The percentage of American teenagers who own their own smartphone has more than doubled from 2012 to 2018, according to a new survey. More teens today prefer to communicate by text message than face-to-face conversation, the study finds.
Common Sense Media, a nonprofit organization that tracks media and technology trends, surveyed 1,000 teens aged 13-17 in 2012 and again 1,141 teens in 2018. Smartphone ownership during this period rose from 41% to 89%, “meaning that social media can be accessed anytime and any place, allowing use to grow exponentially,” the group writes in a new report.
Only 34% of teens in 2012 reported using social media multiple times per day, while 71% do so today, including 16 percent who use it “almost constantly” and another 22 percent who use it several times an hour.
“A lot can happen in six years,” the report says. “We thought at the time of our first survey that social media had pervaded teenagers’ lives; but, as many of us have come to suspect and this study confirms, what we saw then was just the tip of the iceberg.”
The more widespread availability of social media and texting as communications options has changed the way that teens interact, leaving fewer of them comfortable in social situations: About half of teens in 2012 said that their favorite way to communicate with friends was to meet them in person; today that number is down to less than a third.
Taking the place of in-person time with friends are social media, texting, and video chatting, which all grew as preferred ways of communicating with friends. Texting as a means of communication was already widespread in 2012 and rose only slightly in the six-year period, while social media and video chatting saw more significant gains.
Facebook is no longer the main social media site used by teens, down from 68% to 15% at present. Snapchat and Facebook-owned Instagram have taken a larger market share.
The study’s authors say they are not sure what teens’ changing habits could mean for them in the long term: “One of the most compelling questions about digital communication is how it will ultimately impact the way humans communicate with and relate to one another. In this sense, teens may be the proverbial canaries in a coal mine.”
“The fact that young people’s preference for face-to-face communication has dropped substantially over the past six years is therefore especially noteworthy. Are we starting to see a real shift, or will this turn out to be a temporary blip or something that teens grow out of? If teens are truly changing how they want to communicate with each other, how are technology and social media contributing to this change? And if this change is real, what will the implications be in the years ahead?”
Funding for this research was provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Jennifer Caldwell and John H.N. Fisher, Eva and Bill Price, and Craig Newmark Philanthropies.
Photo Credit: Common Sense Media
