Social media use on the rise, but fewer young people are blogging


The use of mobile devices has led to shorter forms of communication among youth.
The use of mobile devices has led to shorter forms of communication among youth.

The use of social-networking web sites among young Americans continues to climb, with nearly three-fourths of American teens now using these sites. But fewer teens and young adults are blogging now than four years ago, and the number of those who use Twitter is still very low.

These are among the findings of a new study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, called “Social Media & Mobile Internet Use Among Teens and Young Adults.” Released Feb. 3, the study reveals new trends with implications for schools.

The study found that young people are losing interest in long-form blogging, as their communication habits have become increasingly brief and mobile. Technology experts say it doesn’t mean blogging is going away. Instead, they say, it has gone the way of the telephone and eMail—still useful, just not trendy.

“Remember when ‘You’ve got mail!’ used to produce a moment of enthusiasm and not dread?” asks Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Now, when it comes to blogs, she says, “people focus on using them for what they’re good for and turning to other channels for more exciting things.”

Those channels might include anything from social-networking sites to others that feature games or video.

The Pew study found that 14 percent of internet youths, ages 12 to 17, now say they blog, compared with 28 percent who did so in 2006. And only about half in that age group say they comment on friends’ blogs, down from three-quarters who did so four years ago.

Pew found a similar drop in blogging among 18- to 29-year-olds.

Overall, Pew estimates that roughly one in 10 online adults maintain a blog—a number that has remained consistent since 2005, when blogs became a more mainstream activity. In the U.S., that would mean there are more than 30 million adults who blog.

“That’s a pretty remarkable thing to have gone from zero to 30 million in the last 10 years,” says David Sifry, founder of blog search site Technorati.

But according to the data, that population is aging.

The Pew study found, for instance, that the percentage of internet users age 30 and older who maintain a blog increased from 7 percent in 2007 to 11 percent in 2009.

Pew’s over-18 data, collected in the last half of last year, were based on interviews with 2,253 adults and have a margin of error of plus or minus 2.7 percentage points. The under-18 data came from phone interviews with 800 12- to 17-year-olds and their parents. The margin of error for those data was plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.

So why are young people less interested in blogging?

The explosion of social networking is one obvious answer. The Pew survey found that 73 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds who have access to the internet use social-networking sites such as Facebook. That compares with 65 percent two years ago and 55 percent four years ago.

With social networking has come the ability to do a quick status update, and that has “kind of sucked the life out of long-form blogging,” says Amanda Lenhart, a Pew senior researcher and lead author of the latest study.

More young people now access the internet from a mobile device like a cell phone, only increasing the need for brevity in their communications. The survey found, for instance, that half of 18- to 29-year-olds have accessed the internet from a mobile device.

All of that rings true to Sarah Rondeau, a freshman at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass.

“It’s a matter of typing quickly. People these days don’t find reading that fun,” the 18-year-old student says. She loves Facebook and has recently started using Twitter to share pictures of her dorm room and blurbs about campus life, which are, in turn, shared on the Holy Cross web site for prospective students.

Arax-Rae Van Buren, who writes about trends, travel, and food on her Kiss and Type blog, is relaunching her site with a mobile audience in mind. “It is imperative that the site design is translatable to a phone,” says the 24-year-old New Yorker.

Meanwhile, New Yorker Jackie Huang hasn’t made a posting on her long-form blog in two years.

Now 25, she started blogging when she was a college freshman, using Xanga and then WordPress to tell friends, family, and a few strangers about anything from travel experiences to pop culture to politics.

“My blog was my own little soapbox,” says Huang, who works for a communications agency. Now, however, she now uses Facebook and Twitter to communicate—though she’s still not too hot on tweeting.

While teens are big users of almost all other online applications, Twitter remains an exception, the Pew report found. Just 8 percent of internet users ages 12-17 use Twitter. About 19 percent of adult internet users say they use Twitter or other “micro-blogging” services.

There are early signs that micro-blogging on sites such as Twitter might actually create long-form bloggers out of people who get frustrated by the constraints of the 140-word limit. Already, sites such as Tumblr and FriendFeed have emerged to allow for expansion of thought and content, though it remains to be seen whether those services will catch on with younger people.

“Blogging is actually a quite involved form of self-expression. It takes a lot of time and effort,” says Eszter Hargittai, an associate professor of communications studies at Northwestern University.

She and other tech experts also suspect that fewer young people have an interest in sharing their every thought with the whole world.

“Five years ago, blogging was a club,” says Sifry of Technorati. “There was this wonderful, delicious feeling of being able to talk privately or semi-privately with people who shared your interests. And there were few consequences of being able to share with your friends on a blog.”

He added: “I think we’re seeing a deeper awareness of the perception of privacy and how that can affect your life if it’s violated.”

Link:

“Social Media & Mobile Internet Use Among Teens and Young Adults”

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