Kids and Media in America

Now that we have examined U.S. young people's exposure to individual media, it is time to turn to overall media use and media diets. How much are children and adolescents exposed to media overall? How does overall media consumption vary with such factors as age, gender, race and ethnicity, or socioeconomic status? What proportion of the total media budget is accounted for by each different medium?

With all of the media options available, it is no surprise that U.S. children and adolescents devote an enormous portion of each day to their use. As we have seen, they watch television, listen to music, play video games, use computers, read books, magazines, or newspapers, watch videos, and go to the movies. Moreover, today's kids often do two or three or more of these things simultaneously. Christenson and Roberts (1998), for example, present evidence that most teenagers' music listening accompanies other activities, quite often other media activities. Similarly, Lenhart et al. (2001) report that today's computer activities almost stereotypically imply multitasking on the part of young people. One 17-year-old girl states, “I get bored if it's not all going on at once, because everything has gaps – waiting for someone to respond to an IM, waiting for a Website to come up, commercials on TV, etc.” (p. 13). Another 15-year-old says, “I do so many things at once. … I'm always talking to people through instant messenger and then I'll be checking e-mail or doing homework or playing games AND talking on the phone at the same time” (p. 13).

EXPOSURE VERSUS USE

Such parallel processing of media points to an important distinction between media use – the amount of time kids spend with media – and media exposure – the amount of media content they encounter. For example, if a youth spends 1 hour reading while simultaneously listening to music, she has used media for 1 hour but has been exposed to 2 hours of media content.