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Are Most Teens Web Geeks at Heart?

Posted by Nick O'Neill on April 28th, 2008 12:40 PM

Continuing with the generational meme that I started this morning, I decided to post about an article that I came across on the Navigation Arts website. The article paints a portrait of what Graziella Jackson calls a “dot teen.” It describes Meghan as a 17 year old girl that is frequently on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Stumble Upon, Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us and iLike.

Practically every large “Web 2.0″ site that you can think of, Meghan is on it. While I don’t consider any of the sites mentioned as the early adopter phase, one thing that stood out to me is that Graziella claimed Meghan (the dot teen) is twittering regularly. I found that to be surprising given Kara Swisher’s description of most people not being aware of Twitter. Nobody that Kara spoke to at a wedding in Washington, D.C. knew what Twitter was.

While Kara clearly wasn’t hanging out with the rest of us at Tech Cocktail DC, she may have a point. Most people don’t know what Twitter is even though the “dot teen” does as well as the rest of the early adopters. So approximately what percentage of teens are dot teens? Unfortunately this article doesn’t say but the article did provide few general statistics about general technology usage among teens.

While 93 percent of American teens use the internet only 63 percent own a cell phone. 90 percent use a family computer though suggesting that parents may have a substantial amount of control over teen computer use in the house. So as for my initial question: are most teens web geeks at heart? Well unfortunately the article doesn’t answer that question.

My interpretation was that those who are granted frequent access to computers tend to spend more time leveraging the tools that help them avoid information overload. Do you have a dot teen or know some? Are they any different than the early adopter web community? How do you think they differ from the majority of teens or are dot teens the majority?

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 12:40 pm and is filed under Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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    I worked for about a year (2007-2008) in the Young Adult area of a public library. The big commodity in there was the internet computers. I was surprised to find that, aside from Myspace, Facebook and gaming websites, the kids (mostly 12-15 year olds) really didn't do much with the internet, let alone any of the "web 2.0" stuff, like Twitter, Friendfeed, etc.

    In my opinion, the teenagers use the internet a lot, but aren't necessarily very web-savvy. They don't seem to have very big attention spans; they just want to play games, chat and get on Myspace. Almost none of them knew what Twitter was when I mentioned it to them and they didn't really show much interest.

    Just looking at people's profiles on Twitter though, it does seem that its mostly used by adults, 21+. That's just a quick estimate though, I could be wrong.

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