"One of the main findings predicts that Americans will be more electronically inclined -- or enslaved -- than ever in 2007. They'll be parked in front of their TVs for 65days and on the Internet for more than a week, according to projections from a communications industry forecast." - San Francisco Chronicle (Dec 2006)
Note: 65 days works out to about 4:16 per day
(65 x 24 hrs / 365 days)
Bureau of Labor Statistics
"Time spent in leisure and sports activities for the civilian population by selected characteristics, 2006 annual averages" - United States Department of Labor
Note: the averages are lower than the Census or Neilson. Presumably this is because the labor averages don't include children and because of overlap, i.e. doing housework, or homework, etc. while watching TV.
Weekdays &
Weekends &
Holidays
averaged together
Leisure
Hours
Watching TV
Hours
&
Percentage of Leisure
Reading
Hours
&
Percentage of Leisure
Men
5.47
2.80
51%
0.31
6%
Women
4.72
2.36
50%
0.42
9%
Educational Attainment:
Leisure
TV
Reading
Less than high school
6.01
3.70
62%
0.25
4%
High school,
no college
5.57
3.22
58%
0.37
7%
Some college,
Associate deg
4.76
2.40
50%
0.45
9%
Bachelor's
or higher
4.33
1.85
43%
0.51
12%
Employment Status:
Leisure
TV
Reading
Full-time
4.09
2.03
50%
0.23
6%
Part-time
4.52
2.15
48%
0.34
8%
Not empoyed
6.75
3.53
52%
0.55
8%
Earnings of full-time wage and salary workers:
Leisure
TV
Reading
$0 to
$23,920
4.25
2.19
52%
0.20
5%
$23,921 to
$36,920
4.22
2.14
51%
0.19
5%
$36,972 to
$57,200
4.15
2.12
51%
0.23
6%
$57,252
and higher
3.88
1.74
45%
0.33
9%
Age:
Leisure
TV
Reading
15 yrs & Over
5.90
2.58
44%
0.36
6%
15 to 19 yrs
5.40
2.11
39%
0.11
2%
20 to 24 yrs
5.03
2.16
43%
0.17
3%
25 to 34 yrs
4.30
2.20
51%
0.16
4%
35 to 44 yrs
4.09
2.11
52%
0.22
5%
45 to 54 yrs
4.52
2.38
53%
0.32
7%
55 to 64 yrs
5.41
2.89
53%
0.55
10%
65 to 74 yrs
6.97
3.86
55%
0.76
11%
75 yrs & Over
7.82
4.21
54%
1.08
14%
Note: numbers are approximate, see link to original table for exact numbers.
Weekdays and weekends were averaged together.
((weekdays x 5) + (weekends x 2))/ 6.97
Also, I assumed that there was an equal number of women and men. ((women + men) / 2)
"In 15 of the 18 countries for which data were collected, broadcast-TV viewing increased from 1997 to 2005. Only in Spain, New Zealand and South Korea did people watch less." - The Economist (July 2007)
"A major study that compared 10 communities with or without television revealed that television viewing had the greatest impact on other media use, such as comic reading, listening to the radio, and going to the movies.17 Television viewing had little influence on the time that children spent reading books or doing homework, even during its early introductory stages." - AAP Pediatrics (Feb 2006)
So basically the authors concluded that the hours that children spend watching television did not displace reading because reading comic books does not count as "reading". Also note their term "even during its early introductory stages". During TV's early introductory stages people (adults and children) watched much less TV than is common today.
"The most striking results were generational. In general, older Dutch people read more. It would be natural to infer from this that each generation reads more as it ages, and, indeed, the researchers found something like this to be the case for earlier generations. But, with later ones, the age-related growth in reading dwindled. The turning point seems to have come with the generation born in the nineteen-forties. By 1995, a Dutch college graduate born after 1969 was likely to spend fewer hours reading each week than a little-educated person born before 1950. As far as reading habits were concerned, academic credentials mattered less than whether a person had been raised in the era of television. The N.E.A., in its twenty years of data, has found a similar pattern. Between 1982 and 2002, the percentage of Americans who read literature declined not only in every age group but in every generation—even in those moving from youth into middle age, which is often considered the most fertile time of life for reading. We are reading less as we age, and we are reading less than people who were our age ten or twenty years ago." - The New Yorker (Dec 2007)
