by: Lynette Webb
A few weeks ago Pew Research released another of their great surveys into how the Internet is being used in the US. Oh how I wish there were equivalents to Pew in other countries, who published so regularly and made their results freely available!
Click image to enlarge.
You can download the Pew report here: www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/198/report_display.asp. It’s based on a telephone survey with 935 US teenagers aged 12-17, carried out late-October to mid-November 2006.
This research shows that social networking is clearly big among US teens, but that we shouldn’t get carried away that it’s being used by everyone. Whether because of parental pressure, lack of home internet access, or just a deliberate choice to avoid, not all teens are participating in the sense of being a member.
That doesn’t mean they’re not aware of social networking sites though, and don’t (at least occasionally) read other people’s pages. As a recent slide said: “Myspace is the civil society of teenage culture – whether one is for or against it, everyone knows the site and has an opinion about it”. www.flickr.com/photos/lynetter/373375037/
Sam Ford over at the Convergence Culture blog has a nice post about the Pew research findings that highlights some of the interesting details:
www.convergenceculture.org/weblog/2007/01/new_study_revea…
—91 percent of all teens surveyed who are part of social networks say they use the site to stay in touch with friends they already see regularly, and 72% use the site to make plans with local friends
—82 percent say they use the site to stay in touch with friends they rarely see in person.
—49 percent of teens use the site to make new friends
—48 percent of teens say they visit their social network on a daily basis, with 22 percent using the site multiple times a day.
—70 percent of girls 15-17 have used a social network, as compared to 54 percent of older boys.
—2/3 of teens reported that their profile is not completely publicly visible, with privacy perhaps extended only to people they choose to befriend.
Image from Flickr CC www.flickr.com/photos/tallmariah/185557867/ thanks to Tallmariah
Original Post: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lynetter/380604448/
