As more and more teens and young adults get online (we’re close to 100 percent, folks), usage habits are changing, with content creation in the form of blogging falling among both age groups and social networking activity increasing.

Or so it would seem based on a new survey on Social Media and Young Adults conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Teens and young adults (followed closely behind by us still-remember-the-typewriter Gen X-ers) are the biggest Internet users. Survey says: “Nearly two-thirds of teen internet users (63%) go online every day – 36% of teens go online several times a day and 27% go online about once a day.”

Going Mobile: Of the 75 percent of kids 12-18 who own cell phones, 66 percent text. 79 percent own an MP3 player. (And it looks like 72 percent of adults aged 50-64 still listen to the radio and buy CDs. Ha … ha.)

Taken with the Kaiser Foundation survey we reported on earlier this month, which showed that kids spend upwards of seven hours a day consuming digital media, this all paints a fairly definitive picture of neither trend nor fad but … dare we say it … human evolution?

At the forefront is social media. The Pew report shows that of the teens who go online daily, 80 percent visit social networking sites (SNS). 62 percent of teens who go online less often still visit social networks. The Pew survey suggests that social networking may even provide incentives for teens to go online.

Twitter, on the other hand, is not popular at all with teens — only 8 percent use the microblogging service. The decline in original content creation extends to blogging and to commenting on blogs. Both of those activities have declined among teens and young adults.

Interestingly, however, blogging has increased among older adults, due, no doubt, to the rise of blogging as a business tool. In the past, blogs were the primary means of personal self-expression and sharing web content. Now Facebook and Twitter (for young adults, at least) make self-broadcasting more effortless.

It seems, though, that kids are more interested in private transactions (the almighty text) than in public display. After all, when you’re in eighth grade, the here-and-now of cafeteria seating drama and locker gossip is way more relevant than whatever’s going on in the adult, *gulp*, world of public commentary.

CBS News reports that according to a survey of 2,000 American youths, kids aged 8 to 18 spend around seven and a half hours a day, seven days a week, engaged with media. That’s more time than they spend doing anything besides sleeping — and it’s more time than adults spend working their full-time jobs.

Also, when taking into account the fact that kids often multitask when it comes to consuming media, the number’s more like a whopping 10 1/2 hours.

The study was conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Some other findings:

• The only type of media usage that has not increased is reading, though that’s mainly magazines. Book reading has actually increased over the past ten years, up to 25 minutes a day.
• Increased cell phone usage accounts for much of the increase: “Young people ages 8 to 18 spend an average of a half-hour a day talking on their cell phones, and an average of 49 minutes a day listening to, playing or watching other media on their phones. In addition, 7th- to 12th-graders spend an hour and a half a day text messaging.”
• Half of the heavy users (16 or more hours a day) reported getting poor grades in school. “Heavy users are also more likely to get into trouble, and are often sad, unhappy, or bored, according to the study.”
• Children between the ages of 11 and 14 consume the most media.
• Hispanic and African-American kids consume 13 hours on average, compared with 9 hours for white children.
• 41 percent of young people’s TV watching occurs on “time-shifted” media (i.e., TiVo) or on the computer.

In related news, a group of forward-thinking PTAs in San Francisco school districts are soliciting developers to create mobile phone apps that will remind their children to eat their broccoli, send thank-you cards to grandma and get into good colleges.

Just kidding! I made that last part up.

But come to think of it …