> Dutch youth is spending an average (!) of 5 hours and 45 minutes per day on digital media.
I was wondering if something like that was at play. Well, here are some hard statistics. Thank you for that.
> That's some serious amount of time
It's a worrying and disturbing amount of time.
Now, the question is: is more time wasted on digital media than was wasted on TV in the past?
And secondly: does the current TV time come on top of that, or has TV simply been displaced to other media, and is therefore fully included in the 5 hours and 45 minutes?
And thirdly: would anyone complain if children were spending 5 hours and 45 minutes a day reading books?
Watching television was much more toxic than digital media. Network television spoon fed content targeted at a lowest common denominator to everyone, that content was consumed passively. It was horrible.
Digital media allows active selection of content, and provides access to much higher quality information, if you want it.
Back in the day, you were lucky if your public library had even one book on a subject you were interested in, and if it did, it was probably mediocre at best. And highschool libaries? Pfft. Brittanica? Pathetic compared to Wikipedia.
Today, kids have instant access to all of human knowledge as digital media.
It's a false equivalency to compare TV time to digital media time.
Come off it. These kids aren't spending that time reading Wikipedia, they're on social media platforms that optimize for engagement and gambling apps disguised as video games.
> Watching television was much more toxic than digital media.
That's a wild take. TV didn't spy on you while you watched it. TV didn't send you a steady stream of notifications that sounded alarms or vibrated in your pocket at various hours even if you weren't at home just to make you feel like you were missing out and to keep you checking back in. TV didn't have microtransactions or lootboxes either. TV wasn't pay to win.
TV didn't have ads targeted to an individual. Ads on TV could only be targeted to a market and to broad demographics (kids before school starts and during cartoons, women in the day and while soaps were airing, etc) and there was some regulation on the kinds of advertising you show children and programing intended for children was developed with oversight from the network. Elsagate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate) was impossible on television. There was too much perl clutching over what kids could see on TV, but these days parents hand their kids a tablet with youtube and they are at the mercy of an algorithm that's designed to show them the most extreme and divisive content.
Sure, my son enjoys high quality content like "Life on our planet", but he also has a Smartphone, which is much more addictive than a TV with, indeed, mediocre content. Moreover, all my friends were outside, on the streets, in the forest. Not so much right now.
Have you seen what children are doing on their phones? It's not sophisticated discourse on all human knowledge or reading informative articles. It's digital heroin, ads and rage content.
There has to be a name for this absolutely divorced from reality whataboutism. At best, kids may spend one of those ~6 hours watching edutainment, but it is far more likely to be entirely spent scrolling on Twitter, Tiktok, or Instagram for microdoses of engagement dopamine.
I was wondering if something like that was at play. Well, here are some hard statistics. Thank you for that.
> That's some serious amount of time
It's a worrying and disturbing amount of time.
Now, the question is: is more time wasted on digital media than was wasted on TV in the past?
And secondly: does the current TV time come on top of that, or has TV simply been displaced to other media, and is therefore fully included in the 5 hours and 45 minutes?