7. Young people online

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It’s what most parents of teenagers want to know – what are they up to on the Internet? One teenager – award-winning blogger Tommy Collison – got some answers when he polled his fellow teens for a project for this year’s BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition. Collison, now 15, has been a blogger for a couple of years and decided to test the attitudes of secondary school students to blogging.

In the process, he got insights into their online behaviour. Some 1,781 students from ten secondary schools completed the survey, two-thirds of whom were 15 or younger and half of whom use the Internet from home each day.

Music was the top internet choice, followed by socialising and research. All but 18% of the sample had “at least one” account on a social networking site. Interestingly, Bebo is shown to have the widest reach, followed by Facebook (other social networking data shows Bebo on the wane, losing out to Facebook). How many of these social networking accounts lie dormant is known only to the social networking sites themselves.

As for the blogging, the teens gave a lukewarm response. Around a third of the sample read blogs and only 7% of the sample contribute to blogs. Why? Tommy speculates that it’s to do with lack of familiarity, the time it can take and, also, concerns about parental approval.

Source: BT Young Scientist project by Tommy Collison which examined secondary school students’ use of the Web. Based on a sample of 1,781 secondary school students

Back to contents of State of the Net issue 16