Updated: 04/22/2010

Media Use and Today's Youth

  A Kaiser Family Foundation study has found that youth 8 to 18 are spending more time with electronic media than ever before. According to the latest study, the average person from 8 to 18 spends almost every waking moment outside of school on the Internet, watching TV, listening to music on MP3 players, texting, or using some other electronic device.

Although that totals about seven and one-half hours a day, because of multitasking the total adds up to about eleven hours a day. This total jumped about one and one-half hours a day since 2005

The graph below shows the relative use of each.

Watching TV (240 min.)
Listening to Music (151 min.)
Text Messaging (90 min.)
Nonschool Computer Use (89 min.)
Playing Video Games (73 min.)
Talking on Cell Phones (33 min.)

The downside is that a reverse relationship was found between media use time and school grades.

TV Production Index

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