College Students Surf a Lot, But for What?

What a shock. College students spend a lot of time on the Internet. No surprise there, but some of the details from a recent study by Burst Research is very interesting because it provides a fair amount of detail about what college students are doing and not doing while they’re on-line and it also details what they’re doing and not doing in other areas of their lives as a result of their Internet surfing:

• One third (33.0%) of college students spend more than ten hours per week on the Internet, and 19.6% spend more than 20 hours per week online.
• Among college students, Internet usage levels surpass those of television and terrestrial satellite radio.
• While one in three college students are heavy consumers of the Internet, only one in six (16.6%) watch more than ten hours per week of television and merely 5.5% listen to terrestrial/satellite radio more than ten hours per week.
• College students are multi-taskers ‚Äì often consuming different media simultaneously. In fact, one-half (50.6%) of college students surf the Internet while watching television and 43.5% are online while listening to terrestrial/satellite radio.
• Top activities for students include downloading music (53.3%), listening to Internet radio (44.5%) and viewing streaming video content (42.6%).

My thanks to Derrick Moe of Select Metrix for bringing to my attention a summary of the study published by Podcasting News.