14 DAY TRIAL // The online era at hand doesn't look that appealing and all-encompassing, after reading the report that Pew issued a few days ago. It clearly states that teenagers still prefer meeting face to face over chatting via the Internet among other things.
It's really understandable, despite being able to do a lot of things at once and boosting the social life of an individual with the option to talk to many people at once about different things, the Internet still can't offer a viable alternative to meeting somebody in person and the level of intimacy that it confers. Steps have been made to fill this gap of the Internet chat, by adding the video option to text and voice chat (see Skype for the best free experience of the sort, in my opinion). None have gotten close to the real deal, though.
Despite having the wireless alternative, teens between the ages of 12 and 17 still prefer the old school telephone with the landlines wired to a wall. 40 percent have answered that they talk to their friends this way every day, while only 35 percent have admitted to using their mobile phones for the job, in the study that the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which tracks the USA's online behavior, conducted.
Janet Kornblum of USA Today writes that "The report finds that 28% of online teens have created their own online journal or blog, up from 19% in 2004; 33% create or work on Web pages or blogs for others, about the same as in 2004; and 39% share their own artistic creations online, up from 33% in 2004. [?] Blogging is still dominated by girls: 35% of all online teen girls blog, compared with 20% of boys. But boys rule when it comes to posting videos: 19% of online boys have posted videos, vs. 10% of online girls."
The margin of error is of 3.7% and the study was conducted between the 23rd of October and the 19th of November, on 935 teenagers.