1: Digital Migration

Young People’s Historic Move to the Online World

The enduring American love affairs with the automobile and the television set are now being transformed into a giddy passion for the personal computer. . . . Above all, it is the end result of a technological revolution that . . . is now, quite literally, hitting home. Americans . . . expect that in the fairly near future, home computers will be as commonplace as television sets or dishwashers.

—from the 1982 “Man of the Year” issue of Time, which selected a machine: the computer

In the three decades following the end of World War II, households in America were relatively simple places in terms of communication technology. Most American households had a radio, a record player, and a phone line. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, one element was definite about communication technology in the majority of American homes: television was king.

In 1950, 10 percent of American households had a television set. Ten years later virtually every American home had at least one television, making the technology one of the fastest and most widely adopted technological innovations in modern American life. Thirty years after it was first adopted, television was still the marquee technology in American homes. It was our primary source of entertainment and information. In essence, it was our window to the world.

Throughout the 1980s Americans began to upgrade the technological capabilities of their homes at an astonishing rate. Between 1980 and 1990 multitelevision set households in America increased from 50 percent to 65 percent. During that same period cable television grew from 20 to 56 percent and the average number of channels per household went from nineteen in 1985 to about forty in 1993. In 1980 few American homes contained a video-cassette recorder, but by 1990, 66 percent of American homes had added one. Introduced in 1983, CDs went on to all but extinguish the LP album format by the close of the decade. Video-game consoles grew steadily throughout the decade and were soon a staple in many households with children and young males. During this time, communication technologies in the home not only became more abundant, they also became more individualized. For the first time in American history many school-age children gained access to their own television, phone line, gaming console, and music media, turning their bedrooms and playrooms into an oasis of media, entertainment, and private leisure.

Since the 1990s American homes have been in a perpetual state of technology upgrade, adding, among other things, satellite dishes, fax machines, high-powered gaming equipment, personal computers, the Internet, DVD players, digital cameras, MP3 players, and digital video recorders. Today, a steadily growing number of Americans live in technology-rich households, what communication scholar Jorge Schement calls the “wired castle.” At the heart of the wired castle is the networked personal computer or, more precisely, the Internet.

In a rising number of homes the computer is becoming the focal point for both leisure and work-related activities, making it more versatile and, in many respects, more integral to daily household life than television. Initially, computers tended to be in work-related spaces such as home offices or in general-use areas like family rooms. The diffusion of wireless, however, turns every room—the kitchen, bedroom, living room—into a home-computing space.

The rise and influence of the personal computer is nothing short of phenomenal. Not that long ago, home computers did not exist. In 1985, when the Current Population Survey, a division of the U.S. Census Bureau, began measuring computer adoption rates, only 8 percent of American homes possessed them and the Internet was a technological experiment confined to the military and universities. By comparison, 98 percent of American homes had a television in 1985; more than half, 57 percent, had multiple sets. Gradually, as the cost of computers fell and interest in them rose, more people began adopting the technology. Nearly one quarter, or 24 percent, of American homes had a computer by 1994. It was around that time that the adoption of home computers began to tip, achieving a more robust pace that reached 42 percent of American homes by 1998. In 2003, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, “70 million American households, or 62%, had one or more computers.”

The diffusion of the Internet in American homes was considerably more rapid than the computer. The Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey began probing Americans about home Internet use in 1997. That year 18 percent of households in America reported using the Internet. At the start of the millennium, in the year 2000, four in ten households, or 40 percent, were connected to the Internet. By the close of 2001 more than 50 percent of American homes were accessing the Web. Sixty-two million households, or 55 percent, had Internet access by 2003. That was more than triple the proportion of Internet households in 1997. Nearly all households with a computer in 2003, 88 percent, had access to the Internet. Indeed, by the late 1990s the Internet was the primary motivation for purchasing a computer, as the two, in effect, became synonymous. Our lives, needless to say, have never been the same.

The generation of young people we met came of age in technology-rich households. In fact, they were the first generation of American teens to grow up with computers and the Internet literally at their fingertips. It was their presence in the household, more than any other factor, that correlated most consistently with the presence of computers in the home. In 2003, 76 percent of homes with school-age children, six to seventeen years old had a computer compared to 57 percent of homes without kids. Also, homes with school-age children were more likely than homes without them to be connected to the Internet, 67 and 57 percent, respectively.

Not surprisingly, many of the young people we talk to share stories of how the Internet has become a routine part of their everyday lives, shaping how they learn, live, play, and communicate with their peers. Many of them were introduced to computers at an early age, around nine years old. Many of their earliest memories involve computer games, the gateway experience to computers for most children. But not long after that, many of the young people we met were introduced to the Internet. As twenty-one-year-old Jonathan told me during an interview, “I can’t imagine living without computers because I’ve never really known a world without them.” Like many of his peers, Jonathan has also never known a world without an Internet that offers unprecedented access to information, entertainment content, and, most important, his close circle of friends.

The initial attraction to the online world for many young Internet users was e-mail. Twenty-year-old Allison recalls e-mailing her friends when she was ten. “At the time, “Allison said, “e-mail was the cool thing to do and it was new and a lot of fun too.” Allison laughed at herself now: “I would call my two closest friends and ask them to go online and respond to my e-mail.” Early in the Internet’s history, researchers often considered e-mail the “killer app” because of its heavy use. Young people’s new media behaviors turned a pivotal corner in 1997. That was the year AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) was introduced and became an immediate hit with teenagers.

When we asked young people to describe their first true adventures online, they easily shared vivid memories of IM and the time they spent communicating with their friends on the service. As young teens they rushed home from school to use IM. For decades, when American youth arrived home from school, they turned on their television screens. But the enthusiastic embrace of IM reversed, almost overnight, a four-decade-old habit of daily life in America. IM was a way to extend the time teens spent with their friends. The rise of the instant messaging generation was a harbinger of things to come, namely, the Internet as an emphatically social and communal space. It would take a while before the larger public began to realize what was happening, but young people were making their way to the digital world.

For the first generation of online youth, IM was one of their first truly independent experiences with the Internet—that is, time spent online alone rather than under the direct supervision of an adult authority figure like parents and teachers. It was around this point in their lives that they began going online, not because someone thought it was a good educational or novel activity but rather because they wanted to. Research suggests that the early teens, ages thirteen to fourteen, represent a digital tipping point. A 2005 Pew Internet & American Life Project report writes, “Starting junior high seems to be the moment when most teens who were not previously online get connected.” In 2005 about 60 percent of the sixth graders Pew surveyed used the Web compared to 82 percent of seventh graders. Among twelfth graders, 94 percent were using the Internet. Online services like AIM were tailor-made for teenagers transitioning toward their own peer networks and greater independence from adults. At a time in their life when the world as well as their own bodies and behaviors were undergoing profound changes, adolescents were offered a chance to assert a modicum of control over their lives with IM. Later, with the rise of social-network sites like Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook, they asserted even more control over their bodies by producing and performing elaborate online identities.

Twenty-year-old Victoria believes that IM was thrilling and liberating at the same time. “IM was like the best of both worlds,” she recalled. “I could do my homework, chat with my friends, and surf the Internet at the same time without getting into any trouble.” IM was also a great way to get the dish on all of the latest drama in school. In Victoria’s words, it became “kind of addictive.” In fact, her parents, like most other adults, had no idea how much Victoria used IM. Young people’s migration to digital left an indelible mark on family life. Many parents found themselves confronting new challenges regarding the impact of computers in their children’s lives. A New York Times article on the phenomenal role of IM in young people’s lives maintains that the application turned many teens into “the overconnecteds,” that is, a generation of youth that became obsessed with the state of almost constant connection to their friends and social networks. Before long, Victoria, like many other teens, found herself awake and online as late as one and two o’clock in the morning on school nights. After a number of bleary-eyed mornings and suspicion that Victoria was doing more than homework on her computer, her parents established stricter rules that limited her time online.

Despite all of this, the young people who grew up in technology-rich homes were no different than the generations of youth who preceded them. Like most teens since post–World War II America, the so-called “digital natives” eagerly embraced opportunities to break away from their parents and establish their own cultural milieus, independence, and identities. It just so happened that for this and successive generations, digital technologies allowed them to branch out in some hyper-efficient and extraordinarily creative ways. The use of e-mail and IM in the 1990s established one fact about young people’s online behavior that remains true today: staying connected to peers is paramount. According to one group of researchers, “IM satisfies two major needs in adolescent identity formation—maintaining individual friendships and belonging to peer groups.” Young people were drawn to online platforms that facilitate opportunities to develop extremely strong, persistent, and real-time ties to their peers while also interacting with a wide range of cultural content such as pictures, music, and video.

From the very beginning of home-computer adoption, school-age children embraced the technology like no other segment in America. In fact, if you go back and look at the first academic studies of home-computer life, one theme stands out: young people enthusiastically embraced the technology. As computers began entering more and more homes in the late 1980s, many adults shied away from the technology. Children and young teens, on the other hand, gravitated to home computers. They learned, played, and, most of all, experimented with the technology. In the beginning it was mostly boys, but soon thereafter girls developed great interests in computers too.

In 1995 Robert Kraut, a Carnegie Mellon University professor, and his colleagues launched the HomeNet field trial to learn more about home Internet use. One of their initial experiments involved supplying forty-eight families in Pittsburgh with a computer and Internet service. The sample cut across a diverse spectrum of America. Fifty-seven percent of the participants were female. Roughly 25 percent had an annual family income under $35,000. A fifth of the sample, 20 percent, had never used computers before. And 24 percent were from nonwhite households. The Carnegie Mellon team investigated a variety of things, including where the computer was located as well as who used the computer and for what purposes and for how long. At the time of the HomeNet project, roughly 37 percent of American households had computers.

During the first four weeks of the Carnegie Mellon study, teen-age males and females were logging in about eight and six hours a week online, respectively. Adult females came in at around one hour a week, whereas adult males spent less than an hour online. Teenagers, the researchers discovered, were the family gateway to the Web. In one of the first attempts to report on their findings, the Carnegie Mellon group wrote, “Teenagers’ enthusiasm motivated other family members to use the Internet, and their skill helped them overcome barriers.” Of all the variables that the researchers examined—including, for example, race and ethnicity, gender, education, household income, and social extroversion—none was a more powerful predictor of computer use than age. Kraut and his colleagues reported that parents had to impose time limits on their children’s computer use. When it came to personal computer use in the home, young people were true early adopters. The question, of course, is why?

It turns out that teens were especially attracted to the applications that allowed them to connect with their peers from school. No matter if it was e-mail, Internet Relay Chat, or multiuser dungeons (MUDs), teens’ use of the Web was principally social. Though the metaphor of the “information superhighway” dominated early public discourse about the Internet, teens realized early on the value of the Web as a social and communal tool. As I discuss in subsequent chapters, this is a resonant and consistent theme.

In the migration to the digital world the power dynamics between adults and young people were often flipped. Indeed, it is fairly common for adults to learn some of the wonders of the Internet from the innovations of young people. In one of the first research papers produced by the HomeNet Project, researchers wrote that teenagers “became the technical support gurus of the family, and would be consulted by their parents and younger siblings about technical problems and goals.” Many businesses are mixing IM into their culture to communicate more efficiently and effectively. And, after seeing how young people built vibrant online social networks, many adults joined platforms like MySpace and Facebook to rekindle long-lost friendships and LinkedIn to broaden and cultivate their professional networks. Teens, many researchers discovered, led the transition to digital.

Between 2005 and 2006 the adoption of broadband took off just as many of the older teens and young twenty-somethings that we talked to hit the adolescent years. According to the Pew, “The availability of a broadband connection is the largest single factor that explains the intensity of an American’s Internet use.” As recently as 2004, most Internet homes in America were not broadband. But by 2006 a considerably wider cross-section of Americans was moving to the broadband world. Between March 2005 and March 2006, broadband adoption grew 6 percent in households with annual incomes between $40,000 and $50,000. During that same period, broadband adoption grew 121 percent for African Americans and 46 percent for English-speaking Latinos, turning what Pew once called the “broadband elite” into a steadily evolving and increasingly diverse “broadband public.”

The 25 million Americans who picked up broadband between March 2005 and March 2006 were more than the entire broadband population by the end of 2002. But the most revealing aspects of broadband went far beyond growth rates, adoption curves, and demographics. The real story is what Americans, especially younger ones, did with the faster connection to the Internet.

Broadband quite simply changed American lives by changing what Americans did at home. Starting around the late 1950s, leisure time in the home was the principal, if not exclusive, domain of television. Discussing television’s most fundamental impact, Robert Putnam writes, “Nothing else in the twentieth century so rapidly and profoundly affected our leisure.” Television indeed was a leisure magnet and masterful time stealer. Putnam points out that between 1965 and 1995 Americans gained an average of six hours a week in additional leisure time, and, he writes, “we spent almost all six of those additional hours watching TV.” But the rapid adoption and subsequent cultural impact of broadband challenges what has been an absolute fact about American household life for nearly half a century: the dominance of television.

Many of the earliest studies of home Internet use, academic and proprietary, found that television viewing was not adversely affected by the arrival of the computer in American households. A few studies even concluded that use of the Internet increased television use. These studies suggested that heavy Internet users were also heavy seekers of information and hence media consumption of all kinds was high among them. In a 1999 study titled “TV Viewing in Internet Households,” Nielsen Media Research found that “Internet homes are lighter TV viewers but analyses of the same homes before they had Internet access revealed that they were lighter TV viewers to begin with.” Nielsen concluded that there was very little evidence that the Internet directly impacts television viewing.

In retrospect, these claims are reasonable and even predictable. Before broadband, the Internet was more textual than visual. Consequently, it had more in common with print media—newspapers, magazines, and encyclopedias—than it did with television. The typical user was more likely to “read” the Internet rather than “watch” the Internet. Similarly, the typical user was more likely to consume rather than create Web-based content. In other words, the kind of experiences the Internet offered prebroadband rarely if ever rivaled television or the user-generated media so common today. By making the Internet a much more visual, dynamic, and creative experience, broadband also made it more directly competitive to television.

Our research found steady evidence that the social Web is emerging as a viable alternative to television and a preferred leisure activity among young people. Our surveys and in-depth conversations revealed that young people are increasingly likely to express a preference for the Internet over television. Among the college students we surveyed, 67 percent said that since arriving at college the amount of television they watch has decreased, compared to 11 percent who said the amount they watch has increased. Though the Internet is not solely responsible for this decline, its role cannot be overstated. Also, our research found that young people spend an average of twenty-one hours online a week compared to roughly fourteen hours watching television. They are in fact just slightly more likely to own a computer than a television, 97 and 92 percent, respectively.

The Internet, no matter how you spin it, is a force to be reckoned with in household life. This fact alone is historic if only because television has long been the “go-to” technology for household leisure, information, and entertainment.

Signs that a broadband-powered Internet was displacing television were visible as early as 2002. That year Pew reported that 37 percent of broadband users it surveyed said they cut back on their television viewing. The differences between broadband users and those who used dial-up began to reveal what were, in reality, two different Internet users and experiences. Three things distinguished broadband users from their dial-up counterparts. First, broadband users were more likely to go online on any given day. Second, broadband users spent more time online each day. Finally, users of broadband did more online activities on any given day. Access to higher-speed connections made it twice as likely that a user would go online from home several times a day. In 2002 Pew wrote, “The increased daily usage translates into about three and a half hours more per week online for broadband users.”

Above all else, young users of broadband are especially drawn to managing and making online content. Compared to their dial-up counterparts, the downloading activities of home broadband adopters are significantly more robust. That same 2002 study found that individuals using home broadband were five times more likely to download games and videos and three times more likely to download music. The difference in media streaming was equally pronounced, as broadband users were three times more likely to watch a video clip and five times more likely to listen to an online radio station. Pew’s initial assertion of broadband adoption found “that the decrease in television viewing is most pronounced among those most active in using the Internet for entertainment purposes.” It is after all the capacity for broadband Internet to deliver music, video, and games on demand that makes it such a compelling alternative to television.

In addition to devouring online content, young people are passionate creators of online content. Young broadband users thrive in the do-it-yourself environment of today’s online world. By 2004 more than half of American teens reported that they created content for the Web. You name it—art, photos, blogs, personal Web pages, mash-ups, videos, game mods—and they are creating it. Pew has a name for this bunch of young and enthusiastic Internet users: “Power Creators.”

If you have ever built an avatar, joined a guild in an online game, shot and uploaded a video online, crafted a digital scrapbook on Flickr, maintained a blog, or managed your own MySpace profile, you know how immersive and time consuming life on the Web is. If you have done any of these things, you also know how disengaging television seems by comparison.

Broadband did more than expand the Web’s technical capabilities; it actually paved the way for profound behavioral shifts and social transformation. High-speed Internet connections laid the foundation for what a group of savvy marketers and buzz engineers in the heart of Silicon Valley would begin to sell as the most exciting development in the Internet’s brief but dazzling history: Web 2.0. More than anything, the term acknowledges the Internet’s constant evolution and transition from something that we mainly consume to something that we increasingly produce.

Broadband did not create radically new online activities. Online communities, identities, and fantasy worlds existed years before super-fast Internet connections went mainstream. What broadband did do, however, was expand a relatively small collection of early adopting technophiles into a massive but highly differentiated public of netizens, world builders, bloggers, gamers, social networkers, and content creators.

Television’s pivotal role in American households has led many to call it the “first screen.” For decades, television was the screen we turned on to get our news and information. It was the screen we turned on to connect to the world or simply to pass time. However, for a growing number of young people, a new “first screen,” the computer screen, has emerged. Take Rachel, a hard-working and ambitious twenty-one-year-old. In many ways, she is emblematic of young people’s move to the online world.

Between her full-time load of university courses and an arduous work schedule, Rachel said that television—at least the traditional television experience—has lost its appeal. “I don’t have a lot of leisure time,” Rachel explained, “and so the time that I do have, I find myself spending more and more of it with my computer.” For Rachel, and for many of her peers, the computer has become a primary source of information and entertainment. It has also become, according to Rachel, the dominant screen in her life. As she is eager to check her MySpace and Facebook accounts, scan her messages, reconnect with her network of online friends, and grab the day’s news headlines, the computer is the first screen Rachel turns on when she arrives home. “It’s my way of connecting to the people and things I care about,” she said. Almost seven in ten, or 69 percent, of our young respondents agreed that they log on to the Internet as soon as they get home from work or school. In years past, television was the first and for many the only screen that was turned on after a long day at work or school.

The diminishing appeal of television in Rachel’s life is primarily a result of social and lifestyle factors. In other words, it is not a deliberate or even a self-conscious rejection of television. Young people like Rachel are tuning out television not because of poor programming (though some do complain about what they perceive as a line-up of lackluster shows), but rather because of something far more ominous for the networks: the traditional television broadcast model, a nearly fifty-year-old institution, is simply not compatible with the social and mobile-media lifestyle preferred by young people. Rachel said, “It is really hard to fit live television in these days.” When she elects to watch television, it is usually via her computer, mainly because it allows her to stream the programs she likes. For tech-savvy youth like Rachel, the computer screen’s flexibility and anytime/anywhere playability better suits their lives. Those same features give them greater control over television and their entire media experience.

Many compare the television industry’s slow response to the rise of social and mobile media to the pop music industry’s response to rising new media behaviors. Even in the face of a steady drop in their prime-time audience, TV industry executives have made only cosmetic changes to their business model. Meanwhile, young people are abandoning synchronous or real-time viewing. Whereas early research and television industry executives may have underestimated the digital migration’s impact on television viewing, technology thought leader Don Tapscott was among the first to comprehend what digital meant for the future of broadcast television. “TV is controlled by adults,” Tapscott writes. “In contrast, children control much of their world on the Net.”

In 1998, just as the network computer was spreading throughout American homes, Tapscott noted that the influence of digital on television viewership was becoming most pronounced among young viewers. The migration of the young and the digital to the Web exacerbates a challenge the television industry has long faced. It turns out that the networks aggressively target young viewers not because they watch more television than any other segment but precisely for the opposite reason: young viewers, historically, watch less television than any other segment. Young viewers are so lucrative because they are so elusive. Consequently, a premium is placed on delivering them to advertisers. Ten years after Tapscott’s forecast that broadcast television as we once knew it was dead, the network bosses began, grudgingly, to admit the same thing.

Jeff Zucker, NBC-Universal CEO, was one of the first major industry figures to openly acknowledge that the search for a new broadcast model was inevitable. Speaking in December 2008, Zucker said, “So much has changed in the last ten years—even in the last five years—and none of us have taken a step back and tried to think about business from a different perspective.” Zucker even recognized that the failure to develop a better understanding of the young and the digital—and what their behavior means for the future of television—could spell disaster for the networks. “We are at a critical point,” he admitted, “we are in danger of becoming the music or newspaper industry or something worse.”

Still, it is worth noting that television continues to be a widely used screen in young people’s lives. Ninety-two percent of those we surveyed own a television set and 53 percent listed television among the top three communication technologies they use most often behind the Internet, 80 percent, and mobile phones, 75 percent. Although television remains a part of young people’s media mix, it can no longer be taken for granted as the dominant or most-preferred screen in their lives. This is also true for some of the youngest members of our culture, children six years old and younger.

Even though I did not interview young children for this book, I have shared many informal conversations with parents of young children. As the parent of an inquisitive and tech-savvy seven-year-old daughter, a combination of personal and professional interests inspired my conversations with young parents. And as a member of a technology task force in a K–8th-grade school, I get the opportunity to observe young children using computers, the Web, and even SMART Boards in the classroom setting.

For the first time since the arrival of television in American homes, another screen media, the computer, has emerged in the lives of young children. For more than thirty years, parents have trusted educational media, especially television programs like Sesame Street, to ignite their children’s interest in learning. But in the move to the online world, parents are beginning to identify more interactive sources of learning. Today, the migration to digital begins at younger and younger ages. Nowhere is this more evident than in the rising popularity of computer-mediated environments for kids.

In 2007 the growth of virtual worlds targeting kids, such as Webkinz, Club Penguin, and Stardoll, began to surge. When Hitwise.com’s analyst LeeAnn Prescott compared the weeks ending April 29, 2006, and April 28, 2007, she reported that Webkinz visits were up 1,141 percent, Club Penguin visits were up 545 percent, and Stardoll visits were up 275 percent. Not only have visits to these sites increased; the average amount of time children spend on them is also worth mentioning. In her research blog, Prescott writes, “Average session times can be very long, with the average visit to GaiaOnline lasting more than 44 minutes, Neopets at 35 minutes and Stardoll at 26 minutes.” In other words, kids are not only visiting these sites, they are also spending a lot of time with them. If you have ever met a child who manages a Webkinz stuffed animal or a virtual pet on Neopets, then you know how difficult it is to pull them away from the computer. One friend of mine, a mother of a seven-year-old daughter, half jokingly said Webkinz is as “addictive as crack.”

So, what are the long-term implications of kids’ migration to digital for broadcast television? Not good. In many American households young children are growing up spending a growing portion of their media time in front of a computer screen rather than a television screen. A 2003 study by Kaiser Family Foundation researchers Victoria Rideout, Elizabeth Vandewater, and Ellen Wartella identifies some interesting trends regarding the media behaviors of children, from infants to six-year-olds. First of all, they report that at younger and younger ages kids are asserting a growing degree of control over the media they use. For example, they request a specific television program, song, or Web site.

By ages three and four, kids show a striking level of confidence and competence with computers. Seventy percent of kids ages four to six have used a computer. About one in four in this age group uses a computer every day. The researchers write, “Those who use a computer spend an average of just over an hour at the keyboard.” More than half of four- to six-year-olds has used a computer by themselves without sitting in an adult’s lap, and six in ten, or 64 percent, know how to use a mouse to point and click. The very youngest members in our culture are not being socialized to use television as heavily or as often as earlier generations. In computer-mediated environments made especially for them, children are learning to build, create, and interact with each other rather than passively consume the kind of preprogrammed content that television provides. The digital migration continues unabated as children derive enormous pleasure and power from the online world.

Another way of understanding young people’s move to the digital world is to consider the attitudes they hold toward television and the Internet. To gain a greater appreciation for the digital migration, consider the attitudes Americans have held about television in the past. Starting in 1959, the Roper Organization began conducting, in its words, “a series of studies to learn how television stands with the people it serves.” In 1987, ten years before the Internet began moving into a growing number of American homes, the public’s attitude toward television was quite good. “Positive feelings about television,” Roper wrote in its 1987 report, “outnumber negatives by a wide margin.” Watching television was second only to talking with friends, neighbors, and coworkers among the things American said they looked forward to doing each day. That year the Roper Report also announced a milestone in its survey of Americans and their attitudes about the tube. The percentage of people who only mentioned television as their source of news hit 50 percent for the first time since Roper began the study. “The three words,” Roper declared, “that most Americans use to describe television are entertaining, informative, and interesting.”

In an effort to learn more about the attitudes young people hold toward television and the Internet, we asked them to respond to a series of statements that we believe serve as a measure of their disposition toward the two communication technologies and, as such, the value they place on each. What are we learning?

On almost every measure, young people regarded the Internet in more favorable terms than they do television. Take their response to the statement “The Internet is a necessity in life.” Among the people we surveyed, 56 percent agreed with the statement. By contrast, 42 percent believe that television is a necessity in life. The attitudes we tracked parallel the findings by the Pew Research Center.

For more than thirty years, Pew has been surveying Americans about the products they use on a daily basis and, more precisely, if they view those products as a luxury or a necessity. In addition to other topics, Pew surveyed American’s attitudes about communication technologies in late 2006. Significantly, 65 percent of Americans ages eighteen to twenty-nine say that a home computer is a necessity. By contrast, only 25 percent of Americans age sixty-five and older believe that a home computer is a necessity in today’s world. Even more compelling are the generational differences regarding television. Older adults, 73 percent, are more likely than younger Americans, 53 percent, to report that television is a necessity. The fact that almost half, 47 percent, of those surveyed between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine believe they could live without television underscores the profound cultural and generational shifts underway as young people migrate from television to the Internet.

We also asked young people to respond to this statement: “I cannot stay away from the Internet for too long.” We asked the same question with the focus on television. Whereas 44 percent agreed with the statement when the Internet was the subject, 34 percent agreed when television was the subject. A majority, 52 percent, agreed that there are Internet sites they must visit every day. When asked two similar questions about television, the findings are more mixed. First, more than half of the participants in our survey, 60 percent, disagreed that there are specific television stations they must watch every day. Television as a whole, then, is not viewed as a nightly “must-see” experience. However, 51 percent agreed that there are specific television programs that they cannot miss. What does this mean?

First, it strongly suggests that television’s grip on young viewers is not nearly as compelling as the online platforms like social-network sites and online games that are a daily destination for teens and young adults. So, while the occasional “must-see” program appears on television, every night is a “must-do” night for activities offered by MySpace, Facebook, and World of Warcraft.

Also revealing is how young people answered the statement “The Internet relieves stress from everyday life.” Over the years Americans have turned to television to relax and decompress from the rigors of work, school, and day-to-day life. This aspect of television’s appeal explains why some over the years have labeled it the “plug-in drug.” And it still holds true today, as 56 percent of our participants agreed that television relieves stress. But more than half, 53 percent, of our survey participants also agreed with the statement “The Internet relieves stress from everyday life,” suggesting that the online world too is a way to manage our moods and escape from the rigors of daily life.

The Internet, in a relatively short period of time, has joined and in some cases surpassed television as the preferred screen in the household.

As the role of television in daily American life enters a new era, we can put its past in perspective. The truth is that Americans watched television more out of habit than any innate desire for the medium. Over the years we watched mostly because we were bored, tired, lonely, or simply because that is what Americans did for almost half a century. In short, we watched television in the past because no other communication technologies offered a more competitive option. As the Internet expands our options for leisure, entertainment, communication, and information seeking, it signals the steady erosion of television’s amazing run as the dominant communication technology in American households. The march to digital is historic and marks a period when after fifty-plus years Americans began tuning out one screen, the television, and turning on another, the computer.

But what kind of society is being built as young people flee a world once dominated by television in pursuit of a world dominated by the Internet? It is a world that is at once strikingly familiar and yet remarkably foreign.