It is a time when:
* the average teen spends almost 11 hours per day in consuming electronic media (TV. radio, internet, etc.)
* 53% of children go online with no parental supervision
* 38% of teens have received sexually suggestive content via a device
* very young children are becoming addicted to online pornography, with their first exposure as young as 8 years old
* 56% of children 8-11 and 69% of 12-year-olds in America have a smartphone
* the average smartphone user touches his phone 2,600+ times every day
* 66% admit to nomophobia ( no- mobile- phone-pho bia), the fear of not having your phone
* 40% of smartphone users check their phones in the middle of the night
* 52% of teens sit around in silence, staring at their smartphones when together with friends
* 88% of American youth 18-29 use social media and 45% say they are online “on a near-constant basis”
* there are 2.5 billion monthly Facebook users (one-third of the global population)
* 90% of teens use Snapchat and 72% use Instagram
* “If you walk into any middle school in the United States and stop a random 13-year-old girl and ask her how many followers she has on Instagram, she will tell the exact number as of 5 minutes ago” (Jesse Weinberge, The Boogeyman Exists, p. 138).
* new apps like TikTok can explode in popularity from zero to half a billion users in a matter of months
* 95% of the most watched YouTube videos are highly sexualized music videos
* the top YouTube celebrity is a video gamer nicknamed PewDiePie with 102 million subscribers, a young man who has made about $90 million through the social currency of his YouTube channel
* one very liberal-minded company (Google) controls 73% of all internet searches (on all devices) and 93% of smartphone searches
* six very liberal-minded corporations own most of the news and broadcast media in America, controlling 90% of what people read, watch, and listen to.
(Friday Church News Notes, March 20, 2020, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143)