“The Kaiser Family Foundation recently released a report that found that on average youth of both sexes between the ages of 8- 18 spend 8 hours and 33 minutes daily engaged with digital and other media (Internet, music, video games, television and movies), while Black youth were exposed to 10 hours and 10 minutes daily and Latino youth 8 hours and 52 minutes respectively. Other reports show that 57 percent, or about 12 million, of online teens between the ages of 12 and 17 are content creators of such things as blogs, webpages, original artwork, photos, stories, or videos, authoring original content or remixing content found online into new creations. Interestingly, these same reports found that urban and lower-income youth are more likely than their suburban and rural counterparts to engage in these activities.”
The average time spent “engaged” with digital and other media is more than the average amount of time that people are supposed to sleep or even that they are in school for. I assume that engaged means actively paying attention to and participating in and I know as a former teenage student that most of a school day isn’t engaging. Talking and passing notes without the teacher noticing has always been going on. Without even beginning to delve into how students know more about this technology than their teachers, there is still a lot to talk about. This last paragraph brings up at least 4 huge ideas.
Digital technology has become inseparable from daily life. Even as adult, most people are engaged with computers at work, or televisions once they get home. All the time I hear people talking about how they don’t know how life went on before cell phones. If your cell phone breaks or gets lost you are out of immediate contact with everyone you know (unless you still have a land line). Is that a bad thing? A question, that it is too late to even ask, is this huge cultural change enriching our lives or just making them more productive? I already know that the answer will differ depending on if you are asking a teenager, technical person, hippie, grandparent, etc… Should all the hippies and grandparents move into the woods and become farmers? Who know?