Group items tagged

They are now developing a Web site to help educate their peers on the same issues and plan to visit elementary and middle school students this year to pass on Internet safety messages. Students also created individual blogs this week. "We're trying to develop youth to be leaders in the city and the state and the nation and the world. With the Internet, it's not just local," said Akua Goodrich, the program's director who helped found the Power Unit for Motivating Youth, an after-school and mentoring program in the city. "We have to prepare them to be safe and help spread the message."

"When you're a kid, you don't want to listen to an adult who doesn't know what you're going through," she said. "You're much more open to listen to your peers talk to you. It's more interesting."

For example, miniDV cameras are not only among the new tools of self-expression, but the very act of creating personal videos with friends and creating events and key themes to shoot have become key aspects of entertainment in and of itself. To this generation, playing music via your cell phone, and movies and TV shows via your iPod are a given. Emailing is considered too old-school by many, whereas texting is outpacing cell phone calls. These things also go hand-in-hand with changes in online shopping patterns, top website preferences, communication and blogging patterns, and new habits for using social networks—not to mention the tremendous changes in preferred social networks and profile page usage patterns in general. These things are changing the paradigm of how the businesses of entertainment, communication, retail, marketing, advertising, and branding have been done in the past.

Unfortunately, as more companies pour big money into expanding their new media marketing components, as many people have discovered, the Field of Dreams theory (“if we build it, they will come”) certainly doesn’t apply when it comes to reaching savvy youth today. Popping up a site (or social network for that matter) no matter how cool it is means nothing if you can’t reach the market it’s intended for. This Report, therefore, also includes a great deal about how young people find out about new websites, communicate with others, and other forms of grassroots networking.

Overall, the Digital Lifestyle Youth Culture Profile Report 2008 not only reveals traits by target demographics, but also the growing generation gap occurring even within this generation.