Found this book fascinating to read. I agreed with a lot of what the author has to say about the influence of screens on our children and young people. I think this is a good read for parents and educators.

Pretty scary how media and the internet can suck kids and control them. I think it's time we take our kids back and get them back outside and playing. Kids really shouldn't be watching tv or playing on the internet for hours and hours. Parents need to take some time out of their busy schedule, put down their technology devises and pay attention and interact with their kids! Books like these, sadly, a likely just preaching to the choir... But every parent and educator ought to be reading this book...

Plugged In is a good and dense book. It shows extensive research about how social media is involved in today's young generation. I enjoyed it.

PLUGGED IN was written by two university professors, Patti M. Valkenburg and Jessica Taylor Piotrowski, and explores "How Media Attract and Affect Youth." It is definitely an academic work, published by Yale University Press and with close to 15% of the text involving footnotes and sources. This text addresses some very important topics such as media and violence, advertising, and gaming across several age ranges. For example, in the chapter on media and education, the authors acknowledge that the potential for educational platforms other than television is still being understood. They cite numerous studies about the ever younger ages at which children are accessing screens and note findings like "whereas two- to four-year-olds spend slightly more than an hour a day using educational media, eight- to ten-year-olds are estimated to spend only forty-two minutes a day with such content."

They describe our present day networked society as revolving around the individual, conjuring an image of "a contemporary family sitting in a restaurant, parents and children glued to their own phones, unaware of one another" which complements Turkle's work in Reclaiming Conversation. Overall, I think PLUGGED IN addresses a high interest topic for our students, but its valuable insights are masked by a very academic tone.

Such a truth with our kids today: electronics have a physical effect and come with a disassociation to everything around them. This book was great and I will highly recommend this to every parent I know.