Arekibo Report: Digital Media and Irish Teens

"The number of transistors incorporated in a chip will approximately double every 24 months" - Gordon Moore, Co-Found of Intel.

Moore's Law, Gordon Moore, Co-Founder of Intel By the end of the year Apple will have released the iPhone 5, Windows Phone 7 will have replaced Symbian as Nokia's mobile operating system and HTML5 will have become commonplace on most browsers.  Our technology landscape is changing at a rate that would even surprise Gordon Moore.

As a digital agency it is Arekibo's challenge to keep abreast of these changes. While technology magazines and digital media blogs keep us updated they rarely give us a truly current insight into the uses and views of digital media by the very people who use them. Taking inspiration from a similar study by the British arm of Morgan Stanley (pdf | 76kb) in 2009, today we have released a white paper written by Jack Connery, a 16 year old intern, into the use of digital media technologies by modern teens.

In his paper Jack outlines how teenagers have high expectations of digital technologies.  He reports that ubiquitous Wi-Fi, cheap laptops and state-of-the-art smartphones are changing how teens communicate and use digital media. Most importantly he details how their access to  smartphones have been fuelled by increased competition between the two main mobile operators, Vodafone and O2, who offer high-end phones at reduced prices and student friendly pre-pay tariffs. Throughout the next week we will be reporting Jack's assessment of modern teenagers' uses and views of digital technologies.

In the report we look at how mobile phones, apps, gaming, social networking, mobile operators, advertising and traditional media are changing the ways teens communicate, live and even sleep. Tomorrow we will detail how smartphones are taking over the classroom with most teens having "high expectations of digital technology [which must have] Wi-Fi, 3G, application stores, a camera, MP3 player and regular updates."