Ebook readers did seem to briefly rescue books: the number who said they read two or more books for pleasure in the last year bounced back in the late 2000s—but then it sank again as iGen (and smartphones) entered the scene in the 2010s. By 2015, one out of three high school seniors admitted they had not read any books for pleasure in the past year, three times as many as in 1976. Even college students entering four-year universities, the young people presumably most likely to read books, are reading less (see Figure 2.4).
Figure 2.4. Percentage of 12th graders who read books and magazines, (Monitoring the Future), and entering college students (American Freshman Survey, 1976–2015).
This huge decline flatly contradicts a 2014 Pew Research Center study cheered by many in publishing, which found that 16- to 29-year-olds were more likely to read books than older people. Why the difference? The Pew study included books read for school assignments, which younger people are of course more likely to have. Thus it committed the classic mistake of a one-time study: confusing age and generation. In the data here, where everyone is the same age, iGen teens are much less likely to read books than their Millennial, GenX, and Boomer predecessors.
Why? Maybe because books just aren’t fast enough. For a generation raised to click on the next link or scroll to the next page within seconds, books just don’t hold their attention. Twelve-year-old Harper, whom we met earlier, makes all A’s in school but says, “I’m not a really big reading person. It’s hard for me to read the same book for such a long time. I just can’t sit still and be superquiet. We have to read for twenty minutes a day, and if a book takes a while to get interesting, it’s really hard for me to read.”
Books are not the only print media in decline for iGen. The 8th- and 10th-grade surveys ask about reading magazines and newspapers, and the declines are steady, large, and breathtaking (see Figure 2.5). Newspaper readership plummeted from nearly 70% in the early 1990s to only 10% in 2015 (and this is reading a newspaper once a week or more, a fairly low bar). Magazine readership fared little better.
Figure 2.5. Percentage of 8th and 10th graders who read magazines and newspapers once a week or more. Monitoring the Future, 1991–2015.
Some of you might be thinking, yeah, no kidding. However, this is a surprising result according to many prominent theories of media use. Some researchers have argued that new technology doesn’t replace older forms of media but instead supplements them. People who are interested in a topic often seek it out in many forms of media, they point out. In addition, technology makes reading books and magazines easier, since they can be delivered instantly to iPads and Kindles. But those factors were not enough to stem the tide of the decline of print. (As one librarian in a cartoon puts it as she hands a book to a teen, “Just think of it as a long text message.”)
Are teens reading for pleasure less because they have more homework and more extracurricular activities? No—as we saw in chapter 1, teens are spending about the same or less time on these activities than in previous decades. (And recall that they also spend much less time working for pay.) 8th graders are the most clear-cut example: they spent two hours less on homework a week than they did in the early 1990s, but they are also much less likely to read magazines and newspapers. When NPR asked Washington, DC, 9th grader Jamahri Sydnor if she ever reads, she said, “I don’t really read for pleasure . . . . I watch Netflix shows, or Hulu shows, mostly TV. That’s it,” she said. Her friend Chiamaka Anosike said, “I don’t read for pleasure either, unless it’s for a school assignment. I’m usually on my phone or watching TV, too.”
Of the two hundred San Diego State freshmen and sophomores I surveyed in 2015, most said they never read newspapers, and their magazine reading was restricted to celebrity gossip or fashion magazines. One was very specific: “I read magazines like Cosmopolitan when I’m flying on an airplane.” A typical response mentioned required assignments for classes: “[I read] only if a school assignment requires it because I’d rather not spend my free time reading extensively.”
Although many said they enjoyed reading books, those who did not were steadfast in their dislike. “I do not enjoy books,” wrote one. “They put me to sleep and they are boring.” Another noted, “I do not have the patience to read books that I do not have to read.” One stated flatly, “I never read any books.”
To paraphrase the cult classic movie The Princess Bride, print is not dead—it’s just mostly dead. Or perhaps on life support. With smartphones taking up so much of teens’ time, there is little left for other leisure pursuits. As one teen put it in a Chronicle of Higher Education interview, “My dad is still into the whole book thing. He has not realized that the Internet kind of took the place of that.”
Perhaps this move away from print is innocuous, especially if teens are still keeping up their academic skills. But they are not: SAT scores have slid since the mid-2000s, especially in writing (a 13-point decline since 2006) and critical reading (a 13-point decline since 2005; see Figure 2.6). Unfortunately, iGen’ers’ academic skills lag behind their Millennial predecessors’ by significant margins.
Figure 2.6. National average SAT scores, 1972–2016. College Board.
Declines in SAT scores are often attributed to more students choosing to go to college: if more high school students take the test, the population taking the test will be a less academically talented group over time. That’s probably why SAT scores declined so much between the 1970s and the 1990s, when college enrollment soared. However, that’s not the case for the shift from Millennials to iGen in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when college enrollment stayed fairly steady. It’s interesting that the change in critical reading scores follows the same pattern as that of those reading two or more books for pleasure each year, which bumped up in the mid-2000s and then fell again.
Apparently, texting and posting to social media instead of reading books, magazines, and newspapers are not a boon for reading comprehension or academic writing. That might partially be due to the short attention span that new media seem to encourage. One study installed a program on college students’ laptops that took a screenshot every five seconds. The researchers found that students switched between tasks every nineteen seconds on average. More than 75% of the students’ computer windows were open less than one minute. This is a very different experience from sitting and reading a book for hours.
The decline in reading creates some distinct challenges for a wide swath of concerned elders, including parents, educators, and publishing companies. For example, how are students who rarely read books going to digest an eight-hundred-page college textbook? Most faculty report that their students simply don’t read the textbook, even if it’s required. Many publishers are moving toward more interactive ebooks to try to keep students engaged. As a university faculty member and the author or coauthor of three college textbooks, I think this needs to go even further. iGen’ers need textbooks that include interactive activities such as video sharing and questionnaires, but they also need books that are shorter in length and more conversational in their writing style. They are coming to college with much less experience reading, so we have to meet them where they are, while still teaching them what they need to know. That might mean leaving behind some detail, but that’s better than students’ not cracking the book at all.
Regular books and magazines have already taken some of these steps, such as making their articles shorter and lowering their reading level. They may also eventually incorporate some of the same features as textbooks, imbedding quizzes and polls to keep readers interested or including images and videos just as web pages do. Perhaps then iGen—and the rest of us—will return to reading.
Funny Cats Big Compilation 2017!
“They have, like, a dog climbing a baby gate, and it, like, unhinges the baby gate, and you see the gate swing back with the dog on it, and you see the dog fall out of the frame—I just think it’s really funny,” says Chloe, the 18-year-old high school senior from Ohio we met in chapter 1. She and he
r friends watch video clips on Twitter, Buzzfeed, Facebook, and YouTube, with animal videos their usual faves. There’s another one she likes on YouTube, she says: “The dog, like, got into something—have you ever seen when a dog is in trouble and they know they did something and they’ll kind of, like, try to smile? The dog was, like, smiling, and [the video] had this weird, sympathetic music. I was in love with that video for two days in January—I couldn’t, like, not watch it every five minutes.”
These types of short video clips are very popular and have been since YouTube debuted in 2006. Although none of the over-time surveys specifically tracks the amount of time teens spend watching them, a good chunk of teens’ online time is likely spent watching videos, either through social media or via sites such as YouTube. iGen’ers find videos through Twitter as well—20-year-old Darnell says he follows several people on Twitter who post nothing but dog photos, so, he says, “sometimes I look at puppies all day.” The most popular videos seem to feature “fails,” animals, or animal fails. Laughing babies, children drugged at the dentist, music videos, and dancing chickens have also been popular. We have the most complete and instant access to information in all of history, and we’re using it to watch funny cat videos.
Online videos have replaced some TV time for teens, although the declines in TV watching are not as steep as those in reading. Teens watched about an hour a day less TV in 2015 than in the early 1990s (see Figure 2.7). Even with new TV options such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, funny cats are winning.
Figure 2.7. Hours 8th, 10th, and 12th graders spent watching TV on weekdays. Monitoring the Future, 1976–2015.
And when iGen’ers do watch TV, it’s more likely to be on demand or streaming. “I don’t even know how to turn on our TV at home and consume all of my ‘television’ content on my laptop,” wrote 17-year-old Grace Masback in the Huffington Post.
* * *
iGen teens also don’t go out to see movies as often. Going to the movies stayed fairly steady through the video rental era of the 1980s and 1990s and remained robust until the mid-2000s, when it started to slide (see Figure 2.8). So at least among teens, Blockbuster Video (which opened in 1985) didn’t kill going to the movies, nor did Netflix’s mail service (which debuted in 1997). But streaming video and other online activities did (and of course they also killed Blockbuster).
Figure 2.8. Percentage of 8th, 10th, and 12th graders who go out to the movies once a month or more. Monitoring the Future, 1976–2015.
When I asked my students if they preferred to see a movie in the theater or at home, most answered at home, citing convenience, cost, and being able to stay in their pajamas. Many iGen’ers prefer to personalize their movie experience in ways that can’t be done at the theater. “I do not quite understand people who say that they enjoy paying to go watch a movie at the movie theater,” wrote Carmen, 22. “With today’s technology, you can stream the movie online, wear your most bum-like outfit (or don’t wear pants at all), and eat snacks straight from your fridge and pantry. You can also pause, rewind and fast-forward the movie as you please, something that does not happen in a movie theatre. Ever.”
So: iGen is spending much more time online and texting and much less time with more traditional media such as magazines, books, and TV. iGen’ers are spending so much time on their smartphones that they just aren’t interested in or available to read magazines, go to movies, or watch TV (unless it’s on their phones). Although TV presaged the screen revolution, the Internet has hastened the demise of print. The printing press was invented in 1440, so for more than five hundred years words printed on paper were the standard way to convey information. We are living, right now, in the time when that is changing.
iGen’s future—and all of ours—will be shaped by this revolution. It could turn out well, with web pages supplemented by long passages of text in the form of ebooks, with all of the information we’ll ever need contained in our laptops and on the Internet. No more recycling the newspaper, no more packing boxes of books when you move. Or it could turn out badly, with iGen and the next generations never learning the patience necessary to delve deeply into a topic and the US economy falling behind as a result.
There’s another, more immediate question: If teens are spending more time communicating with their friends online, how much are they seeing their friends in person? Has electronic interaction replaced face-to-face interaction? Let’s find out.
Chapter 3
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In Person No More: I’m with You, but Only Virtually
Kevin and I sit down at two desks just outside his third period class at a high school in northern San Diego. He is 17 years old and Asian American, with spiky black hair, fashionable glasses, and a wan smile. He is the oldest of three children, with his parents expecting another child in a few months. Until recently, the family lived in an apartment, where the noise from his younger siblings was deafening. Perhaps as a result, he is unusually empathetic for a teenage boy. “Been doing this all day?” he asks as I take a drink of water before beginning our interview.
Kevin is not the most organized student: he initially neglects to have his dad sign the back of the permission slip, and when I talk to the class later, he forgets his question by the time I call on him. But when I ask him what makes his generation different, he doesn’t hesitate: “I feel like we don’t party as much. People stay in more often. My generation lost interest in socializing in person—they don’t have physical get-togethers, they just text together, and they can just stay at home.”
Kevin is onto something. For example, iGen teens spend less time at parties than any previous generation (see Figure 3.1). The trends are similar for college students, who are asked how many hours a week they spent at parties during their senior year in high school. In 2016, they said two hours a week—only a third of the time GenX students spent at parties in 1987. The decline in partying is not due to iGen’ers’ studying more; as we saw in chapter 1, homework time is the same or lower. The trend is also not due to immigration or changes in ethnic composition; the decline is nearly identical among white teens.
Figure 3.1. Percentage of 8th, 10th, and 12th graders who attend parties once a month or more. Monitoring the Future, 1976–2015.
Priya, the high school freshman we met in chapter 1, says she hasn’t been to any parties and doesn’t want to. “What you read in books is, like, oh my God, high school has all these football games and parties, and when you come there, eh, no one really does it. No one is really that interested—including me.” In the SDSU freshman survey, several mentioned that the high school parties they had gone to had been adult-run affairs, not exactly the ragers memorialized in the 1980s John Hughes movies, where kids got drunk and wrecked their parents’ houses. “The only parties I went to in high school were birthday parties, and they were almost always supervised or included an adult somewhere,” noted Nick, 18.
Why are parties less popular? Kevin has an explanation for that: “People party because they’re bored—they want something to do. Now we have Netflix—you can watch series nonstop. There’s so many things to do on the Web.” He might be right—with so much entertainment at home, why party? Teens also have other ways to connect and communicate, including the social media websites they spend so much time on. The party is constant, and it’s on Snapchat.
Just Hangin’
Maybe parties aren’t for this cautious, career-focused generation. Especially with the declining popularity of alcohol, perhaps iGen’ers are eschewing parties in favor of just hanging out with their friends.
Except they’re not. The number of teens who get together with their friends every day has been cut in half in just fifteen years, with especially steep declines recently (see Figure 3.2).
Figure 3.2. Percentage of 8th, 10th, and 12th graders who get together with friends every day or nearly every day. Monitoring the Future, 1976–2015.
This might be the most definitive evidence that iGen’ers spend less time interacting with th
eir peers face-to-face than any previous generation—it’s not just parties or craziness but merely getting together with friends, spending time hanging out. That’s something nearly everyone does: nerds and jocks, introverted teens and extroverted ones, poor kids and rich kids, C students and A students, stoners and clean-cut kids. It doesn’t have to involve spending money or going someplace cool—it’s just being with your friends. And teens are doing it much less.
The college student survey allows a more precise look at in-person social interaction, as it asks students how many hours a week they spend on those activities. College students in 2016 (vs. the late 1980s) spent four fewer hours a week socializing with their friends and three fewer hours a week partying—so seven hours a week less on in-person social interaction. That means iGen’ers were seeing their friends in person an hour less a day than GenX’ers and early Millennials did. An hour a day less spent with friends is an hour a day less spent building social skills, negotiating relationships, and navigating emotions. Some parents might see it as an hour a day saved for more productive activities, but, as we saw in the previous two chapters, the time has not been replaced with homework; it’s been replaced with screen time.
Teens also go out with their friends less. Chapter 1 showed the steep decline in the number of times a week teens go out without their parents. The flip side of this is those who don’t go out with their friends in a typical week—the ones who are at home on Friday and Saturday night on a regular basis. That used to be a very small percentage of 12th graders—less than 8%—but by 2015 nearly one out of five high school seniors did not go out with their friends during a typical week. The trend is even larger for 8th and 10th graders: in the 1990s, only one out of five rarely went out, but by 2015 that increased to one out of three.
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