An average person uses media for more hours a day than he sleeps, according to data collected by the Middletown Media Studies efforts.
As a branch of the Center for Media Design, the Middletown Media Studies project continues to release reports analyzing information collected on people's real-time media use.
The most recent report shows how people engage in media supported by advertising.
Michael Holmes, a research fellow for the Center of Media Design, said the research they're doing offers a lot of insight into how media-based our society is.
"On average, people use media more than work, more than anything else, period," he said. "We really are living in a mediated world."
In collecting the data for the study, researchers observed about 350 people for a total of more than 5,000 hours of data.
"We were with them as soon as they'd let us in the morning until as long as they'd let us stay in the evening," Holmes said.
The observers went to the homes and workplaces of their subjects and followed them everywhere else their days took them.
The researchers kept track of the subjects' use of several media, including televisions, radios, DVDs, VCRs and telephones. Analysis of computer use was broken down to the categories of software and Internet use; online media use was broken down to Web use, e-mail and instant messaging.
"It's an incredibly rich pool of information about what media people are using when and what they're doing at that time," Holmes said.
A psychological profile and community involvement profile was created for each person who was observed.
"There are just so many things we're doing with this data," Holmes said.
A new report is set to be released this summer. Bob Papper, professor of telecommunications and researcher for the Middletown Media Studies, said this upcoming report will address what media people are using for their primary source of news.
"In terms of news, TV news is the dominant form, but there is very much an age split," he said.
Papper said that adults between 18 and 24 years old get more information from the Internet than they do from television, but people between 25 and 34 years of age split their information gathering evenly between television and the Web. People older than 34, however, typically get most of their news from television, Papper said.
Even though the age divide exists, the Internet is the fastest growing media, he said.
"The message is clear," Papper said. "This is where the future is. If you break down people by age, those 65 years and older are the only ones to spend more time with newspapers than online."
However, people are not changing the places where they get their news - they're consuming more, he said.
"What our research says is that other than 18- to 24-year-olds, people have a very strong appetite for news," Papper said.
The results of the study show that people are using several media at the same time, by which they absorb more news.
"People seem to think as news media comes along, old media drops out," Papper said. "That isn't really what's happening. People are piling on."
One-third of the time, people are using more than a single type of media, according to the study.
Because media use is changing so fast, the data will only be accurate as far as industry application for about six more months. However, Holmes said the researchers involved with the program are still working with the collected data in several ways and the project's academic life will be much longer.
"We've been focusing on reports for the media industries right now," Holmes said. "We will turn more of our attention to scholarly analyses and developing reports for academic publication after this round of reaching out to the media industry."
Papper said he hoped another Middletown Media study could be conducted. There are many other aspects of media use that can be researched, he said.
"We have always had lots of proposals," Papper said. "At this point, the questions is if there's industry support to do it."
Whether this is possible depends on interest and financial support from outside sources.
"This is very expensive research, but I would certainly hope we will continue on," he said. "People either don't know or don't understand how they interact with the media. Figuring that out has been one of the critical values of Middletown from the beginning."
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