The Lives of Teenagers Now: Open Blogs, Not Locked Diaries – New York Times
NY Times is running an article about a recent Pew survey that is demonstrating that teenagers have embraced publishing media online. From myspace and the like to creating their own websites featuring music remixes, videos and so forth.
They have become the participatory generation.
From the article:
According to the Pew survey, 57 percent of all teenagers between 12 and 17 who are active online – about 12 million – create digital content, from building Web pages to sharing original artwork, photos and stories to remixing content found elsewhere on the Web. Some 20 percent publish their own Web logs.
That reality is now inextricable from the broader social, cultural and sometimes, as in Melissa’s case, deeply personal experience of being a teenager. And it is one that will undoubtedly have profound implications for the traditional managers of content, from big media companies and libraries to record labels, publishers and Hollywood.
[Later in the article]
The Pew survey shows “the mounting evidence that teens are not passive consumers of media content,” said Paulette M. Rothbauer, an assistant professor of information sciences at the University of Toronto. “They take content from media providers and transform it, reinterpret it, republish it, take ownership of it in ways that at least hold the potential for subverting it.”