Teens Spend Outrages Amount of Time Online

Teens spend an outrages amount of time online
- By Emil Holt 09-02-2012
Teenagers in America spend more and more time on internet surfing and browsing. Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace are becoming more and more popular every second. Facebook is by far the biggest time consumer of all sites. In May 2011 Americans spent an astonishing 53 billion minutes on Facebook, which is more than 10 times as much as the runner-up site Blogger which was “only” viewed 72 million times in May 2011. Today 93% of all American teenagers are online, 75% own an iPod or another MP3 device. This really shows how dependent teenagers have become of their gadgets. 88% of the teenagers think that these devices help them in everyday life and 69% of parents agree. One of the parents who do not agree is Susan Maushart, she decided to digitally detox her children - and herself for a total of 6 months.
Mother of 3 Susan Maushart decided to cut off all electronic devices and internet use for an entire 6 months as she thought her children were using too much time online, on their cellphones and on their iPods, she only saw their necks she said. Susan dropped the bomb on Christmas morning. The children were chocked and grumpy at first, but after the first month or so they were starting to enjoy it more and more. The children’s friends even thought it was cool, they would come over to Susan’s house to play games such as Scrabble or play music and sing. Susan kept a journal and published a book called “The winter of our disconnect”. Many adults were outraged by the experiment at first but now see how well it actually worked. Susan says that she actually bribed her children into the detox, she said that if she got the book published they would get a part of the money, but in the end it wasn’t needed as the kids enjoyed themselves and didn’t need all the electronics.
Parents around the world are seeing this increasing amount of internet use negatively, many children are being addicted by gaming, and others are just wasting all their time on social networking sites instead of doing homework, working out or other more important things. Although parents agree that the internet makes life easier, most parent are also making restrictions to make sure their teenagers don’t abuse the internet. 30% of American parents believe that the media and the internet have no effect on their children. These parents will usually have little or no control over their teenagers, or the parents are simply teenagers themselves on the inside and use the social media sites as much as their children, making them think it is okay.
Most teenagers know that they spend too much time online and know that it takes time away from doing homework etc. but most teenagers these days simply do not care. The schools aren’t as strict as they have been, so the young people don’t mind if they haven’t completed all of their homework. Of course that doesn’t mean that no teenagers do homework, but many more young people stay up late at night watching television or browsing the web, causing them to be unprepared and tired for school the next day. Physical contact is avoided more and more and teenagers communicate mostly by phone or the internet. As one of Susan Mausharts children said in an interview “Most of our plans are minute to minute and are made on Facebook.” This makes it harder for teenagers to stay off Facebook, as they do not want to miss anything, so the youngsters will stay online most of the time.
American teenagers are on the internet or using electronic devices 8½ hours on average, which is more time spent on the internet than time spent sleeping. This seems to become a problem for children as they become tired.
At MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) teachers and professors are getting worried about their students engagement in school. They can see that the students aren’t fully concentrated on the teacher or the lesson. They sometimes check Facebook, read blogs or view Youtube videos. This is a problem as it takes more from the teachers side to obtain full attention, which means they have to do more work without getting paid more. The students at MIT themselves are under the impression that they can control it. That they can multitask, it is of their opinion that blocking sites such as Facebook or Twitter would only cause rage and would be of no help to the lectures.
All in all parents and teenagers share some views while teachers have a totally different view on social networking. Most young people are aware of the problem but do nothing, while most parents put up time restrictions or such for their teenage children. The opinion of the teachers is that social networking should not be allowed in schools.