Los Angeles – Like many 14-year-olds these days, Julia Schwartz reflects her personality in her cellphone. It’s decorated with Asian good-luck charms and carries snippets of her favorite Sugarcult song and video clips of the She Wants Revenge concert she saw with her older sister.
Julia uses the phone to text-message friends rather than call them.
When she’s not texting, she’s surfing iTunes or watching TV or exchanging rapid-fire AOL instant messages on her wireless laptop. Or she’s doing all three while fending off her mother’s steady stream of inquiries about what exactly she’s doing.
Julia and her peers have more access to a global spectrum of pop culture than any generation before. Her favorite movies, music and TV shows are less an indication of her age or status than they are of the infinite array of content available today.
She’s a fan of “Saturday Night Live” alumnus Dana Carvey – whose career peaked in her infancy – and a devotee of the Finnish rock band H.I.M.
She switches between science-fiction stories on FanFiction.net and an old Anne Rice novel, the cartoon “The Fairly OddParents” on Nickelodeon and a video clip of comic Dat Phan posted on his MySpace.com page.
She rents a DVD every week (most recently the 2004 film “Bring It On Again”) but only occasionally sees a movie in the theater; her home is her entertainment center.
Despite all this, Julia often wants more.
“I find there’s always something to occupy me,” she said, “just not always something new.”
Julia’s voracious appetite for entertainment – as well as the tech- savvy ways she consumes it – is typical of girls her age, according to a new Los Angeles Times/ Bloomberg poll that surveyed the habits of 12- to 24- year-olds.
Girls ages 12-14 are the most deeply motivated by TV: 65 percent say they are influenced by a TV show or network, are more likely to multitask than boys of their age group and are easily bored – 41 percent say there are too few choices of entertainment.
They are most sensitive to degrading depictions of women – 78 percent find this type of entertainment most offensive – and the most enthusiastic about viewing content on iPods, laptops and cellphones.
They’re also the most carefully monitored: 68 percent say their parents know how they spend their time online.
To Hollywood, these girls are a coveted demographic. Yet they’re the most difficult to corral, with elusive, often unexpected tastes and a penchant for evolving technology. They’re sophisticated, demand authenticity and bristle at the slightest hint of condescension.
“They are smarter than we think,” said Jenny Wall, who heads integrated marketing for Crew Creative, a Los Angeles agency that develops teen-targeted campaigns for TV networks and movie studios.
“What’s going to be hard for us is that every day it changes. … I would be lying if I said I knew exactly how to reach them. They are hard to reach. You have to make sure you’re very targeted and very direct with your message.”
Often called Generation Y, the millennials or echo boomers, these kids are known by economists, sociologists and marketing experts as optimistic team players and rule-followers, born after 1982 into “child-centered” families and raised to be the most celebrated, protected and overscheduled generation in recent memory.
Technology has been so much a part of their lives that, to them, life before e-mail and the Internet is “the Stone Age.”
The girls of Julia’s age were influenced by the late-1990s “girl power” phenomenon and are often more accomplished and higher achievers than their male counterparts, said economist and historian Neil Howe.
They’re also more likely to use technology to socialize, according to the survey findings. More than half of teen girls reported regular instant-messaging, about two-thirds reported writing and reading e-mail regularly, and just under half reported visiting social networking sites.
“Today it’s the girls at the front of generational change,” said Howe.
Poll: Parents try to keep tuned in
According to the Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll:
- Sixty-eight percent of girls ages 12-14 say their parents know how they spend their time online.
- One-third say their parents check their social networking sites.
- Thirty-one percent say parents check their e-mail.
- Fifty-eight percent know the content rating of their video games.
- Sixty-five percent say they are influenced by a TV show or network.
- Forty-one percent say there are too few choices of entertainment.
Also, girls ages 12-14 are easily bored and more likely to multitask than boys of their age group.
The poll also showed that today’s teens contradict long- held assumptions about gender. For example, the survey found that when it comes to offensive content, 66 percent of boys and girls ranked disrespecting women at the top of the list.
Teen girls are especially facile with technology, in some cases more so than boys their age – for example, 21 percent were open to the idea of watching a movie on an iPod, compared with 16 percent of teen boys.
– Los Angeles Times
