New Study Shows Youth Plugged In Most of the Day 157
An anonymous reader writes "The amount of time youngsters are spending on the web has ballooned to exceed the average adult's full working week, according to a new study. A few years ago, the same researchers thought that teens and tweens were consuming about as much media as possible in the hours available. But now they've have found a way to pack in even more. Young people now devote an average of seven hours and 38 minutes to daily media use, or about 53 hours a week according to Kaiser Family Foundation findings released today."
For those too lazy (Score:5, Informative)
To click through and download the PDF :38 :25
TV 4:29
Music/Audio 2:31
Computer 1:29
Video Games 1:13
Print
Movies
With a 29% multitasking cut, so from 10:45 total it comes down to 7:38
Not really sure this is all that surprising to me, it's hard for me to feel alarmed over the print and music portions of the time.
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TFS contradicts when it says kids are spending X hours on *the web*. Only 1.5 hrs /day on the computer. Or are kids surfing the web on TVs now? I had thought internet TV use was quite limited.
When you consider how much time in school is actual class time, I'm sure this means more TV than classroom time. And if these numbers are averages I hate to imagine the kids at the far end of the curve.
Re:For those too lazy (Score:5, Informative)
" The report is based on a survey conducted between October 2008 and May 2009 among a nationally representative sample of 2,002 3rd-12th grade students ages 8-18, including a self-selected subsample of 702 respondents who completed seven-day media use diaries, which were used to calculate multitasking proportions."
It also is biased by the type of respondent who would complete a seven day media diary, wth kaiser.
Re:For those too lazy (Score:5, Funny)
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how does the moderation system manage to work without directors such as yourself spelling out your inane opinions?
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So a good question is; how representative is this self-selected subsample? Are these the "heavy" media users? It requires a specific kind of personality to want to keep a seven-day media use diary and no doubt this personality also affects the way they use media. Not to mention seven days isn't a particularly long measurement time; my own media use behaviour varies dramatically during the course of a year, I have no doubt schoolchildren with exam weeks and holidays have even more fluctuating media usage pat
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TFS contradicts when it says kids are spending X hours on *the web*. Only 1.5 hrs /day on the computer. Or are kids surfing the web on TVs now?
Kids are surfing the net and watching TV on their smart phones till 4am.
Please tell me you didn't nod off again and miss the arrival of iPhone, Android, Pre, and Droid, Rumpelstiltskin.
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Rumpelstiltskin? is that the new Microsoft smart phone?
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Rumplestiltskin was a dwarf who spun gold from straw.
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Re:For those too lazy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:For those too lazy (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm guessing torrented episodes also count, as would Hulu and so on...
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Three letters:
DVR.
I observed that, visiting my family last week.
They've got a DVR, and the kids are gathered around watching some show called I, Carly (too lazy to google, don't care if it's the right name).
They know how to work the DVR better than my 40-something year old aunt. I saw them pull the show up, start it, and start laughing.
When I lived with the family over half a decade ago (helping to take care of my aging mother, whom I miss very much), I encouraged them to get a DVR then, because they'd get
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I'm 32 and it seems absurd to me, appointment with my media. LOL
Sorry can't think of a better word to summarise it but lol, it's so archaic, who has the time? It's 2010 not 1987.
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Re:For those too lazy (Score:4, Interesting)
Although the article does contain some overtones of negativity, I think this quote does really present the key importance of the issue:
"When children are spending this much time doing anything, we need to understand how it's affecting them -- for good and bad," Drew Altman, president and chief executive of the foundation.
Here are my thoughts on each item:
TV 4:29 - Almost entirely negative, I suspect; surely the overwhelming advertisements alone cancel out any benefits the few educational shows.
Music/Audio 2:31 - As a musician, I have a hard time knocking this. Premature deafness from blasting those headphones is no good, though.
Computer 1:29 - As a computer scientist, well, let's just say I'm about 10x this. It can range from really good (research) to horrible (4chan).
Video Games 1:13 - I think this is a healthy dose. Games with physical activity and (gasp) sunlight are better, but this could be worse.
Print 0:38 - I'm surprised this number even exists. I assume the majority of it is beneficial in some ways -- exposure to articulating an idea in writing, if nothing else.
Movies 0:25 - Movies are usually a bit more thought provoking than TV. A slight negative here, but it's still a small number.
Overall, I do believe there is reason for concern, but not outright panic. Let the psychologists do their work and we will only understand the effects of this better.
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Print 0:38 - I'm surprised this number even exists. I assume the majority of it is beneficial in some ways -- exposure to articulating an idea in writing, if nothing else.
I'd bet it's only there because of schoolwork. I also don't think it reflects anything -- you can find plenty of well-written material online, in almost any genre.
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Computer 1:29 - As a computer scientist, well, let's just say I'm about 10x this. It can range from really good (research) to horrible (4chan).
Slashdot somewhere in that range? Or was that to beyond horrible to mention?
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I like your breakdown of the categories. Right on.
I agree --- no cause for alarm here.
Cultures are changing. This is how life goes, especially in these rapidly changing times.
Really, the only major downfall of much of this is the fact that you're generally sedentary during computer/media use. But if kids were to ensure good workout schedules as well they could negate that concern.
Our kids (Score:3, Interesting)
Playstation: 1-2 hours
Computer (mostly web): 1-2 hours
MP3 & suchlike: less than 1 hour
Reading (overlaps with MP3, and includes homework): 2-4 hours
The Playstation games are nonviolent or relatively low violence (Afrika, LittleBigPlanet, a few Ratchet&Clank). Reading time does not include PC time. They also get 2-4 hours of outside playing or at various hobby activities. This is the routine that we have right now, based largely on the kids' preferences.
It seem
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Your kids go to bed pretty late then.
Yes, they do. They have never been sleepers, even when babies.
However, your time estimates are a little off, as they appear to assume the maximum of each range can occur on a school day. Using the lower end of each range, and adding another hour for meals, means they're in bed around 11:30, which is almost right. Actually they're mostly in bed around 11:00, but some of the reading time is while in bed.
The upper end of the range occurs on weekend days, when there may be more Playstation, or a few hours of
Re:For those too lazy (Score:4, Interesting)
How is this news? In an average day, excluding the 7.5 hours I spend in front of a computer at work, I still manage to pack in a lot of "media"-time.
TV: 5
Music/Audio: 1.5 - 2
Computer: 7
Video Games: 1
Print: <1 - 2 (I do reading stints, where I consume much more, but on average..)
Movies: 0.3
Of course, my multitasking factor is probably higher than these lame kids'. Laptop is always on, always on the table in front of me so I can chat, surf, perhaps program a little. The TV is for the most part on as well, except that part of the evening where the most interesting program is Oprah. I read on the bus to and from work while listening to music, and naturally "TV Games" pretty much has to overlap 100% with either "Computer" or "TV" (disregarding portables, which I don't own).
News? Hardly.News to the Slashdot crowd..? Definitely not. Scaremongering for technophobic parents? Yes.
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How is this news? In an average day, excluding the 7.5 hours I spend in front of a computer at work, I still manage to pack in a lot of "media"-time.
Notice exhibit A: the condescending introduction, "How is this news?" It is as if the poster is saying, "I already know this, everyone else should know it too! I mean you all know as much as I know right? *wink wink*
Of course, my multitasking factor is probably higher than these lame kids'. Laptop is always on, always on the table in front of me so I can chat, surf, perhaps program a little.
Exhibit B: "I am so multifaceted that I can run three or four kinds of consumer electronics at once. I don't need to explain how much relevant attention I can give to any one said device because that is an irrelevant detail. But look at me, I can do four th
This stat is rather curious (Score:4, Interesting)
I love stories like this that make me feel young. (Score:2)
Is this really a surprise? (Score:2, Insightful)
That's all? (Score:4, Funny)
Amateurs.
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jup. less than 16 hours a day is for sissies.
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I even keep a netbook by my bed in case something comes up I'd like to check *while trying to fall asleep*...
Re:That's all? (Score:5, Funny)
I even keep a netbook by my bed in case something comes up I'd like to check *while trying to fall asleep*...
I see I'm not the only one who needs porn to fall asleep.
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Netbook!?
I keep my desktop right by my bed. 20" monitor, keyboard, stuff. /. -- balled up under a blanket, text size enlarged in the browser to compensate for the slightly larger distance from the screen...
All sorts of good times.
Netflix, live TV, stored media, all in an arm's reach. Great for when it's too bloody cold to sit at the computer and read
Sadly enough, trying to figure out a logical way to put a computer in the bathroom. Need to mitigate the gigantic cloud of steam's potential damage for when my
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Re:That's all? (Score:5, Funny)
or can Google it and follow the steps.
No, not when the router is down usually.
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The scenario was that the dad has asked the kid to fix the Internet connection. If the kid says he needs to go online using dad's phone, I'd think dad's password on the phone isn't such a huge hurdle to overcome, eh?
I have a smartphone, and I'll be damned if that even remotely reduces my need of a proper Internet connection (and thus router). I don't see your point.
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No, not when the router is down usually.
Any 10 year old knows that's what (among other things) neighbor's "WEP secured" WiFi is for!
NEWS FLASH: New Discovery!! (Score:4, Funny)
more reading, less doing. (Score:5, Interesting)
What concerns me most is that the next generation might spend more time reading about something and not have the time to actually DO them. I find the information overload very annoying already at work. Mostly emails. And I feel myself slowly being trained into ASKING for the info rather than experimenting and have your own observation in things.
Don't know how to put it in better words.
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Why not ask Jeeves? Oops, wrong decade.
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Re:more reading, less doing. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Those interested in the technical bits will. Not all problems are adequately solvable by following a step-by-step guide online, hell, most problems I'd actually need to look up are a fair bit to complex to write a simple instructable for (hence real books). Even the problems that can be solved easily by following other people's instructions will lead the potential geek to think about and perhaps research the hows and whys of the solution he/she just implemented.
Re:more reading, less doing. (Score:4, Insightful)
It certainly sounds dramatic, but I think there may be a positive note to add, because where a decade ago children engaged mostly in passively being entertained, the trend now is that they take part, ie are active. A recent study has shown that the main factor explaining why boys in particular don't seem to learn English very well, found that the trick is to get them write more; and that while writing essays is seen as boring and pointless, blogging is seen as cool and meaningful.
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blog [..] meaningful
LOL
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I'm Shocked! (Score:3, Interesting)
/. readers already know this. For 10 years i have almost always laughed at the fact we see it here before they, (The uninformed public) do.
Look at the network news and see the slide.
Re:I'm Shocked! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I'm Shocked! (Score:4, Funny)
Yes: kids would have reached these levels of online consumption 10 years ago and we'd already have brain chips connecting us to the Interwebs 24/7 so we wouldn't need to keep those clumsy netbooks next to the bed for midnight porn surfing.
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Kids... (Score:4, Insightful)
No wonder they can't find time to spell properly.
Your typical teenager probably doesn't even use a pen, and the majority of their communication would be on a device with a built-in spell checker. IT is as though they go out of their way to spell like an idiot. Is it really that much more efficient to type "Im going 2 da park"?
As technology gets smarter, we as a society will be getting dumber. We are setting ourselves up to be completely pwnd by Skynet.
WALL-E (Score:2)
Your taxes at work (Score:2)
They are not the ones that decide to pay less on education and that ebonics or it's more recent equivalent is good enough.
It's not just Texas and California now with cheap schools that produce students equipt to do little more than say "do you want fries with that?".
Re:Your taxes at work (Score:5, Informative)
Don't blame the children.
They are not the ones that decide to pay less on education and that ebonics or it's more recent equivalent is good enough.
We are paying more than we were 20 years ago yet children are doing worse in school.
The problem isn't with the money (maybe in some districts) but the way they teach kids now.
My daughter was not taught how to read using phonics, she was taught using "sight words." I asked the teacher she wasn't learning the multiplication table and the teacher said that it was not taught anymore because they prefered 'concepts.' As a result, my daughter does multiplication (not addition but multiplication!!!!) using her fingers. She reads well now due to the time I have spent with her but her writing is still terrible (but it looks pretty.)
Now I fully admit that I should have taken the time to have taught her myself instead of relying on the school system. But I do remember being taught these things when I went to school. And passing out a multiplication table or phonics sheet is not expensive.
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I was taught the roots of words and why they are spelt the way they are (as well as some rules of thumb and memorized exceptions).
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My daughter was not taught how to read using phonics, she was taught using "sight words."
How often do you read using phonics? If you are consciously sounding out words, people generally interpret that as "can't read".
English spelling is based on half a dozen different sets of phonics rules (English, Latin, Greek, French, and probably others). I don't know about you, but I only learned the very simplest of them when I was in first grade in 1982. Getting a feel for the rest came from just seeing words that
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Have you considered that it is possible that we pay more than we ever did in the past, and yet schools wouldn't have money to buy paper? It is called too much money on overhead.
Don't get me wrong - I'm all for using technology in education. However, far too much money goes on toys that don't really get well-utilized. The cost of one computer would supply paper for an entire school. The problem with technology is that it is very expensive to maintain. It can be worth it if it is well-utilized, but if yo
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Don't blame the teachers either.
A good administration would get rid of bad teachers.
A bad administration would harass good teachers and keep the bad ones.
Within limits, money is not the issue; however, shared vision is.
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it's also the notion that having more people pass is more important than actually teaching them something.
This is the root of the problem. By the time it is bad enough to be forced not to pass a kid, the kid is so far lost and hates school so much - because of being so lost - that it is too late.
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" . . .the notion that having more people pass is more important than actually teaching them something."
Precisely. Idiotic Federal mandates like NCLB enforce a mentality where the "herd" can only move forward at the pace of the slowest member. My anecdotal evidence is the same as yours. Everyone needs to pass. Who knows how many kids are being "held back" to make sure that a few aren't "left behind"? Add in complications like students who come from broken homes or students who speak English as a second
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So what if they're not as fast/a
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They can spell properly. Kids choose to spell like idiots because it makes them different from their parents.
It's the same reason they listen to music that's "unlistenable noise" if you ask their parents. In fact, a friend of mine complained his kids were into noisecore. Ha! He grew up being into heavy metal, which annoyed his parents who preferred the Beatles.
Texting doesn't make you a worse speller, because you have to know how to spell something properly before you can make it shorter for text-speak. Ask [blogspot.com]
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I'm pretty sure the kids don't know better when they spell lose loose.
It's culture, not medium. (Score:3, Insightful)
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I'm not sure how old you are, so at 27 I may well fall into the kids-who-need-to-get-off-your-lawn demographic, but I can barely remember how to use a pen. I post more words on Slashdot alone every day than I write with a pen in a year. I write under a hundred words per month with a pen, and about the only time that I use one is when I need to sign for something. Last month, my second book was published. I don't think you can correlate ability to use a pen with command of the English language.
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When writing for correspondence I prefer to type it on screen where it is easy to edit large chunks at a time. I need this because I often find that I say the same thing a couple of times worded differently, and need to pare it down.
But when doing creative writing, songs, poems, etc. I prefer to write in pencil. Even though I edit as much if not more. It's not in large blocks. Usually only single lines being moved around.
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"Im going 2 da park" wouldn't be so common if god damned SMS messages weren't so expensive and twitter had more than 140 chars.
Efficiency is king and even I find myself re-writing a 140char tweet for 2 minutes sometimes to fit it in the optimal space, as for SMS less so nowadays but it frustrates me that good english can't be applied to it.
That being said it comes with age, I grew up with the beginnings of the 2 cool 4 school lol crowd and we all used shorthand back in the BBS and ICQ days but the vast majo
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Technology is merely a tool. It doesn't make people and dumber or any smarter. Like everything else, it all depends on how it's used. To paraphrase an old saying, "The technology opens th
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Your use of formulae is both incorrect, and pedantic.
Consider the following two sentences:
1)"Bicycles and motorcycles are used more than any car."
2)"Bicycles and motorcycles are used more than any cars."
Clearly the former is grammatically superior.
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Unfortunately, the only people who really try to learn higher level things are those who try to spell properly because those who don't, don't bother to learn at all.
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I assure you the majority of sub-literate such comments on Youtube which prompted my original rant, were not typed on a cellphone.
It's the product of laziness combined with acceptance of mediocrity as the norm.
Change!
This just in (Score:2)
American media cover daily struggle in life 24/24, and Americans tune in.
Daily struggle at 4.
So, what else would you have them do? (Score:4, Insightful)
An individual spends a certain amount of time asleep, a certain amount at school or working (or housekeeping, or whatever), a certain amount eating, washing(!), travelling and all the other miscelleanea of living. Then they have some time spare - is that such a surprise?
All this study does is tell those people who believe studies what those individuals spend their time doing. Would you prefer they spend that time drinking, instead?
Oh yes, that thing about multi-tasking media. All that tells us is how unfulfilling sources like TV are - people don't actually *watch* it, they just have it on in the background (while doing something more interesting) just in case something worthy of their attention does happen. That's all TV is today - whatever age you are.
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don't complain american is full of dumb fat lazy people when the kids of today spend almost a full working day glued to a monitor, with their brain in park.
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I guess you missed the day they taught sentence strucure (commas, capitalization, etc)
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Not that I am encouraging that kind of behavior
It is true! (Score:2, Funny)
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My girlfriend is 12 years younger than me and it is true. She is getting plugged most of the day. Hey, can you blame me?
No, I wouldn't blame you, as long as you're the one plugging her.
Great! (Score:5, Funny)
Now they'll be too busy to get on my lawn!
Only 7:38? (Score:2)
Christ, son, I have that much streaming in NOW. When one goal is to archive the internets useful shit, you come across this problem often. Hell, I burned five roboboards just trying to handle so many incoming 56K streams.
Rank amateurs, I tell you. Are these kids just learning how to utilize a computer in this study?
less than 8 hours a day? (Score:2)
Try watching a 30 hour Monty Python marathon sometime(the only breaks are commercial breaks), that's real dedication to your media.
I suppose you could just watch the DVDs straight through and only take breaks to pee, but no sleeping, that would be cheating.
Quall (Score:2, Insightful)
Study shows: Youth at home, most of the day. (Score:3, Informative)
News at 11.
Really, what’s the point of turning the computer off when at home?
That would mean no music, no movies, no quick search on wikipedia or something, no way of seeing if friends are at home.
If you do not prefer to be alone and bored, but don’t want or can’t to drive to your friends, then the choice is obvious.
Doesn’t mean one also is alone and actually sits in front of the thing.
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Really, what’s the point of turning the computer off when at home?
Peace and quiet.
That would mean no music, no movies, no quick search on wikipedia or something, no way of seeing if friends are at home.
So....time to work on your car? Time to take apart the toaster and figure out how it works? Time to read a book? Time to bake cookies? Time to play with Legos (if you don't have time for that, what's the point in living?).
If you do not prefer to be alone and bored, but don’t want or can’t to drive to your friends, then the choice is obvious.
Sex and/or cuddling on the couch with a spouse, girlfriend, or friend with benefits? Going for a walk?
;)
Kids... (Score:2, Insightful)
To Paraphrase the Matrix (Score:2)
The Media is a system... built to keep us under control... in order to turn a human being... into this [www.sxc.hu]
Re:When the internet bred overtake the TV bred. (Score:5, Funny)
ROFLMAO
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Sheesh!
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Um, what?
I spend most of my "plugged in" time learning new things, doing research for work. It is not Youtube/WoW/Slashdot all the time. Although that is how I spend some free time...
I keep up on the TLA's (I work for IBM after all...) that won't be in print for years. I read the latest for my supported platform and a few others, I read IT management blogs... very informative for what NOT to do!
So, like anything else, it is what you do, not how you do it. I could waste my whole day unplugged, reading the Bl