As Gen Z Ups Screen Time, Their Sadness Stats Rise

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by MediaPost.

Is overuse of phones and social media harmful to the health of Generation Z?

With the human desire for connection evolving into a need for connectivity and the majority “always plugged into the online world, time spent with friends is down significantly. The feelings of persistent sadness or hopelessness are shooting skyward for all young people,” Andrew Roth, founder of Gen Z research and strategy firm dcdx, tells Marketing Daily.  He notes that 73% of Gen Z-ers report sometimes or always feeling alone.

Dcdx’s just-released “Screen Time Report,” now in its third year, shows Gen Z screen time continuing to increase, up 9% year-over-year to seven hours per day on mobile devices alone.

“We hoped to see a decline — or perhaps a plateau” in screen time in 2023 “as more young people went to school, joined the workforce, and emerged from the post-COVID isolations into a more connected world,” Roth concludes in the report. “But as the data came in, we saw that this was not the case.

Indeed, the report calls TikTok, the clear leader in Gen Z usage time, an “addiction.”

The dcdx research, based on 157 video screen recordings of iPhone screen time settings submitted by 15- to 27-year-olds, found that Gen Z-ers are using TikTok for an average of nine hours weekly, up 50% from 2022.

Instagram, the leader in 2022, is now the second most-used app, but did experience a “significant year-over-year jump.” Nearly all other apps saw usage decline among the demographic, dcdx reports.

Source: MediaPost
https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/392553/report-as-gen-z-ups-screen-time-their-sadness-st.html