The line graph illustrates four means of communication used by American adolescents, aged from 12 years old to 19 years old to contact each other in a US state from November 2006 to September 2009.
Overall, communication preferences by text messages and phone calls experienced the upward trends, whereas the opposite trend can be seen in email usage. Face-to-face interaction witnessed a fluctuation over the three-year period. In addition, the most common way to communicate among young people was initially phone calls, but it was replaced by text messages at the end of the period.
For a start, around 34% of young Americans communicated with each other by phone calls, which was the highest figure among the four ways, followed by talk face-to-face (around 32%), text messages (around 28%) and email (approximately 25%). The percentage of phone calls increased gradually by around 5% during the three-year period. Likewise, text messaging usage among teenagers escalated by approximately 10% for a year and remained constant until February 2008, then it saw a remarkable surge to reach a peak of almost 55% in September 2009.
In contrast, a slight increase in the first year to around 18% in November 2007, however, the usage of email showed a steep fall down to 10% over the remaining period. Besides, although face-to-face interactions fluctuated in percentage of communication during the period, it was still relatively within the range of 30 to 40%.