Time spent using other media

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One issue that is consistently raised in discussions of Internet use and time allocation is the impact that users’ Web-surfing habits (as well as the amount of time spent online) may have on traditional media. Canadians spend a sizeable chunk of their day in front of the television (approximately 2 hours on average during the diary day¹), and to what extent the Internet - as both an informational tool and source of entertainment - might cut into this popular pastime is a pertinent question.

This study finds that there is little in the way of significant differences among Internet users and non-users in terms of the time they spend watching television (Table 6). It is true that moderate Internet users were likely to spend a slightly shorter period of time watching T.V. (by just over 13 minutes during the diary day compared to non-users), but once controlling for social and demographic factors, the difference was no longer significant. Most interestingly, there was no significant difference between heavy Internet users and non-users. Although the data source does not track whether individual respondents cut their television viewing over a period of time, the findings indicate that heavy Internet users are in fact regular television viewers who still find time for this traditional medium in spite of their choice to go online. Although heavy Internet users were more likely to download music on the Internet, they also spent more time actively listening to music in traditional formats such as CDs, tapes, and records compared with both moderate users and non-users².

Table 6
Comparison of media use

An important issue for the media industry, as well as educators and others, is whether Internet users dedicate less time to reading traditional media. As sometimes found elsewhere (see for example Cole and Robinson 2002a, Pronovost 2002), the reverse was true. In fact, Internet users were likely to spend more time reading books than non-users of the Internet. Nearly half (48.1%) of heavy Internet users during the diary day indicated that they typically read a book at least once a month as a leisure activity, while this was the case for slightly fewer moderate users (44.1%) and non-users (38.6%)³.

Similarly, Internet use did not appear to deter users from other print media. Users and non-users spent similar amounts of time reading newspapers and magazines. Moderate users were in fact likely to spend slightly more time during the day with newspapers than non-users.

1. The average time that respondents reported watching television during the diary day may be lower than estimates from other sources, such as the Statistics Canada Television Viewing Databank. The databank is based on data collected from BBM, a private company which gathers audience data for the Canadian media industry. Differences in the estimates may occur for a number of reasons, including differences in the collection period, differences in collection units, different target populations, different reporting units, significantly lower response rates in BBM data, and differences in activity coding. In the United States, similar differences in estimates of television viewing time have been observed with data collected in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Time Use Survey and that reported by ratings services such as Nielsen Media Research (Galbi 2001). Readers interested in results from the Statistics Canada Television Viewing Databank may refer to Television Viewing: Data Tables, Statistics Canada Cat. No. 87F0006XIE, available at: www.statcan.ca.

2. Listening activities (and in particular radio listening) are often secondary activities performed simultaneously with other tasks (Galbi 2001). As the time diary only captured one activity at any given time, figures in Table 6 do not include time spent listening to music and the radio while doing other primary activities (e.g., driving, household chores).

3. Both moderate and heavy Internet users were significantly different from non-users in this regard, at a 95% level of confidence (p < .05).