What is the future of user-generated content? It is right before your eyes. The teens under your roof or on your block.
59% of all American teenagers engage in at least one form of online content creation. Of those 35% of all teen girls blog, compared with 20% of online boys, and 54% of girls post photos online compared with 40% of online boys. Boys however like their video, with 19% of boys posting video online vs. 10% of girls.
This data comes from a new report by the Pew Internet and American Life research project.
You may be surprised to see the numbers so high. I suspect they are higher . . as the report clearly prefaces.
Many teen content creators do not simply plaster their creative endeavors on the Web for anyone to view; many teens limit access to content that they share.
This suggests a deeper underground river of content that is out of sight. Probably shielded from adult eyes for the reasons teenagers have been developing secret networks for as long as there have been, um, teenagers.
Clive Thompson touches on this in a Wired article on the new era of microcelebrities.
If you really want to see the future, check out teenagers and twentysomethings. When they go to a party, they make sure they’re dressed for their close-up — because there will be photos, and those photos will end up online. In managing their Web presence, they understand the impact of logos, images, and fonts. And they’re increasingly careful to use pseudonyms or private accounts when they want to wall off the more intimate details of their lives. (Indeed, fully two-thirds of teenagers’ MySpace accounts are private and can be viewed by invitation only.)
Regardless - their use of Web and mobile services to produce interactive reports, and coordinate activities is the way they expect their personal world to work for now and into the future.
The really important take away here is that this is a group with a media habit already established. Research has shown that media consumption (and now media participation!) habits are established early in life and that this teen group will keep that habit their entire life. Today they are teen agers - in 10 years - could be your boss.
The evidence going back at least several decades shows that the generations that preceded these teens were primarily radio, newspaper or TV consumers. Habits for every generation measured shows that the pattern was established in their youth and carried forward. Look at newspapers, for example, they serve the same group of readers as before - only they are older now.
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