> I mean, who else has the time to sit at home playing Facebook games, but the lack of motivation to go and do something more worthwhile?
Is a bit more complicated. On a broader perspective, this pattern usage of Facebook is entertainment exactly like watching TV is (you even get the ads!).
Considering that, based on the first statistic I've found on Google [0], the average American spends hours every day in front of a TV (even if not 5, 3/4 would be alarming), then there is a social problem, more than an individual one.
Averages mean something on a well defined graph, like a bell curve, especially with some extra numbers like std deviation.
I find it nearly impossible to find a percentile graph of something like hours viewed along Y-axis and percentile population along the X. An excellent startup idea would be the very hard task of a search engine that can find graphs of a given X vs Y.
Anyway, based on what little I can find, TV watching is absolutely not a bell curve as "young people" average only 2 or so hours per day and the elderly average over a working day per day (in excess of 8 hours per day of TV over 60 years old).
My strong suspicion is TV viewership is strongly exponential vs percentile with "people in trouble" (medical problems, hospital patients, severely handicapped, addicts, prisoners) recording 24 hours/day or at least all 18 or so waking hours as viewing time, vs the majority the population in a declining exponential graph dropping to almost zero.
Given a population distribution like that, an average is fairly meaningless when trying to draw cultural conclusions. Its like using average income or average wealth to draw economic conclusions. Or doing ergonomic design based on the average number of heads being well above one (think of Siamese twins). What cultural conclusions can you make about my typical normal lifestyle based on the average number of space qualified astronauts in my country?
It is not a completely useless statistic, if the average TV draws a kilowatt then given a billion random people the electrical load due to TVs would be about 5 billion kilowatt-hours per day (5 TWh?). But the usefulness of the numbers break down when zoomed in.
I'm probably not an average person (nor am I American), but my TV "average" is higher than actual pure TV watching. For example I could spend 8 hours with a friend, drinking some wine, chatting, with the TV on - paying attention to it at times, at others ignoring it. In terms of "how much do you watch TV" my total viewing time just went up 8 hours, but it was 8 hours of background for a night catching up with a friend, not 8 hours for the sake of passive consumption.
Equally, I'll often put easy-watching TV on when I'm at home but doing something else - working on my laptop, text-chatting to friends on Skype/WhatsApp, browsing sites like Hacker News. Again, this would raise my average, but it's not quite the same as going "what am I doing tonight? Watching the TV and nothing else" if the TV is getting a small fraction of my attention.
I just wonder to what extent this sort of half-watching increases averages, or on the flip side to what extent high-sounding averages are genuinely worrying.
> I mean, who else has the time to sit at home playing Facebook games, but the lack of motivation to go and do something more worthwhile?
Is a bit more complicated. On a broader perspective, this pattern usage of Facebook is entertainment exactly like watching TV is (you even get the ads!).
Considering that, based on the first statistic I've found on Google [0], the average American spends hours every day in front of a TV (even if not 5, 3/4 would be alarming), then there is a social problem, more than an individual one.