People watched more TV in a recession, duh.

    mericans still watch an absolutely astounding amount of traditional television. In fact, television viewing didn’t peak until 2009-2010, when the average American household watched 8 hours and 55 minutes of TV per day. And the ’00s saw the greatest growth in TV viewing time of any decade since Nielsen began keeping track in 1949-1950: Americans watched 1 hour and 23 minutes more television at the end of the decade than at the beginning. Run the numbers and you’ll find that 32 percent of the increase in viewing time from the birth of television to its peak occurred in the first years of the 21st century.

    Over the last 8 years, all the new, non-TV things—Facebook, phones, YouTube, Netflix—have only cut about an hour per day from the dizzying amount of TV that the average household watches. Americans are still watching more than 7 hours and 50 minutes per household per day.



_refugee_:

I kinda love TV. Commercials are perks. I'm not trying to say that I like commercials or want to watch them, but they're very conveniently spaced breaks so you can wander off and do something else and not lose track of what's going on so much. I realized I often put TV on to only half-watch it. One cannot half-watch Netflix shows if one cares about them at all.

also like

    The thing that Americans do most often with their free time is not cooking or exercising or hiking or any other seemingly salutary activity

You can't exercise for 8 hours a day people would call you compulsive. You can't cook for 8 hours a day people would call you fat. Or your job would be to be a chef.

You could maybe read 8 hours a day, and I think TV should be compared more to reading than to other activities as I feel the two are most equitable in nature.

Lots of things that are really good for you, you just can't do for 8 hours at a time. That was a silly, stupid sentence of the author's.


posted 2156 days ago