True Facts About Teens & Media Through a Three-Decade Evolution
Teen media habits are changing rapidly, and these changes are altering society. Technology has made our world more communicative and entertaining, but it has also diminished our in-person social lives and our likelihood to be active in the real world.
Introduction: From Game Boys to TikTok
The infographic covers three decades: 1995, 2005, and 2015
Demonstrating how teens have engaged with media and interfaced with technology over those years. It provides—most likely unintentionally, but hey, we’ll take it—a look at the speed and manner in which formative interactives have occurred, displaying conversative behavior on the part of our adoptee group. Taking a larger view, this infographic also shows how both technology and social interaction have evolved.
1995: The Birth of Digital Media.
The average teenager in 1995 consumed about 6.5 hours of media a day, mostly in front of the television or playing video games like the euphoria-inducing Nintendo 64. The internet was still in its infancy, and if teenagers weren’t spending time with the latest video game, they were busily constructing the 1.5 million personal websites that made up the early internet. Life in 1995 was simple. Social interactions primarily occurred in person (64 percent of teenagers spent time with friends every day), and when it was time for a good old-fashioned rallying cry, the telephone was your best bet. Even the media itself wasn’t a portal into a private universe; there wasn’t enough to sustain an all-consuming digital existence. Digital media was something you shared with your friends if they happened to be over at your house when The Real World or Beavis and Butt-Head was on.
The Internet Was Taking Over
By 2005, the internet had already penetrated teenage life to a great extent, with 87% of them using it regularly. Social media was still a toddler in comparison to today but was already a part of the teenage arsenal of tools. MySpace, which was already six years old but still a fresh platform, offered the next big thing in digital teenage life. It was basically a space for middle, high school, and even college-aged kids to hang out, listen to music, and establish their own digital real estate. And they were using it some, but it actually wasn’t a very big part of their internet experience.
By 2015, the average adolescent was spending almost half of their daily time on screens—an average of 9.3 hours a day—mostly on smartphones, which had replaced every other device and showcased all kinds of potential for entertainment, communication, and social interaction. Texting had eclipsed phone calling. Adolescent heavy texters were sending and receiving an average of 67.5 texts a day, or over 13 per hour for those 9 hours we were hooked on our phones. If anything was “All That” in 2015, texts were. By now, Snapchat was ascendant over Instagram, which was clamping down hard on user-generated content to make it look cool and coherent for its advertisers. And while we were looking at these photos and videos, whether shared head-on or via screen, we were involved in black-and-white “unproductive” moments—”nah, I can’t hang, I’m in a meeting,” or whatever.
Important Themes from 1995 to 2015:
Watching People: The average number of hours people consume media in a day has risen from 6.5 hours in 1995 to 9 hours in 2015. Screens have become a constant presence in our lives. Communication: While texting and using Snapchat have become the norm, nearly half of teens still prefer in-person conversation over anything else. Social Media: What started as a small online community has exploded. Now, nearly 70 percent of teen life is spent on social media, with Instagram and Snapchat being the most popular platforms. Outdoor Play: Participating in outdoor play seems to be falling victim to the same fate as the telephone booth. Kids just don’t seem to want to play outside.
Final Thoughts The 1995 teenager could easily fill an afternoon at the mall with friends. The 2015 teenager is more likely to be found scrolling Instagram, and probably in solitude. But is this new electronic life really advancing or retarding the good old adolescent identity quest?
