Arts and Leisure Participation Among IT Users: Further Evidence of Time Enhancement Over Time Displacement
A major concern about new technologies like IT is how much they might displace time on media and other daily activities. Three highly-publicized early studies of the initial impact of IT indicated it was reducing time on both social life and mass media use. However, data from a number of high-quality 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, in some cases finding increased social life and media use (especially reading) among IT users. The present article examines data from two separate national surveys (the GSS 2002 and the SPPA 2008), Even though the two studies asked different IT questions and examined different arts activities over different periods of Internet diffusion, progressively higher arts participation was found among Internet users, before and after education and other predictors of arts activity were controlled. The SPPA data also show that users and heavier IT users were also more active in a variety of other free time activities like attending movies, volunteering and sports. IT use here then becomes a away of extending or enhancing live attendance rather than displacing it. However, the results also raise questions about whether these correlations result from a "response set'' of respondents overestimating their activity participation.
arts leisure time displacement internet social desirability