Assignment task:
What are the 3 main points? Find your own example of how youth are covered in the news media today (news story, an online article online, a blog posting, a video, or a graphic, etc.). Provide the link and explain how this news coverage's speaks to the UN Convention on the Rights of Children and Youth
The extent of technology's influence on young people is immediately apparent to any observer of youth culture. Many young people access high-speed satellite and wireless Internet technologies daily, post to YouTube, use cellphones, text-message, play video games, use email or MSN, download music, and use social/semantic networking programs and processes (e.g., Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, chat rooms) to mediate their relationships with family and friends. In fact, there has been an enormous increase in the past five years in media use among young people: Five years ago, we reported that young people spent an average of nearly 6.5 (6.21) hours a day with media-and managed to pack more than 8.5 hours (8.33) worth of media content into that time by multitasking. At that point it seemed that young people's lives were filled to the bursting point with media. Today, however, those levels of use have been shattered. Over the last five years, young people have increased the time they spend consuming media by an hour and seventeen minutes daily, from 6.21 to 7.38-almost the amount of time most adults spend at work each day, except that young people use media seven days a week instead of five . . . Today they pack a total of 10 hours and 25 minutes worth of media content into those 7.5 hours. (Kaiser Foundation, 2010: 2) In addition to these technologically driven activities, young people also purchase the gadgets and machines necessary to engage in these activities. Young people use a significant portion of their wealth to buy the artifacts of technology, such as MP3 players, gaming consoles, cellphones, and computers. The principal consequence of this access is that young people annually listen to thousands of hours of music and watch an almost immeasurable amount of reality television programming, YouTube videos, and Hollywood movies. In addition to these leisure activities, young people also work in jobs that are both fast-paced and geared toward technological efficiency. The net result of this experience is that by the time a contemporary young person has reached the age of 15, her direct experience of life has been subordinated to the narratives of thousands of situational comedies, hundreds of films, thousands of websites and chat rooms, and innumerable advertisements, all offering ever more powerful enticements to consume. As Beder (2009) argues, the corporate capture of childhood and youth has come from multiple sources in business and marketing, and has tentacles that have firmly spread into homes, schools, and the head spaces of modern leisure hours. The most recent trends in the use of digital technology among North American young people support Beder's claim. In fact, young Canadians are now among the most wired in the world (Media Awareness Network, 2006: 8). The speed with which technology has entered North American youth cultures is astonishing, and has grown exponentially in recent years. In 2003, 55 per cent of all Canadian households had at least one family member who regularly used the Internet at home-up from 29 per cent in 1999. As of 2003, Internet use was highest in British Columbia, Ontario, and Alberta, where approximately 6 out of every 10 households were connected to the Internet (Canadian Council on Social Development, 2006). According to Ipsos Reid (2004) almost half of young people (aged 12 to 17) said they used the Internet every day or several times a week for research projects or homework, and 73 per cent said they used the Internet for email either every day or a few times a week. Almost half (48 per cent) used chat rooms daily, while another 29 per cent chatted several times a month. These young people felt that they could have 'real-time' and living conversations with several people at once via chat rooms. According to a study by the Media Awareness Network (2001), 60 per cent of Canadian youth (aged 9 to 17) have used chat rooms at some point. As age increased, so did the likelihood of accessing them. Of those who had used chat rooms, 85 per cent said they chatted unsupervised from their homes and 43 per cent said they had encountered someone on the Internet who had requested personal information about them (e.g., a photograph, a phone number, or an address); close to half (46 per cent) said that someone had made unwanted sexual comments to them while in a chat room. New Phase II data is now out from the Media Awareness Network to update its original 2001 study: One of the most interesting changes we discovered was in the way parents and children now see the Net. Parents' hopeful belief that a home computer would give their children a leg up in school seems long gone. The mothers and fathers we talked to in Edmonton, Toronto and Montreal in 2003 almost universally complained that their children are wasting their time online chatting and playing games. They also told us that the Net has become a point of contention in their households, drawing their kids away from their supervision and into a world that is closed to them. The Media Awareness Network (2005) goes on to provide profiles of the use of technology for different age groups of young people. Those who are in grades 10 and 11 were found to be using technology 'seamlessly' for a range of both social and academic aspects of their daily lives. Perhaps the most stunning discovery is that 84 per cent of these young people are using instant text-messaging each day for an average of 69 minutes.