A Quarter of Teens ‘Online Constantly’ — Pew

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Apr 9, 6:42AM EDT

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Teenagers, in many cases, go online and do not leave the Internet at all while they are awake. The observation is based on a new study from The Pew Research Center. Teens are not just distracted while driving; they are distracted in general.

Pew’s experts wrote:

Aided by the convenience and constant access provided by mobile devices, especially smartphones, 92% of teens report going online daily — including 24% who say they go online “almost constantly,” according to a new study from Pew Research Center. More than half (56%) of teens — defined in this report as those ages 13 to 17 — go online several times a day, and 12% report once-a-day use. Just 6% of teens report going online weekly, and 2% go online less often.

Additionally, use of the Internet skews heavily toward social networks, which is bad news for traditional media, particularly as the nation’s youth move online without taking old-world media and entertainment with them:

Facebook remains the most used social media site among American teens ages 13 to 17 with 71% of all teens using the site, even as half of teens use Instagram and four-in-ten use Snapchat.

While this is good news for Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) in light of worry about the lack of growth in its user count and stagnating time of use by members, it is particularly bad news for Twitter Inc. (NYSE: TWTR), which has struggled to market itself as a real social network and not just a toy for sending brief messages.

ALSO READ: How Smartphone Dependency Is on the Rise

When not using social networks, teens glue themselves to the Internet via smartphones for other reasons:

As American teens adopt smartphones, they have a variety of methods for communication and sharing at their disposal. Texting is an especially important mode of communication for many teens. Some 88% of teens have or have access to cell phones or smartphones and 90% of those teens with phones exchange texts. A typical teen sends and receives 30 texts per day.

Accounting for normal sleep patterns, that is about two texts an hour.

No wonder so few students are ready for college.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.