In the wake of sensational headlines like “Adolescents’ Recreational Screen Time Doubled During the Pandemic” and “Screen Time Associated With Health Behaviors and Outcomes in Children”, American adults have become increasingly worried about the effects of increased screen time on the physical and mental health of their children. They wonder if their child really is spending more time than they should on their computer or tablet. They question whether or not their child’s enjoyment of New Media should be considered a hobby to engage with or an addiction to quell. The short answer is, yes and no. Modern young Americans do, in fact, spend a significant portion of their time consuming New Media on the Internet. However, enjoying things and investing significant time on them is not an addiction, no matter how much old people like to complain about the newfangled New Media rotting their kids’ brains.
Generation Z has found their home on the Internet, and that’s okay.
As just one denizen of Generation Z, I’ve been keeping track of my own use of media over the course of my last college semester. My computer happens to have a handy feature called Screen Time built into the Mac OS, which tracks how long I’ve spent on the computer as well as which applications I’ve been using. Over the past four weeks, my average time spent on the computer, as tracked by Screen Time, was 9 hours and 49 minutes per day. The majority of that time was spent using an internet browser like Firefox or Google Chrome. A smaller but still significant amount of time was spent on Discord, my primary online social space. On Discord, you can chat with other users, either in “servers” with a group of other people, or in direct message channels for one-on-one conversations. Another slice of my screen time last month was spent playing video games that I downloaded from the Internet and installed onto my computer a long time ago. The rest of my time was spent on various other programs like audio mixing software and image editing programs. I only spent a few minutes per day on these miscellaneous applications.
I largely receive news about current events from social media. I follow a forum on Reddit called r/TwoXChromosomes, in which users frequently post links to news articles about women’s issues such as the ongoing teardown of the right to abortion in the United States. When I’m not on Reddit, a friend will occasionally send me an article they find interesting over text message or Discord. Occasionally, I watch news shows like Last Week Tonight on YouTube.
I have not consumed any form of print media over the past four months. I don’t think I’ve so much as picked up a physical magazine or newspaper in over a decade. While I do read books, the majority of them are in the form of .pdf files on my iPad. This includes my school textbooks. I prefer reading textbooks electronically over having to spend more money on a giant physical book that I have to lug around to and from school twice a week and maybe open three times over the course of a semester. Any books I read that aren’t on the iPad are e-books and e-comics published on the author’s website. I don’t read magazines at all, even electronically. They never piqued my interest, they seem like just a collection of advertisements, and I’m already bombarded with so many advertisements every time I do anything on the Internet.
I have listened to the radio exactly four times over the course of the semester, and even those times were not by my choosing. The only reason I listened to the radio on those occasions was because my dad was picking me up from school, and he listens to the radio while driving. My consumption of the radio is directly dependent on when I’m getting driven somewhere by my father– I never listen to the radio outside of the car and I don’t drive. In elementary school I would listen to the radio a lot more because my dad drove me to and from school five days a week. The advertisements from those old radio shows are still burned into my brain. For example, the Cellino & Barnes law firm changed their phone number a long time ago, but I remember the old number by heart— 800-621-2020.
This year, my dad only picked me up from school a handful of times throughout the semester, so I only listened to the radio a handful of times. In general, the radio is not my primary source of music and I don’t listen to it often. My primary source of music is YouTube. Users upload rips of their favorite songs or their own amateur albums all the time. On YouTube I can even listen to video game and film soundtracks, which are notoriously scarce on dedicated music streaming sites like Spotify or Pandora. With all these factors combined, the radio is a thing of the past to me. I hold nostalgic memories of my time listening to it on the way to and from school, but nothing more than that. It was a tiny part of my life when I was a kid and is nigh-on nonexistent in my life now.
My parents cut the cable service to our house several years ago. Nobody used it to a substantial enough degree to justify paying the cable bill, not even my definitely-not-Gen-Z parents. When the cable service was gone, nothing fundamentally changed about our lives. Streaming services were able to completely replace cable, and we never found ourselves unable to watch a TV show that we wanted to watch because we didn’t have cable service anymore. And even now, I watch a lot of TV. At least once a day, but usually twice or more, I sit down with my family and watch a TV show on streaming services like Disney+ or Netflix.
The common thread with my media consumption is that nearly every facet of it is digital in some way, and the lion’s share of it is also online. Even when I consume more “traditional” media like books, TV, and music, I do so over the Internet, using a modern electronic device. I read books on the iPad, I watch TV on Netflix, I listen to music on YouTube. If I’m in the mood for media, I get my fix on the Internet. New Media doesn’t just influence or even shape my media diet, it is my media diet.
While I don’t claim to represent Generation Z, nothing about my New Media consumption is special. All of the New Media habits I’ve discussed in my own personal media profile are fairly typical for a young American in the modern day. In November of 2021, JAMA Pediatrics found that adolescents now spend an average of 7 hours and 42 minutes per day on their screens, not including time spent in online classes or doing schoolwork on the computer.
Americans’s average screen time as a whole is 7 hours and 4 minutes per day. One factor of New Media that makes it so attractive to children and adults alike immediately jumps out at the passive observer. Fun. There are a vast amount of fun ways to pass the time on the Internet. On YouTube alone, an average of ~500 hours of video content was uploaded per minute in 2020 (Ceci, 2022). A person born today with the singular mission of watching as much YouTube content as possible, throughout their entire life, would barely get through the 72,000 hours of videos uploaded in a single day. And that’s just one website. New Media also includes the various books, movies, TV, games, and other user-generated entertainment that can be found online. The Internet can be described as the largest amusement park ever to exist– an amusement park that is open 24/7, has no lines, offers most of its services for free after paying the entry bill, and contains so many attractions suiting every need that it is impossible for a single person to experience everything it has to offer. It isn’t even possible to scratch the surface of New Media’s massive entertainment iceberg.
Despite this, the overwhelming adoption of New Media by young Americans isn’t just for fun. The means of educating oneself have shifted to social media and online news sites as well.
Pew Research found in a 2021 survey that over 85% of Americans get their news from either the computer, their smartphone, or their tablet (Shearer, 2021). Using those devices, Americans now get their news online, from news sites, YouTube news shows, and social media. McClatchy, one of the largest newspaper chains in the country, filed for bankruptcy in February of 2020 as newspaper circulation, employment, and revenue rapidly plummeted in the years preceding McClatchy’s downfall (Grieco, 2020). Specifically, in 2020 the U.S. Census Bureau's Service Annual Survey reported that print newspaper revenue across the industry had dropped by over half, from $46.179 billion to $22.149 billion over the past 20 years (U.S. Census Bureau, 2020).
Even newer technology and businesses have centralized around taking as much advantage of Internet connectivity as they can. Apple discontinued their legacy iPod line in May of 2022 in favor of new, Internet-connected iPhones and iPads (Apple Inc., 2022). The official discontinuation was largely a formality— by that point, very few people were actually buying iPods anymore. iPhones and iPads are strictly superior products in every way due to their ability to connect to cellular services and the Internet.
E-commerce is a huge player in the economic scene nowadays, and the money that can be made from doing business online is truly staggering. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, makes the majority of its money by selling advertising space to other businesses thirsty for the attention of the hundreds of millions of people who visit Google and its proprietary websites multiple times per day. In the third quarter of this year, Alphabet made a combined total of $61.553 billion from advertising revenue. Around $7 billion of this revenue was from advertisements on YouTube, the largest video-sharing site on the Internet (Alphabet Inc., 2022). Amazon is the second largest company in the world by revenue, and it got rich largely by becoming the main website for buying and selling goods online. In Q3 2022, Amazon reported earnings of $127.1 billion from e-commerce sales alone (Amazon.com Inc., 2022). The simple ability to click a few buttons and get everything from food to clothing to electronics to school supplies, all on one website, was enough to win the hearts and wallets of the entire world. Any business that seeks to gain a larger customer base than the neighborhood corner store is now required to capitalize on the enormous amount of people looking to do business over the Internet, in the comfort of their own home or office. There are billions of eyes online, and if even a few of them are looking at a business’s products, they might get some people to click “BUY”.
Artisans and craftspeople have turned social media sites like Twitter, Instagram, and Spotify into their galleries and marketplaces. If one were to search for fashion brands on Instagram, they’d find a treasure trove of product photos from a wide variety of brands around the world. These brands would range from tiny, independent shops relying on their social media presence for most or all of their advertising, to giants of the industry like Balenciaga, Coach, Gucci, and Nike— brands so large that they need no introduction to anyone who knows even a little about the world of modern fashion. On Spotify, the same can be said for musicians. Indie rappers that would never make it on the radio share the open space of Spotify with industry titans like Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, and Lil Nas X. The free content such artistic businesses, big and small, produce on social media appeals to their audience on a personal level, and becomes a cost-effective means of advertisement to a community of highly engaged potential customers.
Modern young people spend their free time online, consuming books, movies, TV, games, and user-generated content over the Internet. And when they’re not entertaining themselves, they’re performing a variety of business-related tasks online. They read the news on the MSNBC or Fox News website. They buy and sell commercial products on Amazon. They hone their craft on Instagram. A small but significant portion of them even do their jobs online, with just under 18% of Americans primarily working from home as of 2021 (US Census Bureau, 2022). In short, Generation Z has moved to the Internet, and they seem intent on making it their permanent home.
It would be very easy to look at the fact that modern young Americans are spending so much time engaged with New Media, and repeat the ancient refrain. The refrain that kids these days are just addicted to their phones and tablets and Nintendos. The refrain that they’d be helpless without the crutch of technology, and that newfangled New Media is rotting their brains away. I thoroughly reject these notions. This line of thought is not new to New Media, and has been repeated with every new form of media technology to exist since the times of antiquity.
In 2005, a CNN article (that was ironically posted online) lamented the advent of the email, claiming that “Workers distracted by phone calls, e-mails and text messages suffer a greater loss of IQ than a person smoking marijuana…” (CNN, 2005). Yes, a supposedly reputable news organization had the audacity to claim that digitally-delivered messages were more damaging to the brain than a literal drug. And people believed this, because several other news organizations wrote similar articles around the same time. MIT Tech Review, UPenn, and The Guardian all wrote articles in 2005 claiming that “Email hurts IQ more than pot.”
In 1936, The Gramophone wrote a scathing article about the effects of the radio on children. The magazine claimed that “Undoubtedly the youngsters of New York City are radiominded.” The article told horror stories of these kids’ abject addiction to the radio. To hear The Gramophone tell it, “[The children of New York] gulp their meals in order not to miss the day's installment. . . . At night the children often lie awake in bed restless and fearful, or wake up screaming as a result of nightmares brought on by mystery stories.” (London & Lambert, 1936). The Gramophone painted the picture of brainwashed, mindless children, who had been molded by the evil radio to become obsessed with the stories they listened to over that small device.
Never mind the fact that the radio just produces sound, and the effects on these children’s minds would be identical if they were being told the stories directly by another person. In 1545, Swiss biologist Conrad Gessner prefaced his Bibliotheca Universalis by decrying the sheer amount of books in existence that his project planned to catalog. In Gessner’s mind, the “confusing and harmful abundance of books” (Gesner, 1545) in the world would lead to an information overload that would require the assistance of kings and princes the world over to solve. Clearly, widespread public access to information is some horrible scourge that the world must band together to prevent.
In the 400s BCE, Socrates believed that even literacy, the most basic and barebones engagement with media that one can possibly attain, was too much for children to bear. In his Phaedrus Socrates had the following to say about writing: “This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.” By not forcing themselves to commit literally everything they ever learn to memory, Socrates believed that children of his day would be rewarded with “not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.” (Plato, 4th Century BCE). Even learning to read and write is apparently hazardous to the fragile brain of a child. The skill is a Faustian bargain that will allegedly poison their ability to memorize information as they rely on the crutches of markings on a stone or a sheet of paper. In short, old people complaining about the new media the kids these days are consuming is almost literally as old as dirt. In a few dozen years, the Capital-N New Media brought on by the replacement of ARPANET by the modern Internet will no longer be lowercase-n new. In time it will be seen as the normal advancement of technology that it always was, and Generation Z will join the ranks of old fogeys complaining about whatever media comes next. Nothing of substance will change, because these complaints never had substance to begin with. They are merely the hallmarks of an old, tired way to think about New Media, and they provide exactly as much value to discussion on the topic as they did back when new media was writing itself.
People have always been invested in new media. They have always been excited by new forms of communication, education, and entertainment. And that’s a completely normal response. Each new advancement in media provides new ways to connect to our fellow human beings. Those new connections are intellectually stimulating, socially liberating, and just plain fun. The increase in screen time over the past few decades is simply young Americans moving to where that new media is, just as they moved to meet the e-mail, the radio, the telegraph, the printing press, and the stone tablet that came before.
Modern young Americans are spending more and more time consuming New Media, to the point where Generation Z practically lives on the Internet. This is not the sign of mass brain-rot in the populace of our generation, nor is it the beginning of a paradigm shift in the way media is consumed by the general public. It is just the result of the Internet, and the New Media it provides, becoming part of the mainstream. The river of media technology is ever-flowing, and Generation Z is floating along its waters just like everyone else. New Media was the mysterious frontier of yesteryear, but to us New Media is home. We’re not going to be shamed into moving.
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