[qi:gigaom_icon_social_networking] The Federal Communications Commission’s workshops related to the National Broadband plan are a hotbed of data if one bothers to download the presentations various people and companies are making in them. One that caught my eye, from Verizon for today’s workshop, showed how much time Americans spend online. That amount has risen dramatically, but other activities listed haven’t decreased in the same proportion that our online time has increased. My guess is that we’re stealing most of our Internet time, not from TV watching or even from newspaper reading, but from family occasions, such as breakfast. Or maybe from sleeping, as we stay up late checking out tweets. Or perhaps phone time — instead of calling, we just visit friends’ blogs and personal pages. Where does your Internet time come from?
Well, just a thought but maybe people are actually stealing the time out of their work. Developer, designer, writers, editors..well probably anyone and everyone who works out of a desk and has internet access spends time in between work browsing, searching or networking on facebook/linkedin or buying and selling stocks on e-trade
Or maybe people are multitasking. Like listening to the radio and browsing the Internet. I know when parts of a show get boring I’ll just do some browsing until a more interesting scene comes up.
I’m pretty sure that people have ambient media running, either radio of some form or the electron fireplace. Is that multi-tasking really? I haven’t had a television for 15 years, or a landline for 10, so television is definitely not my thing, but it has become a vast wasteland of crap that doesn’t deserve attention. Mostly!
I read this report/graphic and I see that Verizon/Forrester missed the obvious: people are sleeping less and spending more time doing things.
It is also not clear what is the demographic of this group. I am pretty certain that a whole lot of people are not spending time on TV – this one shows flat. More and more people are going to online for their TV fix.
I traded the web for TV long ago, but I also spend far more than the 12 hours a week online. The average here likely skews pretty far from many of our reader’s habits.
If you are talking of how Internet usage has increased in a 24 hour-day, then TV consumption might not come down. But if you are talking about consumption-hours, then it could be more than 24 hours. I could be tweeting even as I am watching TV, accessing Facebook even as the radio is on. Then, you can see that our consumption hours could be as much as 26-28 hours in a day…
haha, good point. This is sort of sad but I can’t remember the last time I sat down to watch TV without my laptop :P
[...] but that has been at the cost of other activities like watching TV or reading a magazine offline. Here’s how the hours spent on the activity have changed since [...]
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