Between Self-Actualization and Waste of Time: Young People’s Evaluations of Digital Media Time

Abstract

Children and young people’s time is generally structured by adults’ ideas and interests, be it in the family (sleeping or eating times), in the social world (time of school) or in the cultural realm (holidays and festivities). Children’s autonomy of how they spend their time is reduced to certain spaces, which again are assigned to them by adults. For the past two decades, digital media has entered many people’s – adults as well as children’s and young people’s – everyday life.

With the omnipresent and growing use of digital media by young people – fueled even more by mobile devices – grows a discourse around possible (negative) effects and supposedly necessary pedagogical monitoring and restrictions of their digital media time.

These discussions regarding negative effects on well-being and school performance include formal recommendations for limiting the quantity of time spent online. Hereby, mainly the digital time outside school is addressed and potentially problematized. Despite numerous studies on the effects of digital media time on different aspects of young people’s lives there is little research asking for children’s and young people’s perspectives on digital media use and time.

This study uses questionnaires (509) and qualitative interviews (15) to explore young people’s perspectives in terms of meaning, quality and quantity of the time spent with digital media. The participants were youth aged 12–20 from northern Germany. Using qualitative content analysis, findings point to a necessary differentiation between the purpose of usage, respective effects and evaluations.

Accordingly, being online can be an act (a) of self-actualization including positive effects creating great meaning for well-being, identity and appropriation of the digital world for their own future, (b) a waste of time when, for example, using social media or gaming to pass the time including a feeling that time is accelerated and rushing, personal regrets and references to loss of control and the need for self-control, and (c) a pragmatic naturalization of the digital as one part of life for various individual or social purposes and developments.

The article discusses young people’s evaluations and perspectives addressing the possibly artificial adult differentiation of analog and digital time or activities as well as adults’ presumptions about young people’s digital time and the strive for control resulting from these. Additionally, insights from the circumstances of the COVID-19 lockdown are included in gaining knowledge about what is actually important and rewarding when young people spend time digitally. The chapter aims at an intergenerational understanding of the significance of digital media in young people’s lives questioning alarmist scenarios of a generation that is lost in the digital world.

Citation

Kleeberg-Niepage, A. and Degen, J.L. (2022), "Between Self-Actualization and Waste of Time: Young People’s Evaluations of Digital Media Time", Schutter, S., Harring, D. and Bass, L.E. (Ed.) Children, Youth and Time (Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, Vol. 30), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 29-47. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1537-466120220000030002