The Computer Generation

More screen time doesn’t mean less potential for today’s youth.

According to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation study, eight- to 18-year-old Americans are now on average spending more than seven-and-a-half hours a week using electronic media. Television still dominates, followed by music, computers, and video games respectively. Using more than one type of technology at once is commonplace.

With some justifiable concern, this has led to a rash of analysis focusing on the mental and physical implications of increased screen time. Sure, this has potential negative consequences, but it’s important not to allow screen time statistics to over-influence impressions of today’s youth.

At Decode, our research shows that the people who are highly sociable offline are the same people who are highly sociable online – in other words, the stereotype of the computer nerd with hundreds of online friends but none in real life is no longer relevant (if it ever was).

This relationship between screen time and socializing raises important questions about young people’s health – psychological, attitudinal, physical, etc. Furthermore, hyper-socializing (by whatever means) has always been the domain of youth. Had previous generations had similar tools at their disposal, they may well have used them for as many hours a day. The inclination is not new – only the ability to carry it out.

The Kaiser study showed that nearly half of all heavy users of media platforms usually get C grades or lower, compared to 23 per cent of light users. This has less to do with some kind of detrimental affect of technology and more to do with the desire to chat with friends rather than work, a desire that is hardly new. Long before the days of Facebook, we simply avoided homework in other ways. Remember video games and drag racing the family car to impress a girl?

Perhaps most telling is the Kaiser study’s discovery that when parents want to restrict their children’s media use, they don’t strictly enforce the rules they have set. This is perhaps a quintessential feature of the generation these parents belong to. Generation X (now 30 to 45 years old) is the last generation to have experienced pre-digital life, but unlike the baby boomers, gen-Xers are now completely immersed in the latest technology. They therefore recognize the dangers but are themselves caught up in the pleasures.

It’s hard for them to lead by example. Gen-Xers remember their first dates as verbal promises to meet at such-and-such a place at such-and-such a time, with no ability to postpone at the last minute via text message. To some extent, they’re nostalgic about this; there’s a kind of posthumous romance to the idea of having to keep one’s word or risk standing someone up. However, those same gen-Xers are entranced by the way they can now spontaneously organize their lives, conduct themselves in multiple roles, and have the freedom to change their minds with relative impunity and no serious consequences. It’s one of the relatively few ways in which their behaviour is fundamentally different from that of their parents.

It’s precisely because of gen-Xers’ love affair with the new spontaneity that they were the pioneers of demanding more flexible lifestyles and working conditions. In many ways, their struggles with issues such as the decline of the “job for life” and the increase in divorce rates paved the way for today’s young people. Gen-Xers, while often stigmatized themselves, were actually of the generation that saw the most dramatic decline in social stigmatization – the “go with the flow” generation. They turned things to their advantage by finding flexible solutions to family break-ups and demanding the option of being an independent agent in the workplace. Technology played no small part in this, making working from home realistic and allowing people to be more in touch, though more apart, than ever before.

Therefore, when today’s young people are portrayed as a generation of screen-fixated underachievers, it’s often a blanket perspective that doesn’t recognize that theirs is a path initially inherited from their flex-needy parents and that they’re relatively well equipped to use those screen hours in innovative ways. It’s not enough to quote numbers of screen hours without analyzing what those screen hours are being used for.

The news for employers, therefore, may not be so bad. Today’s youth are digital natives. This recognition has almost already become too accepted and normalized; people say it to prove they understand young people without really thinking about what it means. To be native is to engage with a particular culture as the benchmark of familiarity. Unlike gen-Xers, who to some extent saw increased flexibility and contact as a novelty, today’s young people see it as a given – it’s formative of their normality.

This means that they’ll potentially demand more of it than their predecessors did. They’ll become bored with uninspiring content, irrelevant advertising, and banal gossip. They’ll expect their time online to provide them with opportunities to improve themselves, make their voices heard, express their creativity.

Of course there will be a minority who do not push to improve the tools, as there have been in every generation, but there’s no particular reason to feel that this will not be a useful and impressive generation of workers.