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Census Bureau Survey of Media Usage
Posted on Friday, December 15, 2006 at 10:39 AM by Jason Barker
The Associated Press is reporting a new survey by the Census Bureau of average yearly and daily usage of various media by Americans.
According to the survey, the average American spends nine hours interacting in some way with media each day; nearly half of this is spent watching television. The forms of media whose use increased over the last year are (in average hours used per year):
- 1,555 watching television, up from 1,467 in 2000.
- 974 listening to the radio, up from 942 in 2000.
- 195 using the Internet, up from 104.
- 86 playing video games, up from 64.
Printed media (newspapers, magazines, and books) all experienced declines in use: newspaper readership declined approximately 13 percent, magazine readership declined approximately 10 percent, and book readership declined approximately one percent.
While there is little new in these general trends, they nonetheless generate some important areas of thought regarding online publications like our interactive Bible studies.
The time spent on Internet usage experienced the greatest increase of all media: approximately 43 percent. Thus, while reading of printed media has decreased, use of the Internet - which, for all its audio and video elements, is still overwhelmingly a text-based medium - has increased dramatically.
This means that the most promising future growth area for publishing is online (a fact heavily studied by scholars such as those affiliated with the Institute for the Future of the Book). Furthermore, as I examined in my MA thesis, hypermedia is particularly well suited for Bible studies. Therefore, current work in online multimedia Bible studies is building a foundation for later online Orthodox publications in a medium that the current generation of youth - and their descendents - are most likely to utilize.
At the same time, however, online publishing suffers from a significant problem afflicting all text-based media: the general move away from extended text documents to reduced text and increased audio-visual media. In my next post I'll briefly talk about some of the implications this trend has for online Bible study, and how I believe we should respond.
Edited on: Friday, December 15, 2006 7:30 PMPosted in Miscellaneous