Goodbye Gen Y, Hello Gen M

In our never-ending need to assign letters to people younger than us, the Kaiser Family Foundation hereby dubs the recent crop of kids: Generation M. As in media. Why?

“Children and teens are spending an increasing amount of time using ?new media? like computers, the Internet and video games, without cutting back on the time they spend with ?old? media like TV, print and music, according to a new study released today by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Instead, because of the amount of time they spend using more than one medium at a time (for example, going online while watching TV), they?re managing to pack increasing amounts of media content into the same amount of time each day.”

The study, Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-olds, says that kids are becoming masters of multitasking and although the KFF doesn’t know if that’s good or bad for their health, it’ll certainly help them in the hectic modern workplace.

The study focuses young people’s consumption of media and raises some interesting concerns regarding media in the bedroom and parental supervision.

In addition to these findings on their media consumption, I’d like to see more studies about how much media young people are producing via blogs, zines, podcasts, etc. Somewhere in there, I feel, we will find a healthy balance of consumption and production by those rascally Gen-Mers.