LONDON: The average Indian youth, more than anyone anywhere else in the world, sees the mobile phone as a status symbol, youngsters in China have roughly 37 online friends they have never met and one in three British and American teenagers say they can’t live without their games console, says the largest global study of tweenage and teenage interaction with digital technology.
The survey of 18,000 young people in 16 countries including India found that today’s young can count on an average of 94 phone numbers in their mobile, 78 people on a messenger buddy list and 86 people in their social networking community.
Somewhat surprisingly though, the study by MTV and Nickelodeon found that despite their 21st century technological immersion, today’s digi-kids are not geeks. Nearly 60 per cent of eight to 14-year-olds across the planet still prefer their television to their personal computer, a sure sign they find the internet’s virtual reality only mildly and sporadically absorbing.
Interestingly, Indian youth may be more geek-like than their counterparts elsewhere, with the study finding that only 20 per cent of 14 to 24-year-olds actually admitted they ‘‘loved’’ technology, all of whom were in India, Brazil and China.
In a remarkable north-south digital divide, youth in the developed world, particularly Denmark and Holland said they were barely interested in technology for its own sake. However, the developed and developing worlds intersected at the point where youth universally admitted they could not live without technology.
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