A study of 1,500 teens found they want less romance and more friendship on their screens. Gen Z this and Gen Alpha that — it’s easy to look at younger generations and judge the things about them we don’t understand. This is especially true when we observe kids’ and teens’ relationships with their devices.
But a new study, the Teens and Screens Report from the Center for Scholars & Storytellers at UCLA, reveals that younger generations don’t feel much different about technology and the media they consume than we do. Here’s what talking to 1,500 adolescents about what they want in their entertainment content illuminated for researchers, from AI hesitancy to a desire for more stories centering platonic relationships. Every year, the Center for Scholars & Storytellers (CSS) at UCLA performs a study to find out what tweens and teens want to see in the TV shows, movies, and media made for and about them.
Researchers interviewed more than 1,500 adolescents ages 10-24 “about their perceptions, opinions, and beliefs regarding popular media, including TV shows, movies, video games, AI, and social media,” a press release about the report reads. The high-level takeaway: While there are more and more ways to consume stories today, teens still want to consume “traditional” media. However, they want more diverse perspectives in their TV show and movie options.
Among Gen Xers and Millennials, a “story” typically means a TV show or a movie. For the surveyed adolescents, YouTube videos, video games, and 30-second videos also count as storytelling platforms. TV shows, movies, and video games followed closely behind.
TikTok scored the highest among social media platforms,” the press release reads. We tend to think of kids and teens as hapless would-be victims of AI (no one would willingly watch brain rot, right?). But the same optimism and fear adults seem to feel about the technology were also present among the study group.
Participants’ ages tended to be the best predictor of how they felt about AI. Forty-four percent of 10- to 13-year-olds described AI-generated programs as “fascinating,” while only about 10% used the word “doom” in their description (ominous). That split was completely reversed in the 19-year-old group, where doom was the No. 1 feeling participants had about AI (27.4% of them).
Extract — continue reading at the source.
