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| This Thursday, April 4, 2013, photo shows the HTC First phone with the new Facebook interface is shown at the Facebook Headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez) | AP |
What the application can’t tell me, however, is what I gave up to do
so. Would I have been working? Sleeping? Speaking with friends, rather
than stalking them?
The answer is all of the above, according to Scott Wallsten, an economist and researcher at the Technology Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank.
In his new report “What Are We Not Doing When We’re Online,”
Wallsten used eight years of federal data on Americans’ leisure
activities to calculate the cost of all the time we spend on the Web.
While researchers have long debated what we give up to surf social
media or get lost on Google, Wallsten has offered a definitive and
detailed look at how apps and websites eat away at other pursuits. The
short answer: Facebook’s gain may be our employers’ -- and friends’ --
loss.
By Wallsten’s estimate, every hour we give to online leisure
pursuits, including browsing Facebook or searching Google, corresponds
to 16 fewer minutes working, 7 fewer minutes sleeping and 17 fewer
minutes for all other leisure activities, including going to parties,
watching TV and visiting museums.
Each hour I spent this month on Facebook and Twitter would have eaten
up three minutes of offline socializing, and an additional 2.4 minutes
of “relaxing and thinking," according to the report's calculations.
Intriguingly,
Wallsten’s findings suggest not only that we’re giving up face time to
hang out online, but that we see in-person socializing as
interchangeable with online interactions. As we spend more time hanging
out on the Internet, we spend less time hanging out offline.
“The results suggest that people do view online and offline
socializing to be somewhat substitutable,” Wallsten noted in an
interview. In his report, he wrote that the findings demonstrate, “a
cost of online activity is less time spent with other people.”
Wallsten’s findings are based on data collected from 2003 to 2011 by the American Time Use Survey,
an annual poll of 13,000 Americans launched in 2003 by the Bureau of
Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census. The survey aims to find
“nationally representative estimates of how, where and with whom
Americans spend their time.”
From 2003 to 2011, we doubled the share of free time we spent on
computers from 8 minutes to 13 minutes a day, while our total daily
leisure time stayed constant at about five hours.
Thirteen minutes may seem bizarrely small for online leisure, given the hours that Gmail and Netflix can consume. Indeed, because the survey tracks what we do -- not which device we’re doing it on -- email, gaming and watching YouTube videos are excluded from that total and tallied in separate categories. Those 13 minutes of computer-based leisure time include activities like search and social networking, as well as smartphone use, according to Wellsten. (A major limitation of the data, however, is it does not account for multitasking.)
Thirteen minutes may seem bizarrely small for online leisure, given the hours that Gmail and Netflix can consume. Indeed, because the survey tracks what we do -- not which device we’re doing it on -- email, gaming and watching YouTube videos are excluded from that total and tallied in separate categories. Those 13 minutes of computer-based leisure time include activities like search and social networking, as well as smartphone use, according to Wellsten. (A major limitation of the data, however, is it does not account for multitasking.)
The report aims to better quantify the wealth-creating potential of
the Internet by probing the opportunity costs of innovation and Web
services. While services like Google and Facebook may not require credit
cards, they're hardly "free." As the study noted, a minute on those
sites costs seconds elsewhere. For teens ages 15 to 19, an hour online
means 18 fewer minutes spent on educational activities. For Americans
ages 25 to 39, an hour of leisure time online comes at the expense of 20
minutes of work.
"The crowd-out effect is sufficiently large that understanding the
true economic effects of the Internet must take them into account,"
wrote Wellsten. If not, economists are likely to "over-estimate the
incremental economic surplus created by the Internet."
"My results also suggest that other offline leisure activities that involve interacting with other people are crowded out by online leisure: attending parties and attending cultural events and going to museums are all negatively correlated with online leisure," wrote Wallsten.
It's not only economists who should take note. Anyone who's ever
questioned social media's influence on our social lives should give
special attention to Wellsten's conclusions.
Even as computer-based leisure activities rise, the 13 minutes they
consume each day pale in comparison to how much time we spend watching
television, which still accounts for more than half of Americans’ daily
leisure time.
As Wellsten noted, “What we still like to do more than anything else is sitting down and watching a screen.”
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