How much media do you think you consume every day? Most of us probably greatly underestimate the amount of media we think we take part in because it is so ingrained in our lives. Between TV, smartphones, social media, having everything online as well as the traditional forms of media, we engage with the media for about half our day. If you take a look at this link, you can see a statistical breakdown of the average media usage for a single person per day. This amazed me that we spend about 12 hours a day with media, but when I started to think about it made sense. We need the Internet or our smartphones to do so many things today from banking to shopping that we would be lost without them. Many jobs now involve media too, so sometimes the only time you can get away from it is when you are asleep.
If this statistic was made for 1960 instead of 2015, I think the results would be very different. Obviously there would be no Internet or smartphones and there would be a lot less total consumption. Television, radio, and newspapers would be the main sources of media and radio and newspapers would take up a much greater portion than they do today. But 55 years ago, it was not as much a part of their lives. Not nearly as many people participated in the media for their jobs or did they come home and surf the Internet for hours. Even over the past 5 years the amount and how we engage with media has drastically changed. You can check out this link to see charts and more statistics of this change. In 2005, 12% of young adults used social media. Ten years later, 90% of young adults use some form of social media. Between 2005 and 2015, we went from about one tenth of the country using this relatively new type of media to only one tenth not using it. It seems that we are consuming media from the time we wake up until the time we go to sleep. Will we just continually increase our media consumption over the next few years? I don’t really know how much more media we can pack into our days unless we start to use it in our sleep, but with this trend in media consumption, it looks like it is in our lives to stay. But I think it is important to take break from all the technology for a day or even just a few hours and look out into the really world and see what you are missing from behind the screen.
Principles of Media Blog 