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"Smartphone ownership has become a nearly ubiquitous element of teen life: 95% of teens now report they have a smartphone or access to one. These mobile connections are in turn fueling more-persistent online activities: 45% of teens now say they are online on a near-constant basis. The survey also finds there is no clear consensus among teens about the effect that social media has on the lives of young people today. Minorities of teens describe that effect as mostly positive (31%) or mostly negative (24%), but the largest share (45%) says that effect has been neither positive nor negative. These are some of the main findings from the Center's survey of U.S. teens conducted March 7-April 10, 2018. Throughout the report, "teens" refers to those ages 13 to 17."

"Attention: everybody wants some - social media, tech companies and more. Watch these talks to better understand the ways these entities try and get on your radar."

"Kids like weird things: Yellow sponge-boys, talking doe-eyed ponies, ruddy-cheeked rodents that say only "pika pika," and, especially in the past few years, unboxing videos. Kids' unboxing videos are YouTube series in which children, or in some cases just disembodied hands, take toys out of their packaging and play with them as uplifting music plays in the background. One particularly popular video shows a small boy unwrapping and then assembling a child-size electric car, using plastic tools that would surely fall apart in less practiced hands. He then drives the car down the sidewalk through an eerily empty neighborhood to a playground that is also completely empty, where he plays by himself, presumably because all the other neighborhood children are busy watching YouTube. The video has 267 million views."

"Amazon and other tech giants have made devices connected to the internet increasingly prevalent. Now is the time to be freaking out about the dangers."

"We filmed four dozen original interviews while making The Facebook Dilemma. Our reporting team conducted in-depth interviews with current and former Facebook executives, internet activists, government and intelligence officials in the United States and around the world, the digital chief of Donald Trump's presidential campaign and leading journalists and scholars. Explore many of these interviews - and see how we used them in the film - in this interactive version of The Facebook Dilemma, part of FRONTLINE's Transparency Project."

"eople are known to walk, talk, and eat while sleeping. Increasingly, sleep texting is joining the list. A study from Villanova University found that the habit of using smartphones to message friends while still asleep - and having no memory of doing it - is a common technology trend among adolescents and young adults. The paper, "Interrupted sleep: College students sleeping with technology," was published last month in the Journal of American College Health. The study is the first nursing article to look at sleep texting. Researchers concluded it was a growing trend in the college student population."

"There are three reasons you shouldn't check your notifications. All three are bad, and all three are avoidable by the simple expedient of not checking our phones. But this is hard. Why?"

"Back when I was in university, a friend of mine called his parents every single night. That's sweet, you might think. But no, it was a ritualistic, mandatory process that he was required to complete. Before the dawn of the mobile phone, the university send-off would be the start of some semblance of independence for parents' children. That's not so true any more, with our technologically connected world. Arkangel is a Black Mirror episode that conveys the cold, hard reality of helicopter parenting: a term describing over-involved parents that make decisions for their children, solving their problems and shielding them from making mistakes."

"Let's put something to rest: Facebook isn't spying through your phone's microphone to serve you ads for sweatshirts and seltzer water. It probably couldn't even if it wanted to. But if the social network isn't listening to you, that doesn't mean the rest of the world isn't watching. Advertisements in the real world are becoming more technologically sophisticated, integrating facial recognition, location data, artificial intelligence, and other powerful tools that are more commonly associated with your mobile phone. Welcome to the new age of digital marketing. During this year's Fashion Week in New York, a digital billboard ad for New Balance used A.I. technology to detect and highlight pedestrians wearing "exceptional" outfits. A billboard advertisement for the Chevy Malibu recently targeted drivers on Interstate 88 in Chicago by identifying the brand of vehicle they were driving, then serving ads touting its own features in comparison. And Bidooh, a Manchester-based startup that admits it was inspired by Minority Report, is using facial recognition to serve ads through its billboards in the U.K. and other parts of Europe as well as South Korea. According to its website, Bidooh allows advertisers to target people based on criteria like age, gender, ethnicity, hair color, clothing color, height, body shape, perceived emotion, and the presence of glasses, sunglasses, beards, or mustaches. We've been on the path here since at least a decade ago when the New York Times reported that some digital billboards were equipped with small cameras that could analyze a pedestrian's facial features to serve targeted ads based on gender and approximate age. "

"We define digital nutrition as two distinct but complementary behaviors. The first is the healthful consumption of digital assets, or any positive, purposeful content designed to alleviate emotional distress or maximize human potential, health, and happiness. The second behavior is smarter decision-making, aided by greater transparency around the composition and behavioral consequences of specific types of digital content. People already use music, film, TV, video games, and various digital devices to relax and escape or to avoid painful and unpleasant feelings or decisions. But in this increasingly wireless world, we need a more realistic strategy. Digital material can-and, in our view, should-be leveraged for preventative purposes (to maintain mood and avoid regular descents into depression), for palliative purposes (to ease acute anxiety and other unpleasant feelings), and for regulatory purposes (to track volume of personal exposure to digital asset types known to produce negative outcomes)."

"There's a popular suspicion, for example, that Tinder and other dating apps might make people pickier or more reluctant to settle on a single monogamous partner, a theory that the comedian Aziz Ansari spends a lot of time on in his 2015 book, Modern Romance, written with the sociologist Eric Klinenberg. Eli Finkel, however, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and the author of The All-or-Nothing Marriage, rejects that notion. "Very smart people have expressed concern that having such easy access makes us commitment-phobic," he says, "but I'm not actually that worried about it." Research has shown that people who find a partner they're really into quickly become less interested in alternatives. Finkel believes that dating apps haven't changed happy relationships much-but he does think they've lowered the threshold of when to leave an unhappy one. In the past, there was a step in which you'd have to go to the trouble of "getting dolled up and going to a bar," Finkel says, and you'd have to look at yourself and say, "What am I doing right now? I'm going out to meet a guy. I'm going out to meet a girl," even though you were in a relationship already. Now, he says, "you can just tinker around, just for a sort of a goof; swipe a little just 'cause it's fun and playful. And then it's like, oh-[suddenly] you're on a date." The other subtle ways in which people believe dating is different now that Tinder is a thing are, quite frankly, innumerable. Some believe that dating apps' visual-heavy format encourages people to choose their partners more superficially (and with racial or sexual stereotypes in mind); others argue that humans choose their partners with physical attraction in mind even without the help of Tinder. There are equally compelling arguments that dating apps have made dating both more awkward and less awkward by allowing matches to get to know each other remotely before they ever meet face-to-faceâ€

"As internet-connected devices and appliances accumulate, one academic foresees "the monetization of every move you make.""

"In reality, Google's goal (and our goal, as Google marketers) is to separate you from as much of your money as possible every time you aren't thinking clearly -and we do so through ads. Micro-moments are so important to Google's bottom line that, since a May 2016 keynote, Google has taught us marketers how to best leverage them against you. We do this by serving the ad best suited to your flavor of impulse, and by making sure we're there for each of those impulses. In a perfect world, marketers would be trained to help you use Google well when you are of an impressionable mind. Instead, we're taught to exploit your befuddlement. Whether you're aware of it or not, you have micro-moments about 150 times per day. You will see ads during most of them. These ads speak to what you seek; play on emotions that are unlike you; and fit your age, income, gender, location, and browsing history"

"Michael Brennan, who founded the award-winning safeguarding platform tootoot, was himself a victim of cyberbullying at school. "There were too many barriers for me to speak up, especially in high school. It was all happening on places like Bebo and MySpace, where there was no way to tackle it. So, I vowed to find a solution to the problem." Since Michael launched tootoot in 2014, the reporting app has worked with more than 1,000 British schools, with over 400,000 children registered on the platform. Children can log in and report problematic messages to their school or local council, and are assigned a unique number when they log in to report bullying. Schools can keep track of how many times an individual child has experienced bullying, build a chronology, and identify patterns on a dashboard. If they feel it's necessary, they can click to reveal the identity of a child reporting bullying."

"The floss is everywhere. Ted Danson did it. Mark Ingram did it. A 96-year old World War II veteran did it. And it's in Fortnite, where a wide range of emotes, or character actions, are sold by developer Epic Games. Fortnite characters can also dance using the "fresh" emote, which directly cribs from the "Carlton dance" Alfonso Ribeiro made famous on the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, or "swipe it," a copy of 2 Milly's Milly Rock dance. None of the creators of these dances see a cent from the game's in-app purchases, which, in aggregate, reportedly led Epic to $1 billion in revenue midway through last year. So, naturally, the creators sued. And quickly hit a brick wall."

"Hospitals are leaning on the distracting power of immersive technology "

"Social media is awash with glossy images of our friends having fun - but how does that impact our wallets?"

"How a group of teenagers pivoted from Vine to venture capital"

"ast September, Apple proudly rolled out a Screen Time feature that was designed to help people manage how much they use their devices, and even get away from them altogether with a related Downtime setting. This was a canny marketing move from the maker of the most attractive and addictive screen ever invented. And it came against the backdrop of Apple's unusually public campaign against Facebook in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Screen Time's promotional materials prominently featured both Facebook and Instagram, as if suggesting these two apps in particular might be a waste of your time. Never mind that Facebook's very real privacy liabilities aren't connected to how often you use the product. Apple had an opportunity to position itself on the higher ground of the branding battlefield, and it took it."

"Is the collective horror of the world's tragedies diminishing the weight of each individual crisis?"