Day 29

AO Scott's article in last Sunday's Times Magazine, "The Screening of America," contains an infographic with the amounts of time people spend per year using various media. The article itself is remarkably ho-hum, regurgitated metacommentary on the state of film/video/television viewing, how and where it's done.

The graphic, though, I find far more interesting. Particularly because my data for the top and bottom categories would be so extremely different. I can predict with pretty good certainty that I'll have spent somewhere over 300 hours at the "box office," more than 25 times the average amount per person in 2007, and almost certainly no more than 50 hours watching "cable/satellite TV." Although vacation time spent with family could push me a bit over that, I'd still be comfortably less than 10% of the national average.*

I would probably vary less widely, though still not an insignificant amount, on broadcast TV, online, video games, and mobile (I don't really like watching anything smaller than a laptop, assuming that doesn't qualify), but home video/DVD is about right on the mark. It's tempting to try to interpret the categories as descending from least to most intentional, but that may be misguided for a number of reasons.

*The total consumption comes 40 hrs/wk. It's difficult to discern precisely how much overlap this entails, but certainly some of the hours spent reading magazines (why is there a single reading activity included here?) must simultaneously be spent watching one of these other screens. I'm assuming "online" means watching video online because 3.5 hrs/wk seems extremely small for all activities.