The average American spends more than 8 hours a day watching video-based entertainment.

1. The average American spends more than 8 hours a day watching video-based entertainment. • By 2013 the number of daily hours spent watching television and videos will match the number of hours spent sleeping. • The AMA reports that the "number of hours spent in front of a television or video screen is the single biggest chunk of time in the waking life of an American child.“ • Mass-produced images fill our daily lives and condition our most intimate perceptions and desires • Media culture, has become the primary educational force in regulating the meanings, values, and preferences that legitimate identities. • Media culture defines childhood, national identity, history, beauty, truth, and individual agency. • Young people searching for purpose and hoping to establish independent identities are a particularly vulnerable group. • Corporate giants make every effort to understand youth so as to develop market methods that are more camouflaged, seductive, and successful. • Controlled by a handful of multinational corporations

2. Despite the’ longstanding recommendations to the contrary, children under 8 are spending more time than ever in front of screens, • For the first time, an emerging “app gap” in which affluent children are likely to use mobile educational games while those in low-income families are the most likely to have televisions in their bedrooms. • Almost half the families with incomes above $75,000 had downloaded apps specifically for their young children, compared with one in eight of the families earning less than $30,000. More than a third of those low-income parents said they did not know what an “app” — short for application — was. • “The app gap is a big deal and a harbinger of the future,”