Students Tap Mobile Tech. for Increased Media Use

Heavy Media Activity Linked to Poor Grades, Kaiser Study Finds

Young people are using new technologies to significantly increase access to television, the Internet, and music, spending more time with digital media than almost any other activity in their lives, but such heavy use could be having a negative impact on their school performance, a study released last week concludes.

Americans ages 8 to 18 devote an average of seven hours and 38 minutes a day to using media for recreational activities, or more than 53 hours a week. That’s an hour and 17 minutes more than in 2004, the last time the comprehensive study was done by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit research organization based in Menlo Park, Calif.

In addition, students are increasingly multitasking, using several different types of technology at the same time to access media. That means they actually pack in 10 hours and 45 minutes a day of media content into the more than seven hours,...