An enormously important report by the Kaiser Family Foundation confirms what we’ve been observing anecdotally about the dominance of media and technological devices in young people’s lives.  But in spite of expectations, the numbers are still astoundingly high: The average 8- to 18-year-old is being exposed to media seven hours and thirty-eight minutes (7:38) per day, which, due to multitasking amounts to 10:45 worth of content.  And this doesn’t include the time spent using cell phones for talking or texting.  Indeed, according to the report, 15- to 18-year-olds spend 1:51 TEXTING per day.  Taking into account that these numbers exclude media use in school or for school, for most kids, it seems, media dominate their lives.

I’m not saying that media use is necessarily all bad; kids’ gadgets let them stay connected with their friends and family, and they can look up information on the internet that piques their interest that they might otherwise never take the trouble to track down.

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But I’d like to comment on the multitasking aspect of this report, because it’s relevant to my new book, Conquer CyberOverload: Get More Done, Boost Your Creativity, and Reduce Stress. In it, I review the research on multitasking.  The Kaiser study reports that kids are media multitasking (using two different media at once) 29% of the time (up from 16% in 1999).  More importantly, perhaps, 31% of the Kaiser respondents say they multitask “most of the time” when doing homework.  My book reports research showing that it is impossible for the brain to multitask — when we try to multitask, our brain must switch attention back and forth between the two things we’re trying to do, and both tasks suffer greatly in quality and efficiency.  Learning while multitasking also produces inferior and less flexible knowledge.  So multitasking should lead to poorer school performance.  The study doesn’t report direct correlations between multitasking and grades, but it does show that heavy media use overall is correlated with lower grades.

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There is so much valuable information in this study; I urge everyone to read it.  But one major take-away is this:  The  statistics on multitasking are alarming and suggest that the media habits of many young people are interfering with their educational achievement.