The acceleration point for both age groups studied is 2012. What happened that year? The article doesn't try to answer this. Might be mentioned in the study I suppose.
The acceleration point for both age groups studied is 2012. What happened that year? The article doesn't try to answer this. Might be mentioned in the study I suppose.
Kinda, the measurement points are 2012 and 2020, so the decline is somewhere in that eight year period (birth years 1999-2007 and 2003-2011). My guess is phones/tablets strike again.
Instagram/Android was 2012. (Instagram iOS was late 2010). But not just Instagram; 2012 was about the time that social media really started adopting the dark patterns.
2012 is pretty much the year smartphone addiction began approaching critical mass
Possibly (probably?) a coincidence, but it did look like broad changes to how reading was taught started to land in 2010-2012: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/common-standards-dr...
The real culprit is probably more in line with far more alternatives to reading for entertainment.
Not a rigorous response, but Minecraft.
Kids were playing a ton of online games before Minecraft.
Yes and no
Up until the 2010s I think it was still a lot less socially normal to play a lot of games. We reached a tipping point somewhere that went from gaming being a sometimes activity for kids to basically every kid plays games
Most of the people in my high school in the 2000s didn't play games as a primary hobby. Only a few of my friends had a PC for games or a console. It wasn't nearly as ubiquitous as it is now.
YouTube.
My guess is smartphones hitting a point of increased adoption. In the "good old days", phone games were honest and not addiction-inducing adware..
you kidding me? they were absolutely addicting. Just not casino style.
Anecdotally, 2012 is when I got back in to reading for pleasure, as a 16-year-old. I had no friends though, and thought someone cute might see me reading and become interested in me.
Prior to that, I stopped reading because video games were easy to get lost in endlessly. At the time, I recall I was probably playing a lot of League of Legends, TF2, Minecraft, and probably some others -- all of which I felt I could pretty much sink an infinite amount of time into, at the time.