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Older Teenage Girls Use Internet More, Study Finds

Posted on: Thursday, 28 July 2005, 15:00 CDT

Jul. 28--During the summer, Rochelle Akradi, 17, turns on her AOL instant messaging only once a week. But it stays on for the entire week.

It's on whether the Eagan High School senior is awake or asleep, whether she's searching online for a college next year or in the pool for swim practice.

"I leave it on all day and go on for like 5 minutes here and 5 minutes there," she said. Akradi isn't some techno-junkie. She's just a typical teenage girl, and according to a new national study released Wednesday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, girls ages 15 to 17 like her are the real power users of the Internet.

Older teen girls use instant messaging more than boys their age or younger teens, shop online more, gather information about health, religion, entertainment and colleges more.

Jim Lynch, the information technology director at Eagan High School, sees it first-hand every school day. "The guys are out there gaming, but the one thing the girls are out there doing is communicating," he said.

The vast majority of U.S. teens between ages 12-17 -- 87 percent -- now use the Internet, up from 73 percent in 2000, the survey said. That's 21 million American adolescents, up from 17 million at the height of the dot-com boom five years ago. In 2004, 51 percent told the Pew researchers that they go online daily, up from 42 percent four years earlier.

The only area where boys dominate is in playing online games. But even there, older girls are closing the gap.

More than two-thirds of older teen girls, 69 percent, played online games, up from 46 percent five years ago. That's a 50 percent increase in four years, significantly larger than any other group studied -- older boys, younger boys or younger girls, said Pew researcher Mary Manning.

The 2004 survey shows online games have gained popularity overall, with 81 percent of all teen Internet users having played online games, up from 52 percent in 2000.

Both boys and girls use the 'Net about equally to get information on topics like politics, but older girls are more likely than any other group to seek out information on college and sensitive health information on topics like sex, drug use or depression.

Older girls "use it to gain access to information," Pew senior researcher Amanda Lenhart said, whether it's about health religion, spiritual matters, or entertainment, and to get it without gatekeepers.

Akradi, the Eagan High senior, said the results of the Pew study don't surprise her because she and her girlfriends use instant messaging to stay in touch during school and summer. She has nearly 200 people listed on her "buddy list" that she can talk to and on any given school day, between 50 and 60 are online.

This summer, however, the senior is spending most of her time online looking for colleges that have swim teams by using a site called collegeswimming.com.

Unlike the survey results, she and her friends are not big online shoppers, but she does use her text messaging and photo messaging on her Samsung picture phone a lot, like to send messages to friends while watching movies with her parents.

Blogs -- "Weblogs," or online diaries -- also are very big among many girls, she said, and while she doesn't have one, some of her friends do and she reads them daily. According to a previously published Pew study, 19 percent of online teenagers keep their own blogs and 38 percent of teens read the blogs of others.

The good old landline telephone, amazingly enough, is still the first technology of choice used by teens to stay in touch, but instant messaging has become the "backbone" of teen-age communications, Lenhart said. Three-quarters of online teens -- and two-thirds of all teens -- use instant messaging compared to 42 percent of adults.

Some teens even use it to end relationships, but not Akradi. "Oh gosh no," she said. "You've got to tell them in person."

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Source: Saint Paul Pioneer Press (St. Paul, Minn.)

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