A new report from PEW Internet illuminates some surprising trends about teens and social media. Of these findings:
- 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 written content creation with boys creating more video content
- Almost half (47%) of online teens posted photos where others can see them, and 89% of those teens who post photos say that people comment on the images at least “some of the time.”
- “There is a subset of teens who are super-communicators — teens who have a host of technology options for dealing with family and friends, including traditional landline phones, cell phones, texting, social network sites, instant messaging, and email. They represent about 28% of the entire teen population and they are more likely to be older girls.”
Continue reading ‘PEW study: Teens and social media’
Gangs, drugs, street racing, bullying, video game addiction. These are the typical negative headlines we associate with today’s youth. It’s really no wonder why young people disengage from a media that reinforces negative stereotypes and treats them as an entity to be seen, observed, critiqued but not heard. One of the things I’ve always told writing students is “if you don’t tell your own story, others will tell it for you - and it likely won’t be a very good story.” But give them tools, training and a forum and you’re going to hear the real stories. Take 16 year old Charlotte Lytton, who writes about discrimination in the workplace in Today’s Guardian:
“When are we supposed to learn all of these additional skills for the world of work? From reading the papers, it seems pupils are working their socks off at school to be met with disgruntled employers who sack them because they turn up for work five minutes late or their shirt isn’t tucked in. After a six-hour school day that can sometimes include double history and mathematics, when do they expect kids to learn the protocol of the work place?”
Continue reading ‘Youth making headlines in the UK’
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