Teens Spend Every Waking Minute Online

The New York Times published an article about a month ago about teens and media consumption. The title of the article reads "If Your Kids Are Awake, They're Probably Online," and it's serious. It provides amazing statistics to prove that the youth of our country is saturated by media now more than ever before. According to the article, people between the ages of 8 and 18 spend more than 7.5 hours a day using devices such as smart phones, computers, and television. That 7.5 hours doesn't include the hour and a half teens spend texting daily. What's more shocking is that when you factor in multitasking, such as surfing the net while listening to music, teens pack in a staggering 11 hours of media content into 7.5 hours.

A similar study was conducted back in 2005, and the authors of the study said back then that media consumption could not possibly grow anymore. There simply aren't enough hours in the day. And yet, consumption did grow, aided by devices such as the iPhone that did not exist in 2005 but that have caused a fundamental change in how people consume media, as now they can watch YouTube videos while walking to work or update their Facebook and twitter accounts while stuck in traffic.

There has been a debate ever since the internet exploded about whether all this media consumption was good or bad for society, whether listening to music all the time is making teens more anti social and dependent on technology for just about everything. Dr. Michael Rich, a pediatrician at Children's Hospital Boston and who directs the Center on Media and Child Health, believes we should stop focusing on whether the ubiquitous use of media is good or bad and accept it "as a part of children's environment, 'like the air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat.'"

These statistics are shocking to me. Even though I am probably part of this group of teens who consumes an astonishing amount of media in a day, I am still amazed that this is possible. The first things I do in the morning and the last things I do at night are check my twitter and Facebook accounts, check my email, look at the weather, and maybe check my texts. Ever since I got an iPhone last summer I have become addicted and used to consuming media and checking everything at least a dozen times a day, and when I go a day without these things, I feel detached from the world. I also send a ton of texts. Among the four people in my family, I send and receive about 55-60% of all the texts that appear on the monthly bill every month for all four of us (in the last billing cycle my text count was around 3,000 for the month for an average of about 100 texts a day).

For my generation who don't remember life without the internet, these things are perfectly acceptable, normal aspects of life. My parents can't understand why I have to text someone 50 times a day when I could just call them, and I don't understand why they have to call me to tell me something that they could've articulated with a quick text. This disconnect represents a fundamental shift in the way people communicate, and this generational rift is likely to only increase as more and more people grow up in the world of the internet, texting, and smart phones. The long term social and cultural implications of this digital information revolution remain to be seen, though it appears as though they will be profound.

the article can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/education/20wired.html