As new media continue to be introduced, they become especially troubling for educators, who fear that children will grow up as zombies, lacking creativity, inspiration, and liter acy?and becoming sedentary and overweight (Cordes and Miller 2000; Goodenough 2008; Healy 1998). Many worried previously that television would have similar negative impacts, but research has shown that children learn from media just as they have from the natural world around them, so that the message is more important than the medium (Fisch 2004). This brief article analyzes how media use is nested in children's everyday lives. In particular, it focuses on the hypothesis of media displacement of other activities. According to the displacement hypothesis, media displace creative activities (such as free play), achievement-related activities (like reading and studying), and physical activ ities (like sports or hiking) (Neuman 1995). In this article, "play" refers to unstructured noncomputer leisure-time activities not directly related to school, including indoor and outdoor play. Achievement-related activities (such as studying and reading) are the "work" of children in middle childhood. Physical activities include time in structured sports and in walking/hiking outdoors. Time spent in a new activity has to come from another previous activity, leading to the expectation that many other activities will decline. However, it is expected that time will come from either functionally equivalent activities (such as other types of play), or from activities to which considerable time is now spent and that would, therefore, be only minimally affected by a small reduction in other time, such as sleep. Finally, new media may simply displace older media use. What, then, are the implications of children's increased exposure to new media for their everyday lives, especially valuable activities they should be doing, such as playing, reading and studying?