

Americans watch far more television than the rest of world - cwan
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2009/09/the_idiot_box.cfm

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tokenadult
An interesting chart. I thought I had read in international comparisons of
education that children (perhaps not adults) watch every bit as much
television in east Asia as they do in the United States, but play outside with
neighborhood friends less than American children do. But that would be from an
older source. It would be good to fact-check this, as I'm not completely
convinced that there is a lot less television-watching in Taiwan (the other
country where I have lived the longest, and not on the submitted chart) than
in the United States.

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hristov
One important point is that the data is for households, and the US have (i)
bigger households than most other industrialized countries (ii) definately
have more tvs per household than any other country. So these things might skew
the numbers in favor of the US.

But we definately watch a lot of TV.

I think one reason is that the US is probably the biggest homogenous TV market
(in temrs of advertising dollars) which allows marketing people to spend a lot
of money to craft advertisements and TV shows more specifically to the
audience and make them irresistable to us. You definately do not want to be in
the cross hairs of marketing people.

But I would advise all my fellow americans to do what I did .... do not have a
TV or if you have one do not connect it to a TV signal (connecting it to a
bluray player or netflix online is fine). You'd be amazed of all the free time
you get to waste on the net. Also you get to be that pretentious a-hole that
mentions he does not own a TV whereever someone mentions a tv show they like
so much. It's a win-win situation.

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teeja
We also created the Internet much more than the rest of the world. n'est-ce
pas?

