Interesting piece here where 83% of US teens own a mobile phone and are found to be looking predominantly for social networking and video on their mobiles. At the same time they use texting to create a barrier between themselves and their parents. It really looks like a reactive-defensive mechanism looking to group together with similar-minded teens and distance themselves from their mobile-illiterate parents.
Japan was like that in the early years too, but with the advent of cheap mobile web and the explosion of bargain-hunting on mobile commerce sites, parents (especially moms who surf the mobile commerce sites in search of cosmetics or clothes) eventually caught up with the basics of texting and browsing by about 2007, three years after the introduction of flat data rates in Japan.
There is always a gap there, with younger kids literally typing texts with their thumbs at such a speed they don't need to look at what they're typing, but the female working population has caught up to some extent. Working men are more navigation/search-oriented, but social networking completely passes them by: they have their drinking dens and the drinking habits of the companies they work in, so little reason to race to the mobile for that.
Read more on US teen activity on the mobile phone from the Walt Disney Internet Group survey reported on CNET.
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