Internet: Online Time—Oh, and Other Media, Too

The title of this post is the same as the second chapter in iGEN: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids are Growing up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood, by Jean M. Twenge, Ph.D.

iGen-ers sleep with their phones. They put them under their pillows, on the mattress, or at least within arm’s reach of the bed. They check social media websites and watch videos right before they go to bed, and reach for their phones again as soon as they wake up in the morning. So their phone is the last thing they see before they go to sleep, and the first thing they see when they wake up. If they wake up in the middle of the night, they usually look at their phones.

Dr. Twenge notes, “Smartphones are unlike any other previous form of media, infiltrating nearly every minute of our lives, even when we are unconscious with sleep. While we are awake, the phone entertains, communicates, and glamorizes. She writes, “It seems that teens (and the rest of us) spend a lot of time on phones—not talking but texting, on social media, online, and gaming (togther, these are labeled ‘new media’). Sometime around 2011, we arrived at the day when we looked up, maybe from our own phones, and realized that everyone around us had a phone in his or her hands.”

Dr, Twenge reports, “iGen high school seniors spent an average of 2.25 hours a day texting on their cell phone, about 2 hours a day on the Internet, 1.5 hours a day on electronic gaming , and about a half hour on video chat. This sums to a total of 5 hours a day with new media, This varies little based on family background; disadvantaged teens spent just as much or more time online as those with more resources. The smartphone era has meant the effective end of the Internet access gap.

Here’s a breakdown of how 12th graders are spending their screen time from Monitoring the Future, 2013-2015:
Texting 28%
Internet 24%
Gaming 18%
TV 24%
Video Chat 5%

Dr. Twenge reports that in seven years (2008 to 2015) social media sites went from being a daily activity for half of teens, to almost all of them. In 2015 87% of 12th grade girls used social media sites almost every day in 2015 compared to 77% of boys.
HM was happy to see that eventually many iGen’ers see through the veneer of chasing likes—but usually only once they are past their teen years.

She writes that “social media sites go into and out of fashion, and by the time you read this book several new ones will probably be on the scene. Among 14 year olds Instagram and Snapchat are much more popular than Facebook.“ She notes that recently group video chat apps such as Houseparty were catching on with iGEN, allowing them to do what they call ‘live chilling.”

Unfortunately, it appears that books are dead. In the late 1970s, a clear majority of teens read a book or a magazine nearly every day, but by 2015, only 16% did. e-book readers briefly seemed to rescue books: the number who said they read two or more books for pleasure bounced back in the late 2000s, but they sank again as iGEN (and smartphones) entered the scene in the 2010. By 2015, one out of three high school seniors admitted they had not read any books for pleasure in the past year, three times as many as in 1976.

iGEN teens are much less likely to read books than their Millennial, GenX, and Boomer predecessors. Dr. Twenge speculates that a reason for this is because books aren’t fast enough. For a generation raised to click on the next link or scroll to the next page within seconds, books just don’t hold their attention. There are also declines for iGen-ers with respect to magazines and newspapers.

SAT scores have declined since the mid-2000s, especially in writing (a 13-point decline since 2006) and critical reading ( a 13-point decline since 2005).

Dr, Twenge raises the fear that with iGen and the next generations never learning the patience necessary to delve deeply into a topic, and the US economy falling behind as a result.

Tags: Boomer, Facebook, gaming, GenX, IGEN, Instagram, Internet, Jean M. Twenge, Millenial, SAT scores, Snapchat, Texting, TV, Video Chat