News for the Week of November 26, 2006

Research - on kids' use of digital media (including videogames) and the Internet - was much in technology news this week.

'What we've learned so far'

A girl started redesigning her town, Pasadena, in SimCity when she was in the 5th grade. "Today she's a [real life] city planner," her dad writes at the end of a long academic's blog post taking a measure of what his multi-year, multi-study research program has discovered about kids' "informal learning" while they play and socialize with and in digital media. He is Prof. Peter Lyman at University of California, Berkeley, and one of the principal investigators of the Digital Youth Research program that started in 2003. His daughter's experience perfectly illustrates what these researchers - at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Southern California, and the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education - have been studying, what they call "informal learning." It's what young people learn outside of school, and - with digital media and the Internet - informal learning is on steroids.

A media diet for kids?

That's what David Walsh said as he unveiled his watchdog group's 11th-annual "Video Game Report Card" in Washington this week, the Associated Press reports. His Minneapolis-based National Institute on Media and the Family "urged parents to take a stronger role in safeguarding their children from games that glamorize sex and violence. Game industry news site Gamasutra reports that "the two major topics highlighted in the report concerned 'parental ignorance' and the 'public health crisis' of obesity and gaming addiction.... While the Institute's survey found that two thirds of parents said they had house rules over game play, only one third of surveyed children reported the same." The institute says this year's report card "focuses less on the flaws of a complex [$13 billion] industry and more on what all of us can do about the real risks posed by some types of video games [ignorance, obesity, game addiction]" and points out that nearly half of "heavy gamers" are 6-17 years old, even though gamers' average age is in the high 20s.

Parents on Net vs. TV

That kids watch too much TV is still the view of more parents than that kids spend too much time online. In a just-released study at the University of Southern California, "21% of adult Internet users with children believe the kids are online too long, compared with 11% in 2000. Still, that's less than the 49% who complain their kids watch too much TV," the Associated Press reports. Losing TV-viewing time is also still a more widely used disciplinary measure at 57% (of parents who say they impose it) than losing Internet privileges (47%). I think this is smart, because we're really comparing apples and oranges: TV is a single, very passive medium; the Net is many media and, for youth, far from passive; parents are increasingly getting this. Other key findings:

• At least 74% of all Americans under 66 are online (only 38% of people 66+), and 99% of people 18 and under are.
• "On average, users spend 14 hours a week online, compared with 9.4 hours in 2000" (when USC first started researching this).
• 37% of US Net users have dial-up accounts, 50% high-speed ones, and 11% access the Net via mobile devices.
• 22% of Americans are unconnected, more than a quarter of them former Net users who "dropped out" (mostly because their computer didn't work.

Friendship on the social Web

The new Harris Interactive study reflects youth's blurring of the line between online and offline. Harris folded all teen social tools into its research, finding that 85% of 13-to-18-year-olds have email contact lists, 81% IM buddy lists, 77% have cellphones, and 75% have social-networking or community site profiles. But "for both tweens [ages 8-12] and teens [13-17], their most common way of spending time with their friends are in person, closely followed by speaking with them on the phone," Harris added - in-person socializing being the top pick for 81% of tweens vs. 53% for teens (IM is No. 4 for tweens and No. 2 for teens). Particularly interesting is a chart (on p.3) about online vs. offline friends. Nearly 80% of teens have friends in real life with whom they never talk online (only in person or on the phone), 87% have friends with whom they talk both online and offline, and 36% have friends with whom they talk only online, but these "friendships that exist only online are more recent, and thus not surprisingly, less close," Harris found.