Social Networks Dominate Our Online Time
This should come as no surprise to those of us with bloodshot eyes and productivity problems: social networks now account for 23 percent of time online for Americans. That’s twice as much time as is spent playing online games.
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No doubt, some super-users and digital hermits inhabit the high and low fringes of that statistic, but it’s still a significant number. That means that nearly a quarter of online activity is flowing through social media sites.
While this says a lot for how people are spending their time online, I think it’s merely another sign that Americans (and citizens of other industrialized nations) are migrating more of their overall leisure time into online spaces. Time spent online is quickly catching up with — and surpassing — TV watching, the traditional monolith that dominates our free time.
Still, social media is shaping the way we consume traditional entertainment, from games to movies to books. I hardly believe that everyone is spending that time posting on one another’s Facebook walls or consuming mass numbers of tweets.
What do you spend your time doing on social networks? Is it entertainment? Activism? Cat pictures? What do you wish you could integrate into your social media world that you currently can’t?
