UK teenagers spend 31 hours in a week (that’s more than one day per week) surfing the net, out of which they spend nearly two hours watching adult Web sites, according to a report published by Web monitoring firm Cyber Sentinel.

Communicating with the buddies on MSN accounts for around three and a half hours, while watching videos on YouTube takes around two hours of teens’ time over an entire week, the report added.
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In addition, teens spend an hour searching for various cosmetic surgery processes, such as methods to enlarge breasts size and collagen implants, whereas they devote one hour and 35 minutes in checking  weight loss techniques.

A significant percentage of teenagers – those in the survey were aged between 13 and 16 – did look at pornography for around 100 minutes a week, that’s more than 3 days a year.

More than a quarter of the teens surveyed have also asserted that they often interact with strangers online, but believed that the activity is totally harmless, and around one-third of the teens admitted hiding what they were surfing over the web when their parents entered into the room.

Ellie Puddle, marketing director of Cyber Sentinel, reckons that, ‘The alarming thing about this research is that it shows that teenagers are obviously exploring all sorts of topics as a result of modern-day pressures.’

Which is true.

But first we need out definitions sorted out. An adult view of porn is very, very different from those of teenagers. This has been shown in survey after survey?

So what are these teenagers watching which was called ‘pornography’ by the report? Some people might see much of Rap and Hip Hop as porn. And, indeed, there are many published comments to show this. In some state showing a naked breast is porn as legally defined.

If you run a survey company you get far better results if you make the results spectacular.

Watching television is one favorite. In many houses the television is left on whether anyone is watching it or not. Same is true with computers. Yes, yes, from a green point of view we should all frown at this habit.

Years ago survey after survey was published showing teens spent hours listening to the radio. Yes, the radio was on. But that did not mean that they were listening to the damn thing. Multi-tasking in a different form existed even then.

Someone needs to get this survey and find out what it presumes the terms mean. The fact that ‘lax parenting’ was given in the PR release does not fill one with confidence.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 8:59 pm under Adult content, Internet.

Read more entries by Gareth Powell.
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