Watching TV
It's official: We have become a TV nation.
According to a new study, Canada has become the land of people glued to TV screens and tablets. A new report released by BBM Canada, the average Canadian adult watches a hefty 30 hours of television a week, which averages out to an average of four hours and 20 minutes of TV a day. Make your own connections to the inexorable rise in obesity among Canadians.
But wait, there's more. According to a recent report by Media Technology Monitor, 58 per cent of Canadians said they have multitasked with an Internet-related device at the same time they're watching TV, and 26 per cent said they were always or almost always using the Internet while watching TV.
Translation: More Canadians are watching TV and commenting about what they're watching on social media simultaneously. Beyond chatter about Lindsay Lohan or Justin Bieber's monkey, that's why social media was created, right?
And yes, there's precise figures about what shows people are watching and talking about.
According to a Seevibes analysis of social media commentary about shows aired in Canada last month, an episode of the series Pretty Little Liars on MuchMusic generated the most online conversation with more than 540,000 Facebook and Twitter posts.
Also in Canada's social media top ten: American Idol, Saturday Night Live, Glee and the A&E reality series Duck Dynasty, which pulled in an astounding 10-million U.S. viewers for its finale earlier this week.
So what do these new figures tell us about the Canadian mindset? Well, for starters, not a single Canadian show made the social media top-10 list, so it's pretty apparent most of us are looking south of the border to fulfill our TV habits. Nothing new there.
On a wider, possibly more worrying scale, the double-team of watching TV and then talking about it on social media platforms means we're getting more sedentary than ever. And all this coming at a time when winter is finally ending and nice weather is finally here.
What do you think? Do you spend time talking about your favourite TV programs with friends on social media at the same time you're watching those shows? Is there any way to prevent us from becoming a completely immobile nation of TV-addicted zombies or should we just accept the inevitable?