The Pugnacious Irishman

45 hours a week….

The average work week?  No.  The average hours of sleep per week? No. The average time teenage boys spend thinking about girls per week? No. That number is much, much higher. Trust me. I was a teenage boy once. I still act like one from time to time.

That, according to a meta analysis of 173 studies on media consumption, is the number of hours *on average* that a child spends immersed in media each week.

Because I teach of teenagers, even if I didn’t examine the studies, I’d believe it. That number, by the way, dwarfs the number of hours on average that children spend with parents (around 15).

Technological media, from IPODS to cell phones, from the internet to video games, is everywhere. The current young generation has grown up being immersed in this stuff to the point that they often consider media consumption as an assumed right, rather than a moderated privilege.

Sometimes we uncritically assume the technical imperative (or at least something close to it): all technological advances are good and we must have them. Even if we don’t explicitly state this, far too often we implicitly think it and/or feel it.
The CommonSense Media analysis should give us pause, however. Actually, we should have paused to think about all this long ago.

Often, technological advances and inventions have advantages to them, but we often don’t realize that they come with a downside as well. This is true with even the most innocuous inventions. The light bulb and the harnessing of electricity, for example, both obviously had the advantage of, uh, light in the house, but the unforseen disadvantage was that families no longer had to congregate in a single room. Everyone now had ample opportunity to do their own thing in other rooms of the house. Now, this didn’t bring on the apocalypse, but it did make for less and less family time.

Another example is the invention of air conditioning. This drove folks inside into their houses, rather than out on the porch at night. Again, this is no reason to proclaim the sky is falling, but the effect it had was that it eroded neighbor time. Folks didn’t get to know their neighbors as well.

We often miss these unintended consequences of technology.

Just in case you are wondering, I’m no hypocritical luddite. I’m writing this on a blog, after all, and I first was alerted to the media study by Albert Mohler via his Podcast (read his recent blog entry on the subject here). The internet is wonderful. I’m very thankful also that I can get quality teaching and thinking on deep things through ITunes. I could go on and on about the benefits of technological advances in Media. I hope you will see by reading some of the related articles below that I’m a fan of social media and blogging.

We need to pause, though, to ask ourselves what media saturation is doing to us and, more importantly, to our kids.

Tomorrow I will post on the downsides of the most recent technological advances. On Wednesday, I will post on how we can manage our exposure to media such that we can maximize the benefits while minimizing the damaging effects. Thursday I will conclude with a note on how the blogging revolution has and can be positive.

Like this article? Here are some other related articles:

32 Links to Build your Blogging Knowledge

Tips for Making Friends on Stumbleupon

Thoughts on a Technologically Saturated Life

The Ten Commandments of Blogging

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