• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, September 13, 2011

Conventional wisdom might suggest that college age Americans are the earliest adopters of next-generation digital media technologies and are more apt to use smartphones, tablets and new-fangled gaming platforms than old school devices, but new research from a leading academic media think tank suggests that the central media processor for college kids is still, well, the CPU, albeit a portable one. The research, which is being released this morning by the Center for Media Design at Ball State University, finds that the laptop computer continues to dominate campus media life.

The study, "And Then There was One: College Students' Media Priorities and Preferences," studied took a page out of popular reality TV show "Survivor," dividing groups of college students into teams that would meet for 90-minutes to discuss which of 12 electronic media devices would eliminated from their media island weekly, until only one remained. With an average of 11.7 weeks of survivor power, the laptop computer beat out the next best survivor, the mobile phone (11.3 weeks).

Madison Avenue mainstay TV (9.7), interestingly, still ranks third among the college set, followed by MP3 players (8.3) and gaming consoles (7.3).

"Portability, convenient Internet access and bundling of office applications, communication tools and entertainment in a single device were the key selection criteria used to determine the order of elimination," said Michael Holmes, CMD director of insight and research. "As long as participants felt that the functions afforded by a device could be covered with an alternate device still in the mix, they were comfortable letting go of it."

Holmes noted that the 2011 study replicated similar research that Ball State conducted in 2004, which found that portability wasn't as much of a factor back then, with the desktop computer (10.5) dominating the survivability exercise with, followed by mobile phones (10.2) and laptop computers (9.8).

"College students still need a work horse," Holmes said, noting, "For the students in our 2004 study, that work horse was the desktop computer. In the 2011 groups, it was the laptop. Our 2011 participants characterized the desktop computer as a dinosaur."