Summer Means Surfing ... Indoors

For generations of American children, summer has meant free time, time to do fun stuff. That meant camp, beach visits, bike rides and other healthy, physical things that are generally good for a growing child.

But today many children are choosing to spend their summers indoors, simply doing more of what they increasingly do year-round: sit at the computer and surf the web or play games. This is rewriting the nature of childhood and the rules of parenting, as a recent National Public Radio story points out.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #61




***MEDIA SURVEY RESULTS, PART 4-Over the next several weeks, I'll be giving you the results of a mass media survey given to all MC101 students with their final exam during the spring semester. Here is how the spring MC101s answered the following survey question...

What do you see for interactive media (games and virtual worlds) over the next 10 years?
A. It wil be about as big as it is today. (11%)
B. It will be bigger. Large numbers of people will become involved in online games with huge numbers of players. (33%)
C. Growth will come largely through new-generation game devices like the Wii, which allow people to physically act out what their virtual self is doing. (56%)

These MC101s are at the Biltmore Hotel. They are standing in front of a photo of the storied hotel's Opening Night festivities in 1923