1129 The Media Generation

The Kaiser Family Foundation reports on the media and your children (too late for mine--they're adults). Sounds like someone needs to get out in the sunshine more, don't you think? Buy them a pony the next time they ask for a gadget that blasts music or plays games.

"A national Kaiser Family Foundation survey found children and teens are spending an increasing amount of time using “new media” like computers, the Internet and video games, without cutting back on the time they spend with “old” media like TV, print and music. Instead, because of the amount of time they spend using more than one medium at a time (for example, going online while watching TV), they’re managing to pack increasing amounts of media content into the same amount of time each day.

The study, Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-olds, examined media use among a nationally representative sample of more than 2,000 3rd through 12th graders who completed detailed questionnaires, including nearly 700 self-selected participants who also maintained seven-day media diaries."

You can read this as a news release, a summary (41 p.), or you can read the whole thing, if you aren't busy with a video game or blogging. You can also listen to the report.

Just a few years ago, we were wringing our hands about the "digital divide" among children, but evil capitalists rose to the challenge and have taken care of that, and the increase is greater in homes of minorities and low income families than in higher socio-economic educated households. You can now buy a computer for under $300 that cost me over $2500 eleven years ago.

"The majority of young people from each of the major ethnic and socio-economic groups now have Internet access at home, and the increase from 1999 has been higher among children and adolescents of color and those from lower socio-economic levels. For example, over the past five years there has been an increase of nearly 40 percentage points in home access among children whose parents have a high school education or less (from 29% to 68%), compared to an increase of just under 20 percentage points among those whose parents have a college or graduate degree (from 63% to 82%)." (Summary, chapter 13)

The lower income kids go on-line less often, which probably makes them the advantaged group now. They're hanging out with their friends, visiting grandma or going to church, maybe. Kids still read, but the ones with TVs in their bedrooms (probably the richer kids) read less than those who don't have them. The kids who really get into video games read more than the ones who don't.