• New York Times, Wednesday, January 20, 2010 6:30 PM

Outside of school and sleep, young people now spend "practically every waking minute" connected to one digital device or another, according to new research from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Today, those ages 8 to 18 spend more than seven and a half hours a day with some sort of device. By contrast, they were connected less than six and a half hours five years ago, when the study was last conducted.

What's more, those numbers do not even include the hour and a half that youths spend texting, or the half-hour they talk on their cellphones. Overall, multitasking teens and pre-teens are packing an average of nearly 11 hours of "media content" into that seven and a half hours. Of note, and contrary to popular wisdom, the heaviest media users reported spending a similar amount of time exercising as the light media users.

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