If you are reading this as you surf the internet while the television is on, the radio is playing and you are listening to music on your personal stereo, you are already tapping into the American way of media multitasking.
Data released by the United States Census Bureau on Friday forecasts that Americans will spend a total of 65 days watching TV next year and 41 days listening to the radio. A week each will be given to reading newspapers and surfing the internet.
All that reading, surfing and listening will occupy 3 518 hours of the average American adult’s year — the equivalent of almost five months. But such indolence doesn’t come cheap. The average American, says the survey, will spend $936 (about R6 550) on media in the coming year.
The information comes in the 126th statistical abstract, which collates data from Census Bureau studies as well as international organisations, non-profit groups and the private sector. The abstract, which has been published most years since 1878, makes comparisons with previous years as well as providing forecasts.
Internet boom
Thus the survey shows that 97-million adult internet users looked for news online in 2005, 92-million bought a product online and 91-million made an online travel reservation. About 16-million Americans used a social or professional networking site such as MySpace, and 13-million created a blog in 2005, with 39-million reading someone else’s blog.
The information on internet usage is based on telephone surveys of 2 500 US adults carried out in September 2005 by the Pew Research Centre. The survey also showed that 25-million Americans downloaded videos to their computers, and 24-million remixed material found online to make their own creation.
Despite much speculation about the death of old media and the rise of the new, reading a newspaper and surfing the internet will each consume the same amount of the average American adult’s time next year, the Census Bureau says.
Nevertheless, a week spent reading the news on the internet represents a significant change in habits. Ten years ago, according to a Pew report in the summer, one in 50 Americans regularly got news from the internet. Today the figure is one in three. But the figures show that the rate of increase in online news readership has slowed since 2000, suggesting, says the report, that ”online news has evolved as a supplemental source that is used along with traditional news media outlets. It is valued most for headlines and convenience.”
”This new Census Bureau material highlights just how dramatically we have moved into the information age,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew internet and American life project.
”Pick any metric you like and you’ll see that the volume of information and media in people’s lives has grown, the velocity of that information as it circulates in their lives has increased, and the variety of information has exploded.”
Food and drink
Elsewhere the Census Bureau statistics showed that people in US households drank an average of 88 litres of bottled water in 2004, compared with 10 litres each in 1980. But while some were enjoying mountain-fresh water, others were struggling to get enough food. Out of 112-million households, 11,9-million were deemed ”food insecure” in a 2004 survey by the US Department of Agriculture.
Food insecure is defined as having ”limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways”. The figures do not include homeless people.
The lives of those with homes were often made uncomfortable by nasty smells. In 2005, residents of 3,7-million housing units said that they were bothered by odours in the neighbourhood.
At the other extreme, the US has more millionaires than ever before — 3,5-million of them, according to Internal Revenue Service figures published at the end of last year. More than half a million live in California.
And as the ranks of the rich have increased, so the beliefs and aspirations of the young have evolved. In 1970, 85% of university entrants thought abortion should be legalised, 59% thought capital punishment should be abolished and 57% aimed to keep up with political affairs. By 2005, those figures had fallen to 55% in favour of legalised abortion, 33% against capital punishment, and 36% who aimed to follow politics.
And while in 1970, 79% of university entrants said they had a personal objective of ”developing a meaningful philosophy of life”, by last year 75% defined their objective as ”being very well off financially”.
The first survey of 1878: Aliens, postmasters and budding industry
The US Census Bureau issued its first statistical aggregate in 1878. ”Sir,” wrote the Treasury secretary, John Sherman, in a letter to the speaker of the House of Representatives, Samuel Randall, ”I have the honour to transmit … a statistical abstract … this abstract embraces tables in regard to finance, coinage, commerce, immigration, tonnage and navigation, the postal service, public lands, railroads, agriculture and mining.”
The 160-page document goes on to catalogue a very different world from this week’s study.
The lists of ”Alien Passengers Arrived in the United States from Foreign Countries between 1861 and 1870” shows that the largest group, 1,1-million, came from the British Isles. A further million came from the rest of Europe, mostly from Germany, although three Corsicans and eight Maltese also made it across the Atlantic. Unlike today, Asia and Latin America made modest contributions, with 363 000 arriving from the ”Americas” and 68 000 from Asia.
Of the 38,5-million population recorded in the 1870 census, the bulk lived in the eastern states, with New York having the largest population, 4,4-million. Pennsylvania, with 3,8-million, was close behind.
The population figures show the country before the huge expansion to the west. Outside California — misspelled as ”Caliofrnia” in the official table — which had a population of 500 000, the most populous of the western states was New Mexico, with 96 000.
That population relied on the postal service to communicate. In 1790, the data shows, the postal service had 75 post offices in the entire nation, offering 3 000km of post routes and taking almost $38 000 in revenue. By 1878 there were more than 39 000 post offices serving 480 000km of post routes and taking in $29-million.
Some of that mail and much of the population would travel by railway, with the number of kilometres of railway in the country rising from 35 in 1830 to 126 400 by 1879.
The year also saw the births of a number of figures who would help to define America’s transition into the modern age: the poet Carl Sandburg, the African-American boxer Jack Johnson, the film actor Lionel Barrymore, the dancer Isadora Duncan and the writer and social activist Upton Sinclair were all born in 1878. — Guardian Unlimited Â