Adults have long claimed that youth speak a different language. Whatever they speak, today’s North American online young consumers age 12 to 21 communicate in a wide variety of ways. An overwhelming 95% use instant messaging (IM), own their own mobile phone, or have a broadband connection at home, and more than one-third have all three. Compared with adults, these young consumers exhibit starkly different behaviors and attitudes about mobile phones. But younger Internet users are not purely enamored with the virtual — in most cases they prefer face-to-face communications to IM, email, phone calls, and text messaging.
