When it comes to widely used social networks, girls set the trends. They join new social networks earlier than boys, as the JAMES 2022 study shows.

Boys, on the other hand, play games more often, and free games are particularly popular. Girls are joining new networks earlier than boys, making them trendsetters. They are currently making much greater use of TikTok and Pinterest, and this was also the case with Instagram in 2014.

Social networks continue to be among the most important media elements in the everyday lives of young people in Switzerland. Problematically, they are becoming more lax about data protection and sexual harassment has increased further.

Young people also maintain fewer but higher-quality friendships than ten years ago.

Young people in Switzerland are using their mobile phones during the week and especially at weekends for longer than they did two years ago. Mobile phones are most often used for chatting, surfing or social networking. The most popular social networks are Instagram, Snapchat and now TikTok. The problem is that more and more young people are being sexually harassed online.

In 2020, mobile phone and Internet use is a major part of the everyday media experience of young people in Switzerland. Meanwhile, the self-estimated usage time of mobile phones has increased significantly over the past two years: on a weekend day, it is almost two hours higher at around five hours compared with 2018. During the week, young people use their mobile phones more than three hours a day, 40 minutes longer than in 2018. Internet use, on the other hand, has decreased. Taken together, weekday Internet and mobile phone time remains stable. At the weekend, there is a significant increase of one hour. According to the ZHAW researchers, the fact that part of this year’s survey took place during the coronavirus lockdown may have influenced the results on media use.

For adolescents in Switzerland, Netflix, Spotify & Co. set the tone. Thanks to flat-rate streaming, more than half of young people have unlimited access to films, music, or games. Adolescents communicate mainly by cell phone via Instagram, WhatsApp, or Snapchat. Facebook is now used regularly by only one in five adolescents.

One in three adolescents in Switzerland have a video and music streaming subscription with Netflix, Spotify & Co. These two types of subscriptions have thus more than doubled in the last 2 years.
 

With smartphones, tablets, and more, young people in Switzerland are now spending 25 per cent more time online than they were 2 years ago. Online, they often watch films on YouTube or Netflix, but they are also using social networks frequently. And for the first time, Instagram and Snapchat have pushed Facebook out of first place in social networks.

Since the first JAMES Study in 2010, the amount of time that young people spend online has increased by one half hour per day: They report that they are online for 2 hours and 30 minutes a day on average on weekdays, and 3 hours and 40 minutes a day on average on the weekend. Because almost all Swiss adolescents own a smartphone and also have flat-rate subscriptions to the Internet, mobile Internet use has become everyday routine. Noteworthy is that young people with a migration background use the Internet more intensively than young people with a Swiss background.