Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, welcomed students back to school on Thursday by asking them to walk a line: use technology to learn, but don’t get distracted by it.
In remarks at a back-to-school forum in Washington, the chairman said that with high-speed Internet, “a student anywhere can have access to the best libraries, the best teachers, the best tutors in the world.”
“How many of you are sick of carrying 50 pounds of textbooks in your backpacks?” he asked students at the Columbia Heights Educational Campus. He went on to say that the use of mobile broadband could allow access to digital textbooks and “interactive learning tools.”
But the chairman also said that “as with every revolution, broadband Internet brings not only real opportunities but some real concerns.” Chiefly, he said policy makers and parents should be concerned about the potential for distraction; he said that research shows that the average teenager consumes 11 hours of media content a day, and sends a text every 10 minutes he or she is awake.
Mr. Genachowski said that half of driving-age teenagers have admitted to texting and driving. “We need to get that number to zero.”