Perhaps the hardest things for any of us to realize when we are witnessing them in real time is the emergence of what historians will eventually conclude were revolutionary moments.
Bear with me. This post is about two subjects that may at first seem unrelated, almost comically so. One is the evolution of language, a subject long close to my heart.
The second is children's media habits, and how we, their parents, can best help them navigate their sped-up, multimedia environment without losing their souls in the process.
I'll start this with two recent reports that caught my eye, the first from Harvard that proclaims that "Most U.S. teens, young adults, don't follow the news closely." Reuters Story.
"(The) Harvard University study finds that 60% of young people pay little attention to daily news. One reason teenagers may pay less attention to news than older Americans is only one in 20 young people rely heavily on a daily newspaper, according to the survey. It also found that radio is an underestimated source of news for Americans of all ages."
Now, this is anecdotal evidence, not scientific, but I have been conducting an informal query of my 11 and 12-year-old sons, to try and determine how aware they are of each day's major stories. What amazes me is that they almost always are aware of the major stories of the day.
In both their mom's house and mine they are exposed to various media -- the daily newspaper, for example (and the New York Times on Sundays), but the only section that seems to catch their attention is the comics, which (forgive me) I have never bothered reading my entire life.
But the part of the Harvard study that may explain why my young boys stay on top of the news is that both their mother and I play NPR in our houses and cars with a great deal of regularity. I believe that many times they pick up news from our local station, KQED, while being driven to school, or while eating breakfast, etc.
The other study I wish to draw attention to was conducted by a former colleague of mine at Stanford, Prof. Donald Roberts, and his team. Don has studied kids and media for a long time -- over 40 years -- and he is recognized as one of the premier experts in this field. I'll never forget the speech he gave one year at graduation when I was a visiting professor at Stanford about how many more media messages reach our kids today than ever reached us when we were young.
He is the lead author on a recent report for the Kaiser Family Foundation, available via Children & Media Report . In the past fives years, according to this report, the percentage of kids with access to the Internet in their homes has exploded from 47% to 74%!
This is simply a continuation of a longer-term trend. Back in 1999, when Prof. Roberts et. al., first studied the media habits of U.S. youth for the KFF, they were shocked to learn that two-thirds of American kids aged 8-18 had televisions in their bedrooms!
In addition, back there in the last year of the last century, the researchers were surprised to learn that children were already using two or more media simultaneously 16% of the time -- in other words, one out of six kids was already a serious multi-tasker.
The new study documents what IMHO is the most important change since the turn of the Millennium: IM. If you don't already do it, please open an account (they're free) at MSN or Yahoo or even via Google's gmail and try this out. The world of IM (instant messaging) has superceded email, which of course superceded snail mail.
What is fascinating is the new language that is emerging. More than a decade ago, I speculated that, thanks to email, capital letters would be disappearing from the English language.
Now, in the age of IM, I realize spelling will be changing as well. My messages exchanged with younger people, including my kids, contain all sorts of shortcuts:
WB (write back)
HRU (how are you?)
GTG (got to go)
This is a small sampling of the new english that is emerging via the web. It is somewhat strange to consider that all of the writing we have done in my time on earth, these past six decades, will be seen as an antiquated form much as that (in our eyes) of Chaucer, the father of English literature.
Maybe, therefore, e.e.cummings will have his last laugh?
gtg
-30-
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