Teenage girls are more likely than boys to have engaged in creating most kinds of online content, according to a new report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. They are more likely to have created a blog, more likely to have joined a social-networking site like Facebook and more likely to post pictures online. The study used telephone interviews with a nationally representative sample of 935 Americans age 12 to 17.
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Surprisingly, teenagers from single-parent households are more likely to have started a blog than teenagers living with married parents; those in lower-income houses are more likely to blog than those in families with higher-income brackets.

The Pew study also charts the decline in teenagers’ use of e-mail, which has been largely supplanted by cellphone text messaging and by the chat features of social-networking sites. Only 14 percent of the teenagers reported sending e-mail messages to their friends every day.

“E-mail is not the primary way you talk to your friends,” said Amanda Lenhart, one of the authors of the report. “It’s used to talk with groups, if you’re planning something complicated and you need to send long, letterlike messages.”

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