A creative generation

While the latest report in the LSE's UK Children Go Online series looks primarily at civic engagement, I found some of the marginal observations more interesting.

Despite the frequently-reported death of email, 72% of 9-19 year olds in the UK who use the internet at least once a week send and receive email, while only 55% use IM (this increases to 87% and 72% respectively for 16-17 year olds, though).

And 78% of 9-15 year olds play games online.

Even more interestingly, the study found that 17% of young people have sent pictures or stories to a website and "online creativity can be encouraged through the very experience of using the internet." That is, the more time kids spend online, the more likely they are to produce their own content. And interaction breeds interaction. Does that mean we can safely assume that as internet usage increases its media timeshare, more and more people will become creative producers as well as consumers?

And does online game play in particular have any connection to this increased propensity to create? Nathan Combs recently suggested in his Socially Charged Software post that multiplayer games have a "MODder dimension", where "content is more than just accumulated and integrated, it is the product of collaboration and a shared value system of production: from inspiration through validation." (See Habbo Hotel's fan sites, for example.)

Maybe this is all obvious but I tend to be suspicious of the obvious so it's interesting to see some supporting statistical analysis.