Abstract

Three studies of use of a variety of traditional and digital media in “Middletown” are reported: a telephone survey, a diary study, and an observation study.

The studies reveal people spend more that double (129.7 percent) the time with the media than they think they do – 11.7 hours a day in total – and while the discrepancies between perceived use and actual use are often huge, they’re also inconsistent across and even within media. Because of media multitasking, total time in media usage is less than the sum of its parts. Summing all media use by medium results in a staggering 15.4 hours per day.

The least media-active person we observed spend five and a quarter hours with the media; the most active person spend over 17 hours – essentially every waking moment – with the media.

Diary tabulations of media use documented more usage than did the telephone survey, but it was still 12.9 percent below observed use. Diary data collection reported an average 9.5 hours a day of media use – or 10.8 hours by summing individual media.

Observation revealed that during almost a quarter of the media day (23.7 percent), people use at least two media at the same time. At 12.4 percent, diaries failed to pick up almost half the simultaneous multiple media usage that observation recorded.

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