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Today’s generation has a new pied piper: the screen. Whether it’s a Hi Def, 60” behemoth hanging on the wall, or a 3” screen on a cell phone that fits in a pocket, kids are entranced by the glow from the tech in their lives.
But what kids can’t take their eyes off of…parents seem to hardly notice.
The Dominance of the Screen
A national survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that with technology allowing nearly 24-hour media access as children and teens go about their daily lives, the amount of time young people spend with entertainment media has risen dramatically, especially among minority youth. Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week). And because they spend so much of that time 'media multitasking' (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours.
It’s time to turn our attention to the undisputed heavyweight: the screen.
For many hours each day, kids between the ages of 8 and 18 are entranced by the LCD screens attached to video games, computers, movie theaters, televisions, and cell phones. (In fact, knowing how crucial screens are to most kids, Samsung has been hard a work creating a virtually indestructible screen that will fit kids’ lives even better.)
Sure, those screens are very different in size and location, but the content they deliver to kids will ensure that kids keep their noses glued to them. In fact, photographer Evan Baden noticed such a deep dependence on screens by kids that he put together a telling portfolio aptly entitled, The Illuminati.
The evolution of the screen over the past century has been fantastically chronicled in this video. The gist is that entertainment was once confined to the Silver Screen, but now, all things entertainment are available on a screen that fits in a pocket or purse.
As we discuss the individual screens that have captured a generation, note two things. First, see how dependent upon the various screens most kids are, and how long they look at them each and every day. But second, notice how passé many parents seem to be in regards to the screens in their kids’ lives.
Television
If there’s a sacred cow of media, it’s “television content.” Kids watch 4 hours and 29 minutes of television programming each and every day, which is an increase of 40 minutes per day over the last 5 years! But don’t think kids are glued to their couches for this amount of time. Nope, they can now watch television programming online, on their cell phones, on handheld video game systems, and even mp3 players.
Television has gone mobile.
But don’t be too quick to discount ye ol classic television set, either. Part of the reason kids are watching more television these days is also due to the fact that 71% of them have a TV in their bedroom (and 49% of them have cable or satellite access there, too). KFF’s study clearly showed that kids who have TVs in their bedrooms watched an hour more of programming each day than kids who did not have a TV in their rooms.
The effects of extended TV watching are well-documented: it plays a role in kids starting sex earlier. In fact, multiple studies have observed this disturbing trend.
But, according to KFF’s report, less than half of kids’ parents (46%) have rules about what sort of television content they can watch. And a mere 28% of kids’ parents have rules about how much time can be spent watching TV.
So it looks like one of the most influential screens in kids’ lives is largely unmonitored by parents.
Computers
Another big player in the screen world is, of course, computers. From desktops, to laptops, to netbooks, and soon, the fervently anticipated iPads, computer screens demand 1 hour and 29 minutes of kids’ attention each day. The three most popular computer-based activities include visiting social networking sites, playing computer games (like the wildly popular Farmville on Facebook), and watching online videos on sites like YouTube.
Computers give kids access to the world through a connection to the Internet…and a third of all kids are accessing that world from the comfort of their bedrooms. Yep, 36% of kids have a computer in their bedroom, and 33% of them have Internet access to boot, according to KFF.
Allowing computers in bedrooms is definitely something parents should be leery of; in an incident in
The content available to kids online is constantly growing and changing. Unfortunately, many of those changes are not good.
For instance, one of the biggest buzzes in youth culture this past week has been the explosion in popularity of a website called ChatRoulette. This is a site that allows users to employ their computer-mounted webcam to chat with any other person using the site at the same time. If you don’t like who you’re looking at, you just hit “next,” and in true roulette fashion, another site user is randomly assigned to your computer screen.
During the writing of this article, I visited the site for about 7 minutes to see what the buzz was all about. In that time, I clicked through mainly guys – no surprise there – about 60 in total, 4 of whom were openly masturbating. In the same 7 minutes, I only saw 2 women…but one of them was doing a topless strip tease.
This website has been getting alot of buzz in the UK and Europe, but hadn't quite yet hit the US. I have been leary of letting people know about this site, because curiosity can kill the cat. But after The Today Show covered it, I knew that your student would be finding out about it. Here is the video from The Today Show.
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Are you still sure you want a computer in your child’s bedroom?
1 comments:
So true. This stuff can be scary, and informed parents can make all the difference.
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