Teens today: Highlights from a youth conference

I just returned from a very interesting and educational conference all about teens. Whether you call them Millennials, Gen Y or the Net Gen, they are an amazing demographic. The conference was run by Ypulse, a media platform founded by Anastasia Goodstein, the author of the book Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens are Really Doing Online.

Throughout the next few weeks, I will be writing about some of the wonderful companies and websites catering to teens that I discovered at this conference. For now, though, I would like to share some of the findings on this generation of teenagers with you:

• They adapt to new technologies extremely fast.
• They want ease and efficiency.
• They like customization. They might all join the same social network or have the same cell phone, but they want to customize them differently.
• In most households, teens know more about technology than their parents - first time in history where kids are an authority about something important.
• Teens idolize technology; it empowers them and they will also use it to destress.
• They like to collaborate.
• Teens do not use email except for school or business and have not yet started to use twitter, except to follow celebrities.
• Music is a very important part of their lives.
• They feel a great deal of pressure in their lives.
• They go online mostly to have fun and communicate, although they are very conscious of current events.
• Teens today have never known a life without the Internet, MTV, CDs, 24x7 entertainment, Starbucks, videos or cell phones.

This is really a very unique generation. No other group of teenagers has ever grown up with so much change. It will be very interesting to see how all of these attributes will serve today's teens in the future.