Young people, in general, put to use the new media technologies to a far greater extent than their parents. For example, youth are much more likely to download and watch a new film rather than go to the cinema than their parents. This is because of the accessibility of these new technologies, making it so that a person can access anything they like from their bedroom.
Part of the reason behind the difference between young people and their parents is because generally, we live in very different societies. For a young person sitting in their room on their own, it is much less likely that they are not being social, as they may be using the social networking available, or texting their friends on their mobile phones. Even whilst gaming, with the new technology available in the gaming industry, more and more young people are playing against their friends and strangers accross the internet or network, and a prime example of this is with the recently released Nintendo Wii, on which others can access what you are doing and interact with you. This is more appealing to young people, as our social lives are now up over media networks like this, nearly as much as through school, youth clubs, part-time jobs etc.
However, parents do not avoid the social networks altogether. Many use these to find their friends from school and stay connected, on sites like Facebook, and the new craze for tracing your routes over the internet is popular past-time. With the Nintendo Wii, more adults are becoming involved than with previous games consoles.
There are gaming technologies, however, that mainly only young people get interested in, for example the PSP hand-held gaming device, popular with many young people because of it's high quality and you can take it anywhere if you will have the need to be entertained, which outlines another reason for the new media technologies being more popular with young people: we get bored extremely easily. Parents grew up being able to entertain themselves with anything, but young people have been brought up in a technological spin. While we are developing we get used to having things to entertain us constantly, like MP3 players playing us music whenever we are alone, or even when we're not, or portable gaming devices for when we are on the bus. We are also used to having a social network of friends available to us at the click of a button, now even more thanks to the new mobile phones being released with internet access.
In some media, however, parents are likely to use what's available as much as their children, like in digital television now being able to watch whatever you want, whenever to you want to.
