Fifty-seven percent of teens, those between 13 and 17 in this study, have made a new friend online, with 29 percent of teens saying they have made more than five new friends online. A new survey from the Pew Research Center found that 57 percent of Americans teens between the ages of 13 and 17 have made at least one friend online while almost one in three claim to have made more than five friends over the Internet.
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Highlighting the fact that technology is enabling today’s teenagers to forge friendships, the Pew research has revealed that social networking sites and online gaming are apparently the most common places for teenagers to interact online. They do their homework in front of the computer, they stay on social media websites while riding the bus and it is safe to say that surfing the Net is the favorite pastime activity for some of them. They also meet new buddies online, but rarely make new relationships in the real world, a new study says.
21 percent feel worse about their own lives due to what they see from friends on social media.
“We found the internet is really a critical part of how teens make and sustain friendship”, said Amanda Lenhart, associate director of research at Pew. But between the boys and the girls, it’s the latter who make friends faster on social sites. More than half (55 percent) say they text their friends on a daily basis while 79 percent keep in touch with friends via instant messaging and 72 percent through social media though not necessarily on a daily basis.
But social media has a dark side.
School isn’t the only place teens are making friends these days.
Parents, this might finally answer why teens are always on their smartphones, even when they’re sitting alongside their BFFs. Boys also spend more time playing video games with friends: 16% of boys play videos games in person with friends every day or nearly every day, compared with just 5% of girls. Sixty-eight percent of survey respondents claimed to have overcome a drama among online friends with around a quarter having confronted a friend in real life because of something initially happened in the internet.
While the survey didn’t cover this, I’m sure that some parents worry about friends kids meet online but, in 80 percent of cases, teens never see those people in-person and, when they do, data from other studies suggest that the vast majority of those who do have in-person meetings do not experience anything negative.
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Additionally, they are more likely to block or unfriend people after a relationship breakup. Most (88 percent) teenage social media users believe that people share too much information about themselves on social media with 42 percent saying they have had someone post things on social media about them that they can not change or control.
