Digital Natives

Today's New York Times features a story based off this Pew report on Internet use among 12 to 17 year olds on how young people use the web, and describes teenage girls as the "cyberpioneers of the moment."

As teenage bloggers nearly doubled from 2004 to 2006, almost all the growth was because of “the increased activity of girls,” the Pew report said.

The findings have implications beyond blogging, according to Pew, because bloggers are "much more likely to engage in other content-creating activities than nonblogging teens."

The Berkman Center's Digital Natives project is cited in the article:

Research by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, the result of focus groups and interviews with young people 13 to 22, suggests that girls’ online practices tend to be about their desire to express themselves, particularly their originality.

"With young women it’s much more about expressing yourself to others in the way that wearing certain clothes to school does," said John Palfrey, the executive director of the Berkman Center. "It ties into identity expression in the real world."

Read the entire article at the New York Times, and learn more about our Digital Natives project by visiting their blog, reading their post about the article, and checking out their wiki. And stay tuned for updates on Digital Natives project leads John Palfrey and Urs Gasser's forthcoming Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, which was written up in the March/April issue of Harvard Magazine.