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Female teens active on the Web: survey

A survey released yesterday showed that many of the country’s teenagers were active in expressing themselves with new media technology.

The survey by National Chengchi University’s Center for Media Literacy in Taiwan polled 1,980 junior high and high school students in May and June.

It found that 62 percent of the students owned and continued to use online albums.

Girls used their albums more often than boys, with the percentage of junior high and high school girls who actively used their albums outnumbering that of their male counterparts by 33 percent and 34 percent respectively, the survey showed.

A similar tendency could be seen in how respondents used Web blogs.

A total of 67 percent of female respondents owned and maintained blogs, while only 38 percent of their male counterparts were active bloggers, the survey said.

Up to 19.6 percent of the survey participants said they would discuss public issues on their blogs while 26 percent of them said they would take part in discussions of public issues on other people’s blogs.

Sixty-five percent of the teenagers said they were active participants in online polls, while 10 percent of them joined cellphone text polls.

“Such active expression of their own voice [through new media technology] was unprecedented,” said Sofia Wu (吳翠珍), a professor who undertook the study.

The respondents were also found to be active users of cellphones, with 51.7 percent of them never turning off their phones.

About 62 percent of the interviewees usually speak to their classmates and friends by cellphone, the survey said, adding that junior high school interviewees spend 7.9 hours on the phone every week while high school respondents spend 8.1 hours per week.

Nearly 32 percent of the teenagers speak on their cellphones when they are at home, which shows that cellphones help them establish their own private space at home, Wu said.

Wu said her qualitative study of teenage girls’ media use also found that they had created a “digital bedroom culture,” a term used to describe their preference to express themselves through new media technology inside their bedrooms.
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