Gen Z spends half their waking time on screens

[JINSBEK]

Gen Z spends half its waking hours on screen time. Here’s the good and bad news for Hollywood
The Los Angeles Times - 2022 April 12
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-a ... -wide-shot

Excerpts:

...The good news for media companies is that Gen Z spends a lot of time on screens. This cohort of consumers, born in and after 1996, watches an average of 7.2 hours of video a day, which is nearly an hour more than the 6.3 hours spent by Gen X, according to new market research provided exclusively to The Times. Assuming (naively, of course) that people get the recommended eight hours of sleep a day, that’s nearly half of young folks’ waking hours captured by brightly lit rectangles.

However, while typical 13- to 26-year-olds consume content pretty much all day, they are not watching in the same way as previous generations.

Their viewing changes throughout the day. The typical Gen Z-er’s media diet starts with casually scrolling TikTok and Reels in the morning, switching to YouTube around lunchtime and turning to Netflix or Hulu in the evening for the latest must-see comedy or drama, according to the survey commissioned by music video platform Vevo and media agency Publicis Media.

“Video has essentially become a friend to Gen Z,” said Laura Vanison, Vevo’s senior director of consumer and artist insights. “It’s rewarding. It’s keeping you company. It’s not just for relaxation at the end of the day once you’ve fulfilled all of your life’s obligations and duties.”

Much of Gen Z’s viewing time is dedicated to user-generated content — TikTok influencers and amateur YouTube creators — rather than traditional longform stuff (i.e. movies and TV shows). Nearly half (48%) of video watched by Gen Z-ers was made by content creators outside of the world of traditional entertainment professionals. Meanwhile, Gen X consumers’ viewing was 72% professionally produced.

(The original report is available to premium members of the American National Association of Advertisers.)

With 93% of American Gen Zers admitting to staying up at night and losing sleep to social media, and 46% having trouble falling asleep on more than half the week, I don’t think this bodes well for the overall well-being of that generation. Boomers were made fun of for being the first to be glued to television screens, but at least that was constrained to the end of the day, and not nearly as likely to keep people up compared to compulsive endless scrolling. Knowing the concrete numbers also gives one a better idea of the directions media moguls and marketers will take with regards to media and advertisement production...

[Stefen_Maxwell]

Oh god, I am in this demographic.

[JINSBEK]

Oh god, I am in this demographic.

You and 2 billion others, haha. Outside of the frightening health implications of this, the effects on language and culture is going to be quite fascinating (and probably very sad, in my opinion). My fiancée credits this perpetual screentime with the washing away of the Australian accents in her generation (she’s also part of Gen Z) and those younger than her. Now, Hollywood has always been a behemoth in cultural exports, but people could see a Mickey Mouse movie or Jurassic Park, go home, and still hear, converse, and joke with others in the same local tongues relatively unaffected by the one or two motion pictures they saw that week. It’s different when you’re consuming largely American video media over 7 hours of your day every single day. She’s in Queensland, and her female Gen Z coworkers say “girl” with a US East Coast accent and intonation, presumably because that’s where from the TikTokers that they’re watching are.