The 'Mash Up' Culture

Teens Use Technology To Mix, Match And Create Their Spheres

(CBS) 
Social Connecting

Teenagers aren't just listening to music and watching TV all day. They do socialize, they insist — just not always verbally. According to Ypulse's Goodstein, the way teens interact online is related to the reality TV genre that has become so popular.

"I think the exhibitionism and confessional nature of reality TV, with cameras following the cast members everywhere and recording every moment and every conflict, is very appealing and relatable to teenagers," she wrote in an e-mail message. "In a sense the explosion of MySpace and YouTube is a way for teens to create their own reality TV or drama online through photos, comments and videos on display for everyone to see."

According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project's Teens and Technology survey conducted late in 2004, 75 percent of teenagers with Internet access communicated via instant messaging, whereas only 42 percent of adults in the same category did so.

MTV News' Michael Alex thinks online interaction can be a very healthy, social behavior for teens.

"They're using technology to access their friends; they're using technology to find friends; they're using technology to learn where their friends are, to share with friends, to make friends, and this has taken kids out of the realm of their high school or their park or whatever their social space used to be, which was physically defined," he said.

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MTV News' Michael Alex on the Digital Age

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When the Pew Internet Project's survey was conducted, 64 percent of cell phone-owning teens reported having sent text messages. If texting has proliferated at a rate similar to the rate of MP3 player-ownership — and anecdotal evidence suggests that it has — that number is now even higher.

For many teens, social networking Web sites — especially the immensely popular MySpace.com and Facebook.com — have taken over the realm of centers of gossip that athletic fields and boys' and girls' bathrooms once held.

"Teens naturally crave a space where parents aren't. It's part of being a teen — figuring out who you are outside of your family," Goodstein of Ypulse said.

But according to the Pew poll, 83 percent of teenagers still belong to a non-technology related school club, sports program or extracurricular activity. Teens still claim to spend more time talking to their friends face to face than they do online.

For Cara, 17, MySpace is an addition rather than a replacement to her social calendar — although, she admits, it is a rather large addition.

"I don’t, like, not go out with my friends so I can go on the computer," she said. "But basically, when I'm in my house, I'm on the computer."

Not only are teens leaving their computer rooms from time to time, they're also reading actual books — those archaic resources that people once relied upon to disseminate information. In a Web-based survey conducted in 2005 by Smartgirl.org on Teen Read Week, only about 25 percent of teenagers said that they do not read for fun.

Parents may worry that they're raising a generation so preoccupied with gadgets designed to make life easier that interpersonal communication skills are being jeopardized. But teens insist that technology enhances, rather than detracts from, the ancient art of human interaction.

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