Teens and Technology - Pew Internet & American Life Project

Part 3. Technological and Social Contexts
Other teens feel like the phone was given to them by parents to make them less
independent and more in touch with their families. But as one female teen points out:
“When I’m out and my parents are trying to get a hold of me, they can call but that
also doesn’t mean that I’m going to pick it up when it’s them…. I do! I swear I do.
But if I didn’t want to then I wouldn’t have to.”
Personal digital devices such as a Sidekick or Blackberry are not nearly as popular as any
of the other types of devices we inquired about. Only 7% of teenagers say they have a
personal digital device and less than a third of those teens use it to connect to the web.
Teens say they are enveloped in a wired world.
Teenagers are not only surrounded by the technological tools that allow them to connect
to the internet, but they are equally enveloped by friends and family who go online.
Eighty-three percent of all the teens we surveyed state that “most” of the people they
know use the internet while only 6% say that very few or none of the people they know
use the internet.
This familiarity holds
Teens and Online Perceptions
true across most
Overall, would you say that most of the people you know use the internet, only cross-sections of
some of the people you know use the internet, or do very few or none of the
people you know use the internet?
teens. About the same
Response All Teens Online Teens Teens Not Online number of girls and
Most 83% 88% 51% boys answer that
Some 10 8 27 most of the people
Very few or none 6 4 19
they know use the
Don’t know/Refused 1 1 2
internet while 86% of
Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project October-November 2004 survey. N=1,100 12-17
year-olds. Margin of error for all teens (N=1,100) and for online teens (N=971) is ± 3 percentage
teenagers aged 15-17
points at 95% confidence level. Margin of error for teens not online (N=129) is ± 9 percentage and 80% of teenagers
points at 95% confidence level.
aged 12-14 also
answer the same way. White teenagers are somewhat more likely to answer “most”
people than African-Americans or Hispanics, although significant majorities of all races
say that most people they know are on the internet. Eighty-seven percent of white
teenagers, 70% of Hispanic teenagers, and 69% of African-American teenagers respond
that way. Eighteen percent of African-American teenagers responded to the question by
saying that very few or none of the people they knew were using the web compared to
10% of Hispanic teens and only 4% of white teens.
While the majority of teenagers answer that most of the people they know use the
internet, there are differences in the numbers of teens who agree depending on their
internet access or the access of their parents. For teens who go online themselves, 88%
say most of the people they know go online compared to only 51% of teens who are not
online themselves. For teenagers with parents who go online, 86% answer “most,”
compared to 69% of teens whose parents are not users of the internet.
Teens and Technology - 11 - Pew Internet & American Life Project