The way children and teens use this equipment grows more individualized by the year, too, NetDay found. Thirty percent of K-3 students have their own email accounts, and one-fifth of them say they prefer email to any other medium of communication. For sixth-through twelfth-graders, though, email already appears clunky. Overwhelmingly, they prefer Instant Messaging. They like variety, too. Thirty percent report using a computer, cell phone, DVD or CD burner,
and
a video game player on a weekly basis, a 10 percent jump from a year earlier. One-third admit that they update their personal Web sites “on a regular basis.”
The expansion of media options and access never stops, and one wonders how sixth-graders juggle them all. But, to return to
Generation M,
a counterintuitive drift holds steady. With leisure time finite, one would think that increased Internet and video game minutes would cut into TV and radio time, but the Kaiser study found a contrary trend. Youngsters who spend more time with computers and games also watch more television and listen to more radio. Multitasking enables it. As
Generation M
concludes, “media use begets media use,” and as more connections and feeds and streams and channels enter their private space, kids assimilate them with accelerating ease, adding one without dropping another.
Forty-year-olds don’t get it, the cluttered airspace, the joy in multiple input. Growing up in what appears to their offspring a sluggish and elementary sensory ambiance, they welcome the latest invention as an add-on, something else to do besides reading the newspaper or watching a movie. Kids regard it differently. They mature in and with the flashing, evolving multimedia environment, integrating each development into a new whole, a larger Gestalt. They don’t experience the next technology as a distraction or as a competition with other diversions. It’s an extra comfort, and it joins nicely with the rest. As one of my students just declared last week in class, “I can’t concentrate on my homework without the TV on. The silence drives me crazy.”
The craving for input begins in the home, and as a follow-up to
Generation M
revealed, parents understand it well from the earliest ages. In May 2006, Kaiser released
The Media Family: Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers, Preschoolers, and Their Parents.
The study produced similar findings of media immersion for six-month - to six-year-olds, but added observations by parents about their children’s habits. Kaiser assembled fathers and mothers into focus groups that reflected rates of media consumption found in the national survey, and then posed questions about reasons and outcomes. The predictable answer quickly followed: setting kids in front of the screen frees up time for cooking, cleaning, or just plain rest. A single mother coming home from work needs a few moments to regroup, and a beloved DVD keeps the children docile and preoccupied. A mother from Columbus, Ohio, reports, “He’s a good little boy. He won’t bother anything. He won’t get into stuff. He’s glued to the TV.” A Denver mother who’d recently lost her job recalls that when she arrived home that day she could say, “Let’s watch
Finding Nemo,
kids. Here are some chicken strips, here are sippy cups—I’ll see you in about an hour and a half.” Half the parents agreed that television calms their children, while only one in six noted that it pumps them up. Three in ten installed TV sets in the kids’ bedrooms because it helps them fall asleep (and lets parents watch their own shows in the living room). With DVDs, video games, and computers added to television, the division of tastes between younger and older family members is handled smoothly, parents have more ways to pacify their kids, and screen minutes climb accordingly.
Some parents feel guilty about the virtual babysitting, but not as much as they would if they let the children play with blocks on the kitchen floor while mother stepped around them while washing dishes. The screen, they contend, has educational benefits. Kids learn from what they watch. One mother from Irvine, California, insisted, “Anything they are doing on the computer I think is learning.” And another parent: “Out of the blue one day my son counted to five in Spanish. I knew immediately that he got that from
Dora.
” And another: “My daughter knows . . . her letters from
Sesame Street.
I haven’t had to work with her on them at all.” One parent highlighted the social lessons imparted through the screen: “I think they are exposed to a little bit more diversity. I think that it’s good for them to be comfortable with that . . . to know that it’s okay for everyone to be different.” Yes, the children play alone, but they learn, too, so that as the new technologies relieve harried parents, they also improve impressionable little minds.
Left to themselves nightly with three screen options, wired for music and podcast as they hit the treadmill, reaching in their pocket for an email between classes, stocked with 600 cell phone minutes a month, a DVD collection by age 12 ... young Americans tune in and turn on as routinely and avidly as they eat lunch. They “live” technology the way high school garage bands in the seventies lived rock ’n’ roll, sporting long hair and fraying jeans, idolizing Page and Richards, and blasting
Houses of the Holy, Get Your Wings,
and
Ted Nugent
all weekend. Except that what was then a short-term fad for a sub-subgroup of juniors and seniors whom the rest of us thought were a set of cool outsiders is now a thoroughgoing lifestyle for the majority of students from kindergarten upward. “Without question,”
Generation M
ends, “this generation truly
is
the media generation,” and new and old media practices have settled into essential youth rituals. It starts early, with researchers finding in one study that by three months of age around 40 percent of children are regular watchers of television, DVDs, or videos, and by 24 months the rate reaches 90 percent (Zimmerman et al., “Television and DVD/Video Viewing in Children Younger than 2 Years”). In 2002, in
Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives,
Todd Gitlin phrased it in a simple existential axiom:
“being with media.”
In Pew Research’s 2006 survey of cell phone use, 32 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds acknowledge that “they couldn’t live without their cell.” A January 2007 study by Pew,
How Young People View Their Lives, Futures, and Politics: A Portrait of “Generation Next,
” found that about half the 18- to 25-year-olds interviewed had sent or received a text message over the phone the previous day, and more than four in 10 “Nexters” have created a personal profile on a social networking site such as
MySpace.
In a parallel study of younger ages, Pew discovered that fully 55 percent of all 12- to 17-year-olds have created a personal profile page, and 48 percent of them visit social networking Web sites at least once a day (
Social Networking and Teens: An Overview,
2007). A follow-up Pew study,
Teens, Privacy & Online Social Networks
(April 2007), reported that one in four online teens make friends through the Web, and their virtual social life is a genuinely multimedia exchange. Three-quarters of social networking teens post photos online, and one in five posts videos. In early 2007, Harris Interactive surveyed teens and tweens (eight- to 12-year-olds) for their video game usage and found that the average tween plays 13 hours per week, the average teen 14 hours per week. About one in 12 of them counted as clinically addicted. Their social/ visual habits have so proliferated that Nielsen//NetRatings could report in a July 2006 press release, "YouTube U.S. Web Traffic Grows 75 Percent Week over Week,” ranking it the fastest-growing Web brand for the year. And a press release two months earlier from Nielsen//NetRatings declared, “Social Networking Sites Grow 47 Percent, Year over Year, Reaching 45 Percent of Web Users.” The growth rate of
MySpace
reached an astronomical 367 percent.
No wonder they associate technology with their leisure, with their distinguishing youthfulness. The newer screens become a generational hinge, allowing 68 percent of 18- to 25-year-olds (according to Pew’s
Generation Next
report) to “see their generation as unique and distinct from other generations.” The writers of
Generation Next
echo the opinion: “This generation’s relation with technology is truly unique.” And while 18- to 25-year-olds claim uniqueness for themselves, they grant it much less so (44 percent) to the previous generation. After all, their elders may have had the Sexual Revolution and Civil Rights,
The Breakfast Club
and
Less Than Zero,
but Generation Next grasps its predecessors’ ideals and icons while experiencing something no youth group has before: the Digital Revolution. They play rock ’n’ roll and hook up at parties just like Boomers and X-ers did, but their parents never loaded a thousand songs into a palm-size gadget when they were 18, or sent a message to 50 friends at once with a double-click, or kept a blog. And it is the youngsters themselves discovering novel practices. “They are innovative users of technology,” NetDay’s 2005 report gushes, “adopting new technologies to support their learning and their lifestyles.”
The digital accoutrements signify much more than a lifestyle, too, more than yet another youth cohort’s rebellious social mores and personal tastes. Digital habits reach down into their brains. As kids fixate on the twenty-first-century screen, they learn to count and spell, cut and paste, manage information, relate to others, and “construct knowledge.” New technologies induce new aptitudes, and bundled together in the bedroom they push consciousness to diversify its attention and multiply its communications. Through blogs and Listservs, young Americans join virtual communities, cultivating interests and voicing opinions. Video games quicken their spatial intelligence. Group endeavors such as
Wikipedia
and reality gaming nurture collaborative problem-solving skills. Individuals who’ve grown up surrounded by technology develop different hard-wiring, their minds adapted to information and entertainment practices and speeds that minds maturing in pre-digital habitats can barely comprehend, much less assimilate.
That’s the claim. Screen time is cerebral, and it generates a breakthrough intelligence. E-literacy isn’t just knowing how to download music, program an iPod, create a virtual profile, and comment on a blog. It’s a general deployment capacity, a particular mental flexibility. E-literacy accommodates hypermedia because e-literates possess hyperalertness. Multitasking entails a special cognitive attitude toward the world, not the orientation that enables slow concentration on one thing—a sonnet, a theorem—but a lightsome, itinerant awareness of numerous and dissimilar inputs. In a white paper entitled “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century,” MIT professor Henry Jenkins sketches the new media literacies in precisely such big, brainy terms:
distributed cognition
—the “ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities” (search engines, etc.);
collective intelligence
— the “ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal” (Listservs, etc.);
transmedia navigation
—the “ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities” ; and so on. A report from EDUCAUSE affirms, “We take it to be self-evident that college-bound digital natives are in fact
digital cognoscenti, sophisticates,
and perhaps even
digital connoisseurs
” (
ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology,
2006).
Over and over, commentators stress the mental advance, the learning side over the fun and fantasy side. In describing
Second Life,
the virtual universe in which people log on as themselves or as make-believe identities, become “residents,” and manufacture their own settings, the
Wikipedia
entry claims that users “learn new skills and mature socially.” When reading expert Professor James Gee, author of
What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy,
started to play a video game for the first time, he discovered a whole new consciousness. “Suddenly,” he avows, “all my baby-boomer ways of learning and thinking, for which I had heretofore received ample rewards, did not work.” At a panel on “Technology and Community” at the 2006 Aspen Institute, humanitarian activist and architect Cameron Sinclair announced, “there is a real problem with education in the U.S., and, you know what, the students know it more than the teachers do, and they’re beginning to mobilize [through the Web], and they’re forming their own ways of learning.” In February 2007, Jonathan Fanton, president of the MacArthur Foundation, announced a new digital youth initiative by wondering, “Might it be that, for many, the richest environment for learning is no longer in the classroom, it is outside the classroom—online and after school?” The MacArthur project is called Digital Media and Learning, a five-year $50 million initiative to study how digital technologies affect young people’s lives. At the same event, University of Wisconsin Professor David Williamson Shaffer, a “Game Scientist,” asserted that computers alter “the way people think in the digital age,” and that the invention of computers ranks with “the development of language itself” in the advancement of human intelligence. Consider that analogy: the caveman stands to the average 1950s person as the average 1950s person stands to us.