IT Use and Social/Media Time Displacement
Each new Information Technology (IT) takes time away from other daily activities. Three highly-publicized early studies of the initial impact of Information Technology indicated it was having negative effects on both social life and mass media use. However, a number of national surveys since then – from the Pew Center, the General Social Survey (GSS), the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA), and the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) -- have not replicated these results. Indeed, they find support for Internet and other IT use sometimes being associated with increased social life and media use (especially reading). Moreover, this finding continues to hold after education, income, age and other predictors of social life and mass media use are controlled.