Internet Usage By Teenagers Skyrocketing

The Internet is so much a part of today’s culture that many teenagers today can’t even imagine what the world was like before the Internet existed. Although it’s not surprising that teenagers are very familiar with using and navigating the Internet, you may be surprised by the results of a new survey compiled by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The survey included responses from over 1,000 young people, ages 12 through 17, who were contacted randomly by phone and asked a series of questions to evaluate their Internet usage. The overall findings of the survey showed that nearly 9 out of 10 young people have online access, a figure that is up from 75% of young people in 2000. By comparison, only about 66% of American adults regularly use the Internet.

Many wired teenagers first get access to the Internet at age 10 or 12, and some even younger. The primary uses of the Internet by teens are online blogs, instant messaging, online chats, and e-mail. About 75% of the teens in the Pew survey said they get their news online, an increase of about 38% compared with 2000 results. Many teens say that it’s hard to imagine life without the Internet because they think their lives would be boring and it would be much harder to stay in touch with their friends, especially friends who do not live nearby. Although most kids begin using the Internet because it’s fun and interesting, the more time they spend online, the more ways they discover to use the Internet to enhance their lives as a tool for communication and research, rather than just as a novelty for having fun. Amanda Lenhart, one of the Pew researchers who conducted the study, found that "Teens are very selective—they're smart about their technology use. They use it for the kinds of things they need to do."

Of all the teens surveyed, 87% said that they used the Internet regularly. About 50% of the families with teenagers who have an Internet connection are connected via speedier broadband access, while the other half go online via a dial-up connection. About half of the ones who have online access say they go on the Internet every day, up from 42% in 2000. Three-quarters of the wired teens use instant messaging, compared with only 42% of online adults who do so. Teenagers usually use instant messaging to communicate with their friends and other teenagers, but they use e-mail to communicate with adults, including teachers and parents. Nearly 30% of the teens who use IM have used it at least once to send a music or video file.

Although 45% of the teenagers participating in the survey said they have cell phones, they told researchers that they don’t necessarily prefer cell phones for communication. Given a choice, about half of them said they still use landlines to call friends, and only 12% said they’d rather use their cell phone to call a friend. About 25% prefer instant messaging. Older teenage girls in the survey, ages 15 to 17, proved to be the kids using the Internet and cell phones most regularly. "It debunks the myth of the tech-savvy boy," Lenhart says.

As children get access to the Internet at younger ages, the number of wired teens continues to grow. Even children as young as 7 and 8 years old are now setting up e-mail accounts, engaging in instant messaging with their friends, posting message to their own blogs, and uploading digital photos to websites. Many of them even have their own cell phones. Technology trackers such as Susannah Stern, an assistant professor of communications studies at the University of San Diego, think that text messaging will grow in popularity exponentially. "The more other kids are doing it, the more kids want to do it," Stern says. But Stern points out the downside of Internet popularity among teenagers. About 3 million young people are without Internet access, most of them in low-income households, and a disproportionate number of them are black. "When so many teenagers have such access, the few that don’t are at a significant disadvantage," Stern says.

Daniel Bassil is president of Cabrini Connections and the Tutor/Mentor Connection, an organization that helps build the computer skills of low-income youth in Chicago. Bassil says that the problem of some teenagers not having access to the Internet may even be eclipsed by the problem of not being able to find adults to teach children how to use the Internet responsibly. "Even the kids that have access don't necessarily have people mentoring them to use the information to their greatest advantage," says Bassill.