Source : Calgary Herald

We're a nation of couch potatoes, according to a new report that found Canadian adults age 18 and over watch more than four hours of TV a day on average.

Children age two to 11 spend about 2.5 hours a day in front of the set, the report found, while teens 12 to 17 watch about the same amount as younger children.

The figures are contained in the first of an annual series of industry reports from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.

They are much higher than those offered by Statistics Canada, which reports that Canadians age 20 and over averaged 2.1 hours of TV a day in 2005, down slightly from 20 years earlier.

CRTC says the discrepancy occurs because Statistics Canada asks people to self-report how much time they watch TV throughout the year, while the company that provided viewership data to the CRTC collects it automatically with an electronic meter, often during sweeps week when networks can measure their biggest audiences to set advertising rates.

"(TV) is so double-edged -- it has really great things and really not so great things, and it all depends on how you use it," says Arlene Moscovitch, who authored a pair of reports on electronic media use for the Vanier Institute of the Family.

Between the 1998 report and the one released last fall, she says the biggest change she noted was the rise in "individualistic" media use, with family members increasingly cocooned in electronic bubbles that isolate them from each other.

"Whereas before you might have that one TV set and everyone sits around it or they fight over what they're going to watch, now you've got three, four and sometimes even five TVs in a single household," she says, noting that often leaves even young children to watch programs without supervision or discussion of what they're seeing.

In terms of computer use, the CRTC found that anglophones spend more time online than their French counterparts, at 13.4 hours per week compared to 9.8 hours. Both figures have been growing consistently over the last decade, rising from 11.7 and 9.1 hours, respectively, in 2005. User-generated content is more popular online than professionally produced programs, the commission says.

While MP3 player ownership is on the rise (31 per cent of Canadians last year, compared to 27 per cent the year before), radio listening is slipping -- except among the older age groups.

Canadians age 12 and up spend just over 2.5 hours a day on average listening to the radio or other services, the commission found, but that average conceals a low of one hour a day among teens and a high of just over three hours a day for the 50-plus crowd.

© Calgary Herald