High schoolers in Palo Alto, Calif., in the heart of Silicon Valley, spend significantly more time using digital media every day than their peers at leading high schools in the Chinese capital. However, Chinese students sometimes outpace their American counterparts in embracing the latest internet technologies and building a network of online friends they have never met in person.
A new study from Stanford University provides some clues on who is more digitally switched on – high school students in Silicon Valley or Beijing.
Stanford Graduate School of Business looked into the digital lives of teens between the ages of 16 and 18 in Silicon Valley and Beijing by surveying 71 high schoolers, 44 from Palo Alto and 27 from Beijing. The students were asked about their usage of different types of consumer electronics and communications, including how much time they spent daily on a range of online activities.
While the California teens spent significantly more time than their Beijing peers using social networking sites and blogging, Beijing students spent considerably more time watching films and videos over the internet, hardly watching television at all. The Beijing teens were much more likely to have online-only friends, and more of them (44% versus 16%) touted Apple’s iPad tablets than the Palo Alto respondents.
The study suggested the emergence of a “digital tribe” of teens transcending cultures and geographic borders, especially in tech hotspots such as Silicon Valley and Beijing.
