JOIN USDelhi teens take virtual fight to real playgrounds
Apart from being the country’s political capital, New Delhi is also emerging as the capital for dangerous behaviour of teenagers based on online exchanges, corroborated by the rise in their negative experiences on social networking sites.
Amongst all other cities that participated in McAfee’s ‘Secret Lives of Indian Teens’ survey, New Delhi scores the highest on picking up a physical fight due to an incident on a social networking site and ranked second on ending a friendship for the same reason.
While almost 27 per cent of the surveyed Delhi teens have started a new relationship
online, 29 per cent of them ended a friendship on a social networking site.
Nearly 16 per cent got into a actual fight due to an incident on a social networking site, second only to Hyderabad.
Interestingly, the survey showed that amongst all parents across India, lowest number of parents from Delhi were concerned about their teenage children sharing mobile numbers and intimate details on the internet.
Nearly 29.3 per cent of teens said they don’t think parents need to know everything about what they do online.
The survey also found that teenagers get carried away in regard to posting their photos. Nearly 28.7 per cent share revealing videos of themselves on sites and almost all of them did so because of pressure from an online friend.
As many as 32.6 per cent of the teens posted a photo of a friend that he or she would not want posted.
In another disturbing revelation, 51.9 per cent the of surveyed Delhi teens witnessed cruel behaviour online on Facebook and half of them also joined in. Apart from Delhi the survey was conducted in Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad and Kolkata.
One highlight of the all-India data is that 70 per cent of polled parents completely trust their teens to tell them everything they do online whereas, 58 per cent polled teens strongly believe that they know how to hide what they do from their parents.
Among those surveyed, 97 per cent had a social networking account. On an average social networking accounts were opened at the age of 13.