Article Assessment 2

This is a review of the article Teens and technology -- a good match?, by John Matuszak.

Overview

This feature article briefly summarizes a report by the Kaiser Family institute, called Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18- Year-Olds. It then presents some interviews conducted at the local middle and high schools.

• Technology exposure (everything from radios to online gaming communities and texting) in 8- to 18-year-old Americans has risen by more than one hour a day from five years ago, to over 7.5 hours a day.
• Most technology use is unsupervised, although some school districts enforce policies designed to curtail use, and prevent cheating and cyber-bullying.
• However, technology is also fostered in the schools, so that education can remain in step with the times and take advantage of those same technological revolutions that may be working against them in their recreational applications.
• Parents should be involved with their children in the cybersphere as well as in "unplugged" contexts.

Reflection

The report itself is most fascinating to me, because the school district employees being interviewed restated ideas that were debated many times over in the Sitka School District.

The least expected results in the report were:

• Of all studied forms of media consumption, reading was the only one to which young Whites dedicated more time than young Blacks or Hispanics.
  
• The incidence of internet and computer access did not vary as much between races and classes as I would have predicted (16 percentage points is the widest single-factor spread, out of 24 measures)

Black youth's use of all studied media is significantly higher than that of White youth's, but the statistical significance of that data shifts when one considers that the discrepancy is due almost entirely to a higher exposure to television and music. What we are examining here is the more interactive brand of technology, and this is where the "equality" is most glaring.

Free marketers such as Thomas Friedman and the Economist will usually use this data to predict that the democratization of the means of intellectual production has erased the old left-wing criticism that:

“The prevailing social order perverts or annihilates the creative capacity of the immense majority of people and reduce the possibility of creation – an age-old response to human anguish and the certainty of death – to its professional exercise by a handful of specialists.” Eduardo Galeano 1976

However, left-wing thinkers will raise the undeniable facts that there is a tremendous quality gap in the nature of the technology that young people are exposed to, and that it is top-down economics, not free markets, that get kids copying Wikipedia and PBS primary sources rather than IMing their flirts.

This irreversible technological revolution comes with its own set of advantages and disadvantages. On the whole, those technologies are very beneficial, but we still have the responsibility as educators, parents, citizens, and consumers of media, to ensure that they are reaching everyone in the most beneficial way possible (which includes having fun, of course).