Demographics of Teen Bloggers

In D. Penrod's book she explores how blogging might be closing some digital divides and therefore have real promise in educational settings.

In reading her book a few pieces really seemed significant to me
- Gender and blogs
- Ethnicity and Blogs

In her research she cites two Pew studies, but I think in reading both reports the findings really came from one report. I am having a hard time finding the same statistics in her report - even when I look directly at the cited material. She cites Rainie (2004) however, I could not find the statistic that was in the book at that urban youth were the largest block on content creators online. I did however find that among teen bloggers this demographic was reported to be the largest producers of content.

In this report (not the one cited) I can see these conclusions, but they are for youth only, they can be found on page 10). However, for all people (youth and adults) it seems like more traditional patterns still exist, since within this report there is another on Content Creators this study does not at all agree with her findings - and suggest that higher average household income is correlated with more content creation online - what I had thought. However in reading these Pew Reports it makes me realize that the trends in teen blogging may be out of sync with the trends for all bloggers.

She also reports that ethnic divides are closing with regards to blogging - she cites information from 2005 which states 17% of African American students in the study, 17% of Latino/a students in the study and 19% of Caucasian students in the study reported blogging. This move towards a more equal demographic was really exciting to read (and can be seen on page 14 of this report). I wanted to see how this trend had changed or maintained since the book was published. This more recent study showed that there had been an overall increase in blog creation (from 19% of teens to 28%), but no information about ethnic trends in this demographic.

Digital divides exist in many different forms, and the research from Pew is exciting because it suggests that blogging might be helping decrease these divides.