New Research from Tween Online Life

The latest findings from Tween Online Life were released last week. The new research explores behaviors and usage for a variety of digital and online sites including online video, e-commerce, gaming, communications and entertainment destinations.

YouTube, ESPN, Google and AddictingGames remain the most visited sites for tween boys. Tween girls favor YouTube, Disney, Yahoo and Facebook.

Where the tweens are
Well, over 60 percent of tweens said they viewed at least one video on YouTube during the past month. Hulu is also catching on too… about one in six tweens said they watched a TV show or movie on Hulu. Over the past two years, tweens have become the heaviest consumers of movies and TV shows online

Game on
For tweens gaming is increasingly popular in social media. Nearly nine out of ten tweens participate in regular (monthly) online gaming for either casual online play, multi-player games or console-based games. Today online gaming is fairly gender neutral. Things don’t start to be male-oriented until the early teen years.

Born to shop
E-commerce is also gaining as Tweens have become loyal online shoppers, with more than a third shopping (and buying) online at least once during the past month, as compared to only 25 percent just a year ago.

We all know that kids need to be at least 13 years old to register for social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Tweens who really want in just need to fudge their birth date to register. And the research confirms that the “fudging” becomes all the more common as kids approach their thirteenth birthday.

Do T(w)eens Tweet?

Harvard social media researchers ask the question: Do t(w)een digital natives use Twitter?

 
 

Their answers are revealing about how many t(w)een social media users use various social media platforms and adapt their messages to the medium. They theorize that teens and tweens are developing code to avoid parents from spying on their conversations.

According to Harvard researcher, Dana Boyd, “Teens turn to private messages or texting or other forms of communication for intimate interactions, but they don’t care enough about certain information to put the effort into locking it down.”

Photo courtesy of Media Shift

Twitter is becoming a preferred platform for private communication among tech-savvy teens in affluent communities. Boyd has found that these teens keep their their Twitter accounts under wraps, sharing only with their inner circle of friends. They find that Twitter offers better crowd control (aka privacy) than Facebook. “Facebook is like shouting in a crowd, Twitter is like talking in a room,” stated one teen she studied.

The Harvard research indicates that teenagers have adapted to social media by developing their own private language which is based on song lyrics, personal jokes, na’vi etc. They communicate in code so that only insiders and close friends will understand the true meaning of their messages. There is even an online decoder to help parents understand what their t(w)eens are chatting/tweeting about.

Socrates offered up this critique on the youth of his day: “children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise… They contradict their parents, chatter before company… tyrannize their teachers.” Sound familiar?