People and the Internet - The Shift To High-tech Entertainment

The graph shows the hours spent per person per year on selected entertainment. Figures come from the Communications Industry Forecast by Veronis, Suhler & Associates. Data for 2000 and 2001 are projected.

The figures show how quickly the Internet and home video games have found a place in our lives. The average estimated time spent online jumped from 5 hours per person in 2000 to 162 hours per person in 2001. Playing video games saw a steady increase as well; average per-person time jumped from an estimated 22 hours to 93 hours a year.

It's interesting to see how this compares to other leisure activities. The champion of home entertainment is still television (not shown) which has seen only a minor increase in time spent watching since the 1,580 hours estimated to have been spent on it in 1995. We are spending more time listening to music, true; however, generally we are "multi-tasking" (doing something else at the same time). Also, with the growth of online music services and music trading, there could be a link between the music and Internet categories.

So, what's going on here? Clearly, more items are competing for leisure time. The Internet and video games have stolen away time spent reading; we're spending less time, per person, on books and newspapers. Newspapers in particular saw a drop in time used. Why? We get our news and social commentary from television, radio, and online sources. Indeed, the newspaper industry has seen a rash of consolidations and a drop in circulation and advertising. But research offers one interesting anomaly: Internet users — and particularly those who read their news online — are more likely than other Americans to be print newspaper readers, too, according to the Newspaper Association of America and Research Alert.

Our leisure time increasingly is becoming ordered around the television and computer: either in pay television and high-definition TV sets or in MP3 players and digital picture processing. So, who is online? What do they do there?

The following panels will present data on the demographics of the online world.

Sources: "Entertainment & Leisure." Research Alert, January 5, 2001, p. 6. U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2001, Washington D.C. 2001.