The trend in internet use

There are no surprises in the direction, but the numbers are quite interesting.  The New York Times reports on a recent survey of how people are using their time:

The average Internet user in the United States spends three hours a day online, with much of that time devoted to work and more than half of it to communications, according to a survey conducted by a group of political scientists.

The survey found that use of the Internet has displaced television watching and a range of other activities. Internet users watch television for one hour and 42 minutes a day, compared with the national average of two hours, said Norman H. Nie, director of the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society, a research group that has been exploring the social consequences of the Internet.

A Hugh Hewitt reader writes:

"... the real news of the piece is found by a longitudinal  comparison of the two studies, done five years apart.   In the previous  study , around 4% of respondents used the internet  for 3 or more hours a day. In the current  survey , at a minimum, 31% of respondents were online for 3 or more hours a day. This is a 50% annual rate of growth of heavy internet users over the last five years! (In actuality, the total of heavy internet users is probably even higher than that, since to be considered an "internet user" for the purposes of the current survey, you had to answer "yes" to having used the internet the day prior to being surveyed.)....Heavy  internet users have been doubling every two years of  late. The use of the internet as a main political campaign news source has doubled over the last five years, and   this growth rate has been weighted down by virtual non-usage of the internet by people over 65 for political news.  Therefore, the growth rate of people using the internet for input into political decision-making will increase over the next election cycles, as the internet becomes, in effect, interactive TV and more, for the majority of Americans.

It's little wonder that institutions are establishing their presence on the internet in a more human and interactive way -- via blogs.