Jim Liebelt's Youth Culture Watch

YouTube Scores 101 Online Videos Per Viewer in May

New data from comScore shows that 183 million U.S. Internet users watched online video during the month of May. YouTube.com achieved record levels of viewing activity with an all-time high of 14.6 billion videos viewed and surpassing the threshold of 100 videos per viewer for the first time.

U.S. Internet users watched nearly 34 billion videos in May, with Google Sites ranking as the top video property with 14.6 billion videos, representing 43.1% of all videos viewed online.

Source: Center for Media Research
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=131990#comments

Do As I Say, Not As I Text

Providing new insight into the complexities of contemporary parenting, the "LG Text Ed Survey," conducted by TRU Research and sponsored by LG Mobile Phones, found that parents engage in poor texting behaviors, consistently underestimate the misuse of texting by their teens, but believe that texting produces increased communication and better relationships between family members.

The LG Text Ed Survey is a national snapshot of texting behaviors among 13 to 17 year olds and parents of 13 to 17 year olds.

Key Survey Findings

Do as I say, not as I text: Data from the LG Text Ed survey exposed parents participating in the following mobile misuse behavior:
• 28 percent of parents admit to engaging in some form of "sexting" and 43 percent of teens admit to doing the same.
• Almost half of all parents and teens surveyed admit to texting and driving.

The parent-teen gap: Additionally, the LG Text Ed survey revealed that many parents are unaware of teen mobile phone misuse. Of those surveyed:
• 45 percent of teens admit to texting and driving. And only 4 percent of parents believe their teens ever text while driving.
• 41 percent of teens admit to sending, receiving, or forwarding a text that said something sexual, while only 11 percent of parents thought their teens had ever sexted.

Texting = closer families: The LG research also revealed an encouraging fact about life in the digital age. Results showed that the simple act of communicating over teens' preferred medium of communication, texting, facilitated a closer relationship between parent and child. The survey found:
• 90 percent of texting parents felt closer to their teen as a result of the medium.
• 42 percent of parents said that texting increased the frequency of communication between parent and teen.
• 68 percent of all texting parents agree that communicating via text makes them more comfortable when their teen is out.

Source: PRNewswire
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/do-as-i-say-not-as-i-text-98497159.html

Only 1 in 5 Teens Say They Have Meaningful Relationships with Adults

Only one in five 15-year-olds in the United States have the kind of meaningful relationships with adults beyond their family that help them succeed in life, according to a study released today by Best Buy and Search Institute. This gap interferes with their development, and suggests concrete, powerful ways that adults in schools, neighborhoods, youth organizations, and other settings can have a positive difference in young people's lives.

Adults play an important role in forming relationships with teens, listening to them and serving as positive role models -- and teens who have these relationships have a significant leg up when it comes to staying, or getting, on a path to success.

Source: Marketwatch
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/only-19-percent-of-teens-report-that-they-have-meaningful-relationships-with-adults-2010-07-15?reflink=MW_news_stmp

Canadian Study: 7 Hours Per Day of Screen Time for Teens

A new Canadian study shows some teens spend 7 hours a day in front of computer and television screens. These findings are similar to the research released earlier this year about U.S. teens.

For parents who fret about the amount of time their kids devote to electronic media, consider this: In Ontario, hundreds of thousands of teens spend nearly seven hours a day staring at a computer or TV screen.

The number surprises even researchers familiar with this growing trend and is likely to take a serious toll not only on adolescents' physical health, but on their emotional and mental well-being as well.

“That’s a lot of time spent in front of a screen being sedentary,” said Robert Mann, a senior scientist at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, whose study revealed the new screen-time data. “That’s almost a third of the day.”

Public health officials such as the Canadian Paediatric Society recommend no screen time for children under two years of age and a maximum of two hours for children older than two.

The new statistic – 9.7 per cent of kids in Grade 7 to 12, or about 327,000 students, spend at least seven hours a day in front of a TV or computer – was released Monday as part of CAMH’s annual Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey. (The drug data was released in November.) Dr. Mann, the study’s co-principal investigator, says he was surprised by the results of the screen-time question, the first time it was included in the survey.

The study also did not connect screen time and long-term effects on mental health and cognitive function. But Dr. Mann noted that many of the students who logged long hours in front of a screen expressed feelings of unhappiness and experienced loss of sleep.

Source: The Globe and Mail
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/study-teens-spending-seven-hours-a-day-in-front-of-tvs-computers/article1637749/

What's Hot? 7/9/10

Top 10 Increasing Web Searches on Bing - 7/9/10
   1. tour de france
   2. lindsay lohan
   3. eric johnson
   4. netherlands
   5. uruguay
   6. versus
   7. alicia keys falls
   8. youtube video clips
   9. bachelorette 2010
  10. pretty little liars
Source: Bing

Top 10 U.S. Websites - 7/9/10
   1. Google
   2. Facebook
   3. Yahoo!
   4. YouTube
   5. Amazon
   6. Wikipedia
   7. Craigslist
   8. eBay
   9. Twitter
  10. Windows Live
Source: Alexa

iTunes Top 10 Downloaded Songs - 7/9/10
   1. Love the Way You Lie (feat. Rihanna) - Eminem
   2. California Gurls (feat. Snoop Dogg) - Katy Perry
   3. Dynamite - Taio Cruz
   4. I Like It (feat. Pitbull) - Enrique Iglesias
   5. Cooler Than Me - Mike Posner
   6. Ridin' Solo - Jason Derulo
   7. Airplanes (feat. Hayley Williams) - B.o.B
   8. Billionaire (feat. Bruno Mars) - Travie McCoy
   9. Not Afraid - Eminem
  10. OMG (feat. will.i.am) - Usher
Source: Apple iTunes

Top 10 TV Shows in Prime Time - Week Ending 7/4/10
   1. America's Got Talent - Wed
   2. NCIS
   3. The Bachelorette
   4. America's Got Talent - Tue
   5. Two and a Half Men
   6. NCIS: Los Angeles
   7. The Big Bang Theory
   8. The Mentalist
   9. CSI: Miami
  10. Wipeout - Thurs
Source: Nielsen Co

Top 5 Most Viewed Videos on YouTube - Week Ending 7/9/10
   1. 100 Greatest Movie Insults of All Time
   2. Old Spice - Questions
   3. Worst. Episode. Evar.
   4. Eminem Feat. Rihanna - Love the Way You Lie
   5. School Dance Disaster
Source: YouTube

Top 5 Movies - Week Ending 7/1/10
   1. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
   2. Toy Story 3
   3. Grown Ups
   4. Knight & Day
   5. Karate Kid
Source: Box Office Mojo

Fewer Low-Income Students Going to College

Fewer low- and moderate-income high school graduates are attending college in America, and fewer are graduating.

Enrollment in four-year colleges was 40% in 2004 for low-income students, down from 54% in 1992, and 53% in 2004 for moderate-income students, down from 59% over the same period, according to  a report recently submitted to Congress by the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance.

If that trend has continued, low- and moderate-income students who don’t move on to college face an even darker outlook. The unemployment rate for 16- to 19-year olds averaged 17% in 2004, the jobless rate for people over age 25 with just a high school diploma averaged 5% the same year. So far this year, those figures have jumped to 25.8% and 10.6%, respectively.

College expenses and financial aid have become increasingly larger considerations for parents and students, driving more qualified students away from enrolling in four-year colleges.

Persistence through four-year colleges dropped to 75% in students entering in 2003 for low-income students, down from 78% in students entering in 1995, while persistence for students from moderate-income families remained at 81%. Persistence rates for low- and moderate-income students in two-year colleges, however, fell 10 percentage points to 49% over the same period.

Source: Wall Street Journal
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2010/07/07/fewer-low-income-students-going-to-college/

American Dream Is Elusive for New Generation

An interesting read the other day in the New York Times, "American Dream is Elusive for New Generation"... The gist of the article is that finding a job or career of choice is difficult for recently college graduated Millennials - which puts a damper on their pursuit of the American Dream.

The article chronicles the experience of a 24-year-old recent college graduate, who turned down a job with a $40K annual salary because, the article notes, "Rather than waste early years in dead-end work, he reasoned, he would hold out for a corporate position that would draw on his college training and put him, as he sees it, on the bottom rungs of a career ladder."

The article leaves me with lingering questions: Is pursuit of the American Dream too small as the driving force of one's life purpose? Is this young man's journey representative of his generation or does it just reflect one segment of Millennials (and perhaps a minority segment, at that)? Have his parents and grandparents behaviors equipped him with a skewed sense of entitlement (his parents are paying $2,000 a month for his apartment rent, and his grandparents paid for his college)? Are the notions of personal responsibility and character building no longer meaningful today?

I'm not sure there are clear-cut answers, but the article does provide some food for thought...

After breakfast, his parents left for their jobs, and Scott Nicholson, alone in the house in this comfortable suburb west of Boston, went to his laptop in the living room. He had placed it on a small table that his mother had used for a vase of flowers until her unemployed son found himself reluctantly stuck at home.

The daily routine seldom varied. Mr. Nicholson, 24, a graduate of Colgate University, winner of a dean’s award for academic excellence, spent his mornings searching corporate Web sites for suitable job openings. When he found one, he mailed off a résumé and cover letter — four or five a week, week after week.

Over the last five months, only one job materialized. After several interviews, the Hanover Insurance Group in nearby Worcester offered to hire him as an associate claims adjuster, at $40,000 a year. But even before the formal offer, Mr. Nicholson had decided not to take the job.

Rather than waste early years in dead-end work, he reasoned, he would hold out for a corporate position that would draw on his college training and put him, as he sees it, on the bottom rungs of a career ladder.

“The conversation I’m going to have with my parents now that I’ve turned down this job is more of a concern to me than turning down the job,” he said.

Source: New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/business/economy/07generation.html

Report: College Back-to-School Spending Up 13%

This year, college students will shell out approximately $306 billion in back-to-school spending, per a new report by Alloy Media + Marketing.

Come this fall, 16 million college students—a 6 percent increase—will hit the classrooms. Their combined 2010 spending power is up 13 percent, compared to last year. The spike is attributed to “an increase in per capita spending per student,” said Tammy Nelson, marketing and research vp at Alloy.

It's not just spending on mandatory, back-to-school purchases (books, room, board and tuition) that are going up. Alloy’s survey found that males and females ages 18 to 34 are also spending 10 percent more on discretionary items like gaming, technology and beauty products. Overall, college students are spending three percent more per month on discretionary purchases compared to last year, or $361 per person.  Alloy expects discretionary spending to hit $69 billion this year, a stark contrast to when retailers focused on price and value during last year’s back-to-school season.

At a time when the general population is still cutting back, much of the spending increase among college students is due to the fact that they hold a generally optimistic view of the nation’s economic recovery.

Source: Brandweek
http://www.brandweek.com/bw/content_display/news-and-features/direct/e3ifb9f290da772a7b45d6fb416e579e877

Study: Video Games May Affect Attention Span

Parents who believe that playing video games is less harmful to their kids' attention spans than watching TV may want to reconsider -- and unplug the Xbox. Video games can sap a child's attention just as much as the tube, a new study suggests.

Elementary school children who play video games more than two hours a day are 67 percent more likely than their peers who play less to have greater-than-average attention problems, according to the study, which appears in the journal Pediatrics.

Playing video games and watching TV appear to have roughly the same link to attention problems, even though video games are considered a less passive activity, the researchers say.

"Video games aren't less likely than television to be related to attention problems," says the lead author of the study, Edward Swing, a doctoral candidate in the department of psychology at Iowa State University, in Ames. "They were at least as strong as television at predicting attention problems."

The study also suggests that young kids aren't the only ones whose attention spans may be affected by video games.

In addition to surveying the elementary school kids, the researchers asked 210 college students about their TV and video-game use and how they felt it affected their attention. The students who logged more than two hours of TV and video games a day were about twice as likely to have attention problems, the researchers found.

Source: CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/07/05/games.attention/?hpt=C2

Later School Start Times May Foster Better Students

A new study mirrors previous research results in finding that starting school later in the morning allows high school students to get more sleep and increases alertness in class...

High school students at a private school in Rhode Island who started school a half-hour later in the morning were in better moods, more alert, less depressed and more likely to actually attend class than before the time change, a new study shows.

In fact, the experiment was so successful that the school has now permanently shifted its start time from 8 a.m. to 8:30 a.m.

"At the end of the experimental period, there was not a single faculty member, student or administrator who wanted to go back to the old start time," said Dr. Judith Owens, lead author of a paper appearing in the July issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

The study bolsters the evidence that teens have special sleep needs.

"Sleep medicine specialists have long known that delaying high school start times helps teenagers sleep better," said Dr. Heidi V. Connolly, chief of the division of pediatric sleep medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York. "Teenagers are biologically programmed to prefer a later bedtime and a later wake-up time so it is not surprising that they struggle with early school start times."

After the time change, students went to bed an average of 18 minutes later at night and slept an average of 45 minutes longer. The proportion of students getting at least eight hours of sleep a night jumped from 16.4 percent to 54.7 percent, while those getting less than seven hours a night decreased by almost 80 percent.

Source: BusinessWeek
http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/content/healthday/640822.html