Teens and Internet Usage Statistics
Some really interesting teen internet, social media, and mobile technology statistics are available via Pew Internet:
Content creation by teenagers continues to grow, with 64% of online teenagers ages 12 to 17 engaging in at least one type of content creation, up from 57% of online teens in 2004.
Girls continue to dominate most elements of content creation. Some 35% of all teen girls blog, compared with 20% of online boys, and 54% of wired girls post photos online compared with 40% of online boys. Boys, however, do dominate one area – posting of video content online. Online teen boys are nearly twice as likely as online girls (19% vs. 10%) to have posted a video online somewhere where someone else could see it.
Daily text messaging among American teens has shot up in the past 18 months, from 38% of teens texting friends daily in February of 2008 to 54% of teens texting daily in September 2009. And it’s not just frequency – teens are sending enormous quantities of text messages a day. Half of teens send 50 or more text messages a day, or 1,500 texts a month, and one in three send more than 100 texts a day, or more than 3,000 texts a month. Older teen girls ages 14-17 lead the charge on text messaging, averaging 100 messages a day for the entire cohort. The youngest teen boys are the most resistant to texting – averaging 20 messages per day.
Text messaging has become the primary way that teens reach their friends, surpassing face-to-face contact, email, instant messaging and voice calling as the go-to daily communication tool for this age group.
Two Pew Internet Project surveys of teens and adults reveal a decline in blogging among teens and young adults and a modest rise among adults 30 and older. In 2006, 28% of teens ages 12-17 and young adults ages 18-29 were bloggers, but by 2009 the numbers had dropped to 14% of teens and 15% of young adults. During the same period, the percentage of online adults over thirty who were bloggers rose from 7% blogging in 2006 to 11% in 2009.
Much of the drop in blogging among younger internet users may be attributable to changes in social network use by teens and young adults. Nearly three quarters (73%) of online teensand an equal number (72%) of young adults use social network sites. By contrast, older adults have not kept pace; some 40% of adults 30 and older use the social sites in the fall of 2009.
Additionally, teens ages 12-17 do not use Twitter in large numbers – just 8% of online teens 12-17 say they ever use Twitter, a percentage similar to the number who use virtual worlds. This puts Twitter far down the list of popular online activities for teens and stands in stark contrast to their record of being early adopters of nearly every online activity.
And last but not least, a great post from a presentation by Susannah Fox at Going Viral Against HIV – the one day conference I attended on HIV/AIDS and technology in December:
My message to the group was essentially this: None of the organizations or individuals in the room can control the conversation about HIV and STIs, but they can contribute to it.
Pew Internet’s research shows that a majority of internet users still turn to a health professional with their health questions, but 1 in 5 internet users look online for someone like them to provide advice (a sneak preview of an upcoming report, which was echoed by the LoveHeals research).
There is a parallel health system online, powered by people connecting with each other, and now is the time to tap into it.
I gave the example of Bedsider.org, which I first heard about at Health 2.0 San Francisco, noting that it was a much more elegant and informative presentation of birth control options than I ever had in my high school health class. But in the spirit of a design critique, which I’d love to see more often at health conferences, I pointed out that it’s not perfect: when I tried to share Bedsider.org on Facebook, no click-bait image popped up.
I talked about Pew Internet’s data on sexting, pointing out that people are using their phones to exchange sexual information — not the information this audience may want them to exchange, but the track has been laid. Who will take advantage of the intimacy and immediacy of text to stop the spread of HIV and STIs?
Mobile, social technology is changing us, changing our frame of reference so that we see information as portable, personalized, and participatory.