Updated: 05/01/2013

Media Use and Today's Youth

A Kaiser Family Foundation study has found that youth from 8 to 18 spend 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 "only" 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.)
Non-school Computer Use (89 min.)
Playing Video Games (73 min.)
Talking on Cell Phones (33 min.)

*The "watching TV" category above includes playbacks of recorded TV programs from DVRs, HuLu, Amazon, Netflix, etc.

This is primarily to "time-shift" programming and to bypass the commercials that, in one form or another, have not risen to about one-third of program content.

TV Production Index

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