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Media Ecologies 33the Kaiser report, displaced other types of media, nor have they led to anincrease in the overall amount of time teens spend with media. 1 The authorsof the Kaiser report suggest that this is because youth engage with more thanone type of media at the same time, reading a magazine while watching TV,for example. Furthermore, the Kaiser report found that media engagementdoes not crowd out time spent with parents, pursuing hobbies, or doingphysical activity. Rather, those who engaged in high amounts of mediareported spending more time on average with family, hobbies, and physicalactivity (Rideout, Roberts, and Foehr 2005).When compared to participants in these surveys, our survey participants 2appear, on average, to be more engaged with new media than national averages.While Pew’s 2007 survey found that 63 percent of American teens goonline daily, 75 percent of our surveyed participants reported going onlinedaily and 85 percent reported going online at least a few times a week. Additionally,only 1 percent of our survey participants had never been online,whereas Pew’s 2007 survey found a nonuse rate of 6 percent. 3 In terms ofdaily communications, our survey participants again outpace those found byPew in the fall of 2007: IM (Digital Youth Project (DY) 50 percent, Pew 29percent), text messaging (DY 43 percent, Pew 36 percent), talking on a mobilephone (DY 56 percent, Pew 35 percent), and using a social network site (DY46 percent, Pew 23 percent). 4 If our survey participants tend to be moreengaged with media than the national average, it would not be surprisingbecause our sites and participants were often chosen based on having alreadydemonstrated some affiliation with new media. This was particularly true ofthe online and/or interest-driven sites.While the national surveys by Pew, Kaiser, and USC tend to illustratewidely pervasive engagement with media, they also highlight ways in whichmedia access and use vary according to demographic distinctions in age,gender, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity. In terms of variations thatcorrespond to age divisions, Pew’s fall 2007 survey found that a significantlyhigher proportion of older teens (defined as fifteen- to seventeen-year-olds)go online daily, own mobile phones, and communicate daily via mobilephone calls, text messages, IMs, and messages through social networksites (Lenhart et al. 2008). With respect to gender distinctions, the samePew survey found that a significantly greater proportion of teenage girls thanboys owned mobile phones and communicated daily via text messaging,talking on mobile phones, talking on landlines, sending IMs, and messagingthrough a social network site (Lenhart et al. 2008). The Kaiser survey foundthat girls spent significantly more time than boys listening to music andsignificantly less time than boys playing video games (Rideout, Roberts, andFoehr 2005).