Uses and Attitudes of Young People Toward Technology and Mobile Telephony

This paper aims at showing how young people are developing new and innovative ways of interacting using technology. Previous literature shows that technology adoption depends not only on the technology per se, but also on situational and contextual issues. Mobile telephony has been claimed to change young people's lifestyles, although only scarce empirical evidence exists. We have conducted an empirical study in which we first analyze the existence of differences in technology adoption, acquisition, and usage of technology and mobile telephony between young people in general and those that are online. We find that there are some significant differences in certain dimensions. Next, we carried out the same analysis differentiating between young people that assess themselves as technology-savvy and those that consider themselves inexpert in technology matters. We find that patterns of mobile phone usage in these two groups vary significantly along all analyzed dimensions.