“You can say this for the technological revolution; it’s cut way down on television.” So writes Rebecca Christian in a column for the Telegraph Herald in Dubuque. She’s not alone in assuming that the increasing amount of time we devote to the web is reducing the time we spend watching TV. It’s a common assumption. And, like many common assumptions, it’s wrong. Despite the rise of digital media – or perhaps because of it – Americans are watching more TV than ever.

The Nielsen Company has been tracking media use for decades, and it reported last year that in the first quarter of 2009, the amount of time Americans spend watching TV hit its highest level ever – the average American was watching 156 hours and 24 minutes of TV a month. Now, Nielsen has come out with an update for the first quarter of 2010. Once again, TV viewing has hit a new record, with the average American now watching 158 hours and 25 minutes of TV a month, a gain of 2 hours in just the past twelve months. Although two-thirds of Americans now have broadband Internet access at home, TV viewing continues its seemingly inexorable rise.

And the Nielsen TV numbers actually understate our consumption of video programming, because the time we spend viewing video on our computers and cell phones is also going up. The average American with Internet access is now watching 3 hours and 10 minutes of video on Net-connected computers every month, Nielsen reports, and the average American with a video-capable cell phone is watching on additional 3 hours and 37 minutes of video on his or her phone every month. Not surprisingly, expanding people’s access to video programming increases their consumption of that programming. The spread of high-definition digital TVs and broadcasts appears to be another factor propelling TV viewing upward, says Nielsen.

What about the young? Surely, so-called “digital natives” are watching less TV, right? Nope. The young, too, continue to ratchet up their TV viewing. A recent study of media habits by Deloitte showed, in fact, that over the past year people in the 14-to-26 age bracket increased their TV watching by a greater percentage than any other age group. An extensive Kaiser Family Foundation study released earlier this year found that while young people appear to be spending a little less time in front of TV sets today than they did five years ago, that decline is offset by increased viewing of television programming on computers, cell phones, and iPods. Overall, “the proliferation of new ways to consume TV content has actually led to an increase of 38 minutes of daily TV consumption” by the young, reports Kaiser. Nielsen, too, finds that TV viewing continues to rise among children, teens, and young adults.

What about the rise of amateur media production, abetted by sites like YouTube? That trend, at least, must be shifting us away from media consumption. Wrong again. As Bradley Bloch explained in a recent Huffington Post article, the ease with which amateur media productions can be distributed online actually has the paradoxical effect of increasing people’s media consumption even more than it increases their media production. “Even if we count posting a LOLcat as a creative act,” observes Bloch, “there are many more people looking at LOLcats than there are creating them.” Bloch runs the numbers on one oft-viewed YouTube entertainment: “One of the most popular videos on YouTube, ‘Charlie bit my finger – again!’ depicting a boy sticking his fingers in his little brother’s mouth, has been viewed 211 million times. Something that took 56 seconds to create – and which was only intended to be seen by the boys’ godfather – has sucked up the equivalent of 1600 people working 40 hours a week for a year. Now that’s leverage.” By giving us easy and free access to millions of short-form video programs, the web allows us to cram ever more video-viewing into the nooks and crannies of our daily lives.

To give an honest accounting of the effects of the Net on media consumption, you need to add the amount of time that people spend consuming web media to the amount of time they already spend consuming TV and other traditional media. Once you do that, it becomes clear that the arrival of the web has not reduced the time people spend consuming media but increased it substantially. As consumption-oriented Internet devices, like the iPad, grow more popular, we will likely see an even greater growth in media consumption. The web, in other words, marks a continuation of a long-term cultural trend, not a reversal of it.

Take it away, Charlie:

“Not too long ago I was on it all day long,” writes Juan Rodriguez in an essay in the Montreal Gazette, “it” being the Internet. “I felt buzzed and strangely empty.” But when Rodriguez, a freelance writer, moved into a new apartment last year, he didn’t bring the Net with him:

Unhooking myself from the Net started as an experiment, after depending on it for work and recreation for nearly 20 years. If humans are basically creatures of habit, I wanted to know whether I could survive without being addicted to the World Wide Web. According to some friends and colleagues, this draconian act has transformed me into something akin to an antisocial psychopath. And stupid, too, as I am in the newspaper business, which places a premium on being up-to-date.

Rodriguez hasn’t gone entirely off-line. He spends an hour or two a day at an Internet cafe, catching up on email and doing research. But he’s finding that being disconnected most of the time is opening doors that the Net had closed:

Once I eliminated the Internet from my apartment, I rediscovered the joys of reading books (not blogs). It’s a feeling I haven’t experienced this intensely since my adolescence, when I devoured books, like a human sponge with a lust for everything … Not having the Internet at home has done wonders for my self-image – and also played havoc with it. I imagine myself as a teenage rebel again, a non-conformist, Bucking the System … And, somehow, the less I sense my life being “tracked” online, the more secure and independent – free? – I feel, at least for a little while.

Read it.

The New Republic is today running my review of Tom Bissell’s latest book, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. It begins:

Tom Bissell is a Renaissance Man for our out-of-joint time. In addition to being a versatile and exuberant writer, a restless if ennui-ridden globetrotter, and a dedicated chewer of tobacco and smoker of pot, he is a prodigiously gifted slayer of zombies and other digitized demons …

Read on.

Paul Graham has a perceptive post on what he terms “the acceleration of addiction,” describing how technological progress, by giving us more of what we want, will naturally tend to amplify compulsive behavior:

Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider technological progress good. If some new technique makes solar cells x% more efficient, that seems strictly better. When progress concentrates something we don’t want to want—when it transforms opium into heroin—it seems bad. But it’s the same process at work. No one doubts this process is accelerating, which means increasing numbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like too much.

I hadn’t thought about it in those terms before, but of course he’s right – and his observation explains a lot (though he overlooks how commercial interests will tend to amplify the amplification process, as companies compete to profit from our compulsions). The recent evolution of the web, as a consumer technology, can to a considerable degree be seen as the product of the competition among technology companies – Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. – to feed our native and not necessarily rational craving for new information.

I had the pleasure last month of talking about The Shallows with Christopher Lydon, a superb interviewer, in his offices near Charles Street in Boston. Lydon has a very different view of the Web than I do, which, combined with his sympathetic reading of the book, made for, I think, a particularly good conversation. You can listen to it, via Lydon’s Brown University-based Radio Open Source program, here.

The National Geographic Assignment Blog is featuring a short excerpt from my book The Shallows, illustrated with some photographs from National Geographic photographers. In the excerpt, I look at the map as an early example of an intellectual technology that both reflects and disseminates a new way of thinking. Read it.

As software obviates the need for Chinese to sketch by hand the characters that make up their written language, they are coming to realize that those characters are being erased from their memories. Barbara Demick recently reported on this “long descent into forgetfulness” in the Los Angeles Times:

This is a strange new form of illiteracy — or, more exactly, dysgraphia, the inability to write — that is peculiar to China … The more gadgets people own — cellphones, smart phones, computers — the less often they go through the elaborate sequence of strokes that make up Chinese characters. Whether on their computers or texting on phones, most Chinese use a system where they type out the sound of the word in Pinyin, the most commonly used Romanization system — and presto, they are given a choice of characters to use.

Victor Mair, a professor of Chinese language and literature at Penn, calls it an epidemic of “character amnesia”:

Because of their complexity and multiplicity, writing Chinese characters correctly is a highly neuromuscular task. One simply has to practice them hundreds and hundreds of times to master them. And, as with playing a musical instrument like a violin or a piano, one must practice writing them regularly or one’s control over them will simply evaporate … Unlike aphasia, a type of language disorder that usually occurs suddenly because of physical injury, the impairment brought about by frequent cellphone checking is gradual. Nonetheless, the attrition that results is just as real as that brought about by dysphasia (limited aphasia).

Some of the many commenters on Mair’s post suggest that the complex, character-based system of writing is cumbersome and ill-suited to our efficiency-hungry world. Its eventual replacement by a simpler system of Roman letters, they argue, would be an example of progress. Others worry about a loss of one of the foundations of Chinese culture: “Is it worth throwing out 3,000 years of knowledge and literature for some amount of greater efficiency?”

The shift in Chinese writing practices, and the cognitive skills that underpin them, may be particularly dramatic, but it is just the latest instance of a recurring pattern in human history: the arrival of a new tool for reading or writing changes language, which in turn (as Walter J. Ong, among others, pointed out) changes thought. We adopt the new tools for various good reasons – efficiency and convenience being prominent ones – and the changes in language and thinking come as side effects, unplanned and usually unanticipated.