Children and teenagers in the US have increased their daily media exposure by more than an hour over the past five years, from 7.29 hours per day to 8.33 hours per day, fuelled by video game consumption, according to a new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
The report, “Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 year olds”, examined recreational media use of more than 2,000 participants and includes 700 self-selected candidates who maintained seven day media diaries.
However, media multi-tasking was revealed to have increased to 26% from 16% in 1999, and as such, actual number of hours devoted to media use has remained steady, at just under 6.5 hours a day, or 44.5 hours a week.
One in four respondents claimed that they “often” go online while watching television, 10% said they did “sometimes”, while 18% use the internet to do something related to the show they are watching. Elsewhere, 24% of children say they use other media “most of the time” while watching television, 28% when reading, 33% when listening to music and 33% while using a computer.
Commenting on this, Drew Altman, Ph.D president and chief executive officer of the Kaiser Family Foundation said: “Kids are multi-tasking and consuming many different kinds of media all at once. Multi-tasking is a growing phenomenon in media use and we don’t know whether it’s good or bad.”
These results echo findings from the Simultaneous Media Usage Survey (SIMM V) by BIGresearch, stating that television viewing in the US is estimated to be down by 2.5% as a direct result of media-multi tasking (see TV Viewing Down Due To Multi-Tasking).
Children’s bedrooms are increasingly becoming multi-media centres, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, with 68% of all 8-18 year olds having a television in their room and 49% a video game player. Rising numbers have a VCR or DVD player, up from 29% in 1999 to 54% currently, 31% have cable or satellite TV, 31% have a computer in their bedroom and 20% have internet access.
Parental concern about this rapidly rising media consumption is shown by the study to be declining, with 53% of all 8-18 year olds claiming their families have no rules about television watching.
Vicky Rideout, M.A, Kasier Family Foundation vice president and director of the study, finds these statistics worrying and said: “These kids are spending the equivalent of a full-time work week using media, plus over time. Anything that takes up that much space in their lives certainly deserves our full attention.”
Earlier this month, a report from global market research group, NOP World Technology showed that nearly half of 10 to 18 year olds in the US own mobile phones, confirming the vast uptake in new media technology. The majority of people polled, 71%, were interested in multi-function mobile handsets, wanting phones that convert to MP3 players, while 70% were interested in phones that could double as digital cameras.
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