Parents, researchers and educators have been asking whether the spread of mobile devices and Internet access, for all their benefits, can have negative side effects for young people, interfering with homework or leading to cyberbullying. Now the government is asking the same question.
The Federal Communications Commission announced this week that it plans to hold a forum on Tuesday at a high school in Washington to address risks associated with heavy technology use among young people. The forum will include panels and conversations with experts about how parents can help young people find balance in their digital diets.
The commission noted research showing that mobile phone ownership among children had increased 68 percent in the last five years, and that a typical teenager texts every 10 minutes during waking hours.
“It’s the beginning of a process to help inform parents and spark a discussion about a range of issues that parents are concerned about,” Julius Genachowski, the commission’s chairman, said in an interview. He said those issues included how to balance the time young people were spending online and with digital devices, the type of content they were seeing, and social issues, like cyberbullying and inappropriate texting.
Mr. Genachowski said he continued to be a strong advocate for the spread of broadband and computer use in general, including in the schools, as a tool for economic growth. And he said the forum was “not about considering regulation.”
But he said that “it is natural, as we focus on the opportunities of broadband, to ask about the dangers or risks, particularly with respect to kids.”
The forum, called “Generation Mobile,” will also address ways in which companies and entrepreneurs can develop ways to help parents limit children’s use of technology or steer them to more educational content, Mr. Genachowski said.
Part of the agenda for the forum was inspired by a series of articles in The New York Times about how heavy technology use affects the way people think and behave, an F.C.C. spokeswoman said.