Those darn kids -- they just don't listen! And soon, according to a report, they won't physically be able to listen. It seems that modern teens, with their cloaking jackets, space telephones, and telepathic headsets fail to obey the simplest tenet of leisure-time music enjoyment: keeping their iPod and Zune volumes at a semi-natural level. In focus-group discussions, researchers found that high school students in the Netherlands were aware of the potential hearing loss which can be caused by high volume listening, yet had no immediate plans to crank their jams at anything but 11. Typical of our misguided youth, the teens feel that they have a "low personal vulnerability" to hearing loss -- researchers also noted that they believed they were bulletproof, could fly, and would never, ever lose touch with people who signed their yearbook. The study's findings suggest that the answer to this problem may lie with manufacturers of hardware and solutions like volume caps or warning lights, rather than with the self-control of the end user.

According to a recently released report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a telephone study of US youths aged 12-17 found that -- get this -- kids actually put value on "non-online" meetings, such as "talking on the phone" or "hanging out." If you believe these so-called findings, 40-percent of teens say they use that archaic and confusing system of wired telephones, while 31-percent claim to spend time "in person" with friends every day, as though they're not frittering away their time on PCs, DS Lites, and cellphones -- interacting virtually, like the rest of us. Our take? Obvious youth-driven cover-up. Hear us out here. If the 'rents found out kids were growing up so socially disenfranchised, they might just take all those beautiful gadgets away. On the other hand (or OTOH, as the youngsters say on their picture calculators), we don't exactly take a telephone poll of 935 teens as empirical knowledge, so maybe it's possible that kids are pretty much the same as they've always been -- if slightly more distracted. One thing's for sure -- they'll never experience the pain of not knowing the lyrics to Rock Me Amadeus like we did.

In today's episode of "no surprises here," we look at a recent study published by Piper Jaffray & Company which attempts to take an intimate look inside the minds of high schoolers across the US. As you'd probably expect, none of the results were all that shocking. When asked about MP3 players, some 82-percent of those that already owned some form of DAP stated that it was an iPod, which was slightly up from last fall. Additionally, 64-percent of those surveyed admitted to downloading music illegally, which may actually be an (ever-so-slightly) positive figure considering that the percentage actually dropped from 72-percent in 2006. As for the iPhone, just 3-percent of students claimed that they owned one, but nearly 10-percent stated that they were looking to pick one up "within the next six months."

[Via CNET, image courtesy of MSN]