“We lived on farms, then we lived in the cities. And now, we’re going to live on the Internet.”—Facebook co-founder Sean Parker in the movie The Social Network
It was 2005 when Parker, then president of a fledgling company called Facebook, supposedly offered this bit of prophecy. At the time, some might’ve shrugged off the statement off as hyperbole.
Oh sure, we knew even then the Internet was an extraordinary tool; but perhaps we didn’t quite understand how thoroughly it would change our lives: Facebook, after all, had just garnered its 1 millionth user. YouTube, which launched in February 2005, was in its infancy, if it existed at all. Twitter was a year away from reality, the iPhone was a 2-year-old. If someone wanted to ignore the digital revolution—still read the morning paper, still buy music from a brick-and-mortar store—that could be done.
Five years later, the revolution is impossible to ignore. Grandparents are texting. Toddlers are playing with iPads. Facebook has more than 500 million users—theoretically making Facebook the third largest country in the world.
Technology has altered the way we work, play, learn and live. Many experts believe it’s even changing how we think, and no group is more susceptible to the influence of technology than today’s wired-in youth.
As Quanai, a high school freshman, said to CBS News, “When I don’t have my phone, I feel like I’m not going to make it through my day.”
Plenty of Tech, Not Enough Time
According to research from the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average young person between ages 8 to 18 spent more than 53 hours a week plugged in to some form of media in 2009—more time than they spent at school or sleeping. Keep in mind youth are media multitaskers: If you count separately the time teens and tweens spend watching television and surfing the Internet, they’re absorbing nearly 11 hours of media a day—more than 75 hours a week.
“This is a chance for everybody, whether a parent or media executive, to stop and take a look at the enormous role media play in a kid’s life,” Vicky Rideout, a vice president for Kaiser, told the New York Daily News. “It has become such a part of the air we breathe that it can accumulate at rates we don’t notice.” [BOX 1]
Youth workers would be well-advised to take a look at those figures, too, because they’ve probably only gone up since then. Kaiser found that youth spent just 44 hours a week engaged with media in 2004—a figure substantially unchanged from 1999. Another study by Ipsos OTX confirmed that youth aren’t just consuming more media these days; their rate of consumption is increasing rapidly—rising more than an hour in the last two years.
“Communicating is now entertaining, and entertainment is communication,” said Ipsos president Bruce Friend to TheWrap.com.
Nowhere is that confluence of communication and entertainment quite so obvious as it is on Facebook and other social networking sites. While older adults are flocking to Facebook in droves, the medium is still dominated by youth: According to the Pew Internet Project, 73 percent of teens used social networking sites in 2009, compared to just 40 percent of adults 30 and older. According to Nielsen, such social networking sites sap 23 percent of the time we spend online—up from less than 16 percent the year before. Online gaming came in at a distant second at 10 percent.
We can thank the smartphone for much of this rise. No longer are youth tethered to a television to watch “American Idol” or at a desk to update their Facebook profiles. Entertainment is mobile now—and many teens are making the most of it. Nearly a third of 13- to 17-year-olds visit social networking sites via mobile devices, according to The New York Times; more than 40 percent play games.
Of course, those percentages are dwarfed by the whopping 87 percent of teens who send text messages via their phones.
According to Nielsen, folks under the age of 18 deal with (on average) nearly 2,800 texts every month—more than twice as many as 18- to 24-year-olds, and more than six times the number of those sent by people ages 35 to 44. Many teens report that even if they don’t have their phones with them they feel phantom phones vibrate.
Setting Up Shop in Our Cerebrums
Last year, teen sensation Miley Cyrus shut down her Twitter account. She had to, she says, for her own health.
“It was 3:30 or 4 in the morning,” she told a radio station (as quoted in US Magazine). “I couldn’t sleep. [I thought], ‘Maybe I could sleep if I wasn’t so friggin’ busy Twittering about not being able to sleep.”
Teens have always struggled to get enough sleep, but technology has exacerbated the problem greatly. A recent study by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine found that 33 percent of elementary-age children and 40 percent of middle schoolers have some sort of sleeping problem: The older and more technologically wired children are, the less sleep they tend to get.
Mikaela Espinoza, 17, told the Detroit Free Press that, “Whenever I’d hear my phone ring, I would just, like, wake up and answer it. I think a whole bunch of kids text all night long.” All that texting, doctors later told her, probably was causing her migraines.
“Cell phones, Facebook, iPods and video games are keeping kids up later at night,” Dr. Nancy Collop told USA Today. “The literature is suggesting it’s getting worse, not better.”
Teens aren’t the only ones losing sleep over technology. According to a poll by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, many parents feel that technology—from computers to video games to Facebook—is complicating their relationship with their teens. Studies show that college students who keep their Facebook profiles up while studying get lower grades than those who don’t.
Kaiser found that heavy media users between the ages of 8 and 18 were more likely to have poor grades, experience more trouble with their parents and ironically become more bored than their less media-saturated peers. [BOX 3]
According to a Nielsen study, technology may be isolating youth from their friends: About 13 percent of children under the age of 18 say they spend less face-to-face time with their peers because of the wonders of technology—up from the 7 percent who reported the same phenomenon a decade ago.
Technology and media influence isn’t always bad. Heavy media users actually report having more friends than those who use media more sparingly, and Kaiser reports that ironically they tend to get more exercise. Still, it can be troubling—particularly cases in which media use goes overboard.
We don’t call certain cell phones “crackberries” for nothing. Youth can manifest all the classic signs of addiction when it comes to technological gadgetry: Anecdotally, many cell phone users say they feel lost, irritable or even panicky if they don’t have their phones with them, and 63 percent of children in Britain say they feel addicted to the Internet. Online video games can become notoriously compulsive, with 4 percent of gamers spending more than 48 hours a week playing.
Is Faster Better?
Even if youth don’t compulsively use technology, many experts believe it’s still changing the way we think—for better or worse. We’re used to accessing information nearly instantaneously these days, and we’re programming ourselves to make connections faster than ever before.
More information means we’re all able to make better decisions, right? Not necessarily. Because all that information and quick connectivity comes at the price—our ability to concentrate.
“One big triumph of human culture was the learned ability to pay attention to one thing for a long time, which the arrival of the book helped promote,” Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, told USA Today. “The Internet is about skimming, scanning and de-emphasizes our shifting into deeply attentive modes…As a species, we are naturally in love with distractions. This technology is taking us back to a more primitive state. This is not a good thing.”
Some believe that all this technology may even damage our faith. “[The Internet] creates a permanent puberty of the mind,” Shane Hipps, author of Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith, told Christianity Today. “We get locked in so much information, and the inability to sort that information meaningfully limits our capacity to understand. The last stage of knowledge is wisdom, but we are miles from wisdom because the Internet encourages the opposite of what creates wisdom—stillness, time and inefficient things such as suffering. On the Internet, there is no such thing as waiting; there is no such thing as stillness.” [See more from Shane Hipps in his Roundtable article.]
The Internet and its associated technology has been a boon in many ways. These powerful tech tools allow youth new avenues of interaction with each other, and give them the ability to connect with friends they might never have known otherwise; but there’s a potential downside, too—one that youth workers should be aware of and seek to address in redemptive ways.
Youth ages 8 to 18 spent more than 10 hours and 45 minutes a day consuming some sort of media in 2009. Here’s how those numbers break down on average:
Television: 4 hours, 29 minutes
Music/audi 2 hours, 31 minutes
Computer/Internet: 1 hour, 29 minutes
Video games: 1 hour, 13 minutes
Books/magazines: 38 minutes
Movies: 25 minutes
Source: Kaiser Family Foundation
How media affects personal contentment:
Percentage of 8 to 18 year olds who use: Heavy Media Light Media
Get good grades (As and Bs) 51% 66%
Get fair/poor grades (Cs and Ds) 47% 23%
Have lots of friends 93% 91%
Get along well with parents 84% 90%
Are happy at school 72% 82%
Are often bored 60% 48%
Get into trouble a lot 33% 16%
Are often sad or unhappy 32% 22%
Source: Kaiser Family Foundation
By the Numbers Sidebar
88: Percentage of teens who either own or have easy access to a mobile phone
2: Hours a day smartphone owners spend fiddling with their devices.
35: Percentage of teens who admit they’ve cheated at school using a cell phone
3: Percentage of parents who believe their own children have cheated with a cell phone
77: Percentage of teens, given a choice between giving up television or the Internet for a week, chose the tube.
96: Number of texts the average teen sends and receives a day.
4,600: Number of people Blizzard employs to keep World of Warcraft up and running.
Sources: The Nielsen Company; CBS News; BBC, MediaPost
