Media Reports Of Media's Death Greatly Exaggerated

If doomsday predictions are right and all media is dying, we know one group that can't be held responsible for its demise: teenagers. According to ailing news outlet the Times, the average teen spends "every waking moment" consuming electronic media. That's a whopping 11 hours a day!

The findings shocked the Kaiser Family Foundation study's authors, who had concluded after a similar poll in 2005 that the portion of time spent texting, sexting, video gaming and, presumably, slobbering over internet porn could not get any larger.

Dr. Michael Rich, a pediatrician, is resigned to the current teenage reality, saying that the new omnipresent media world is:

"The air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat.”

Well, presumably they're eating something else, since those other despairing media reports  constantly remind us of how fat the youth of America is.

The good news for old media nerds is that the amount of time spent on print media (though presumably not in its original print form) has held relatively steady, dropping from 43 minutes in 1999 to 38 minutes last year. Kids are listening to a hell of a lot more music, which isn't a bad thing if we assume the tunes are any good. (So yeah, that's probably a bad thing.) Teens spend an average hour and a half each day texting, which is pretty mind-boggling. Also, 66% of them own cellphones, up from 39% just five years ago.

Way to make me feel old. If I remember correctly, I was rocking a Motorola Two-Way pager back in '04.