Sit And Eat Tea With The Wife? Nah Am Off Stumbling.

The Annenberg Centre for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California carried out a survey last year and has just revealed that the number of Americans who said they are spending less time with their family has almost tripled in only two years.

Interestingly, the respondents didn’t report spending less time with their friends though so what is going on?

No one can deny that the way we live has changed dramatically in the last couple of decades, particularly with the rise of the Internet.

Technology is advancing at a rate most of us cannot even imagine and we are constantly being bombarded with a stream of new devices to keep us connected to the web and with each other in ways that were inconceivable before.

Long gone are the days where households had just one television set and no one had a mobile phone.

Just think, we’ve often heard in the past that television was ruining the family but we no longer even sit round the telly in the living room together to watch a film.

I mean why would we do that when we can access anything we want on the Internet, and can watch it whenever and wherever we want to?

It just so happens that the decline in spending family time together also coincides with the rise in the number of people using the Internet and the overwhelming surge in popularity of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace where people communicate with their friends online.

One thing is pretty certain, the Internet has become an integral part of our daily lives whether for business or pleasure and the scope is endless.

“Most people think of the Internet and (our) digital future as boundless, and I do too” said Michael Gilbert A senior fellow at the Annenberg Centre

However Gilbert also says “it can’t be a good thing that families are spending less face-to-face time together. Ultimately it leads to less cohesive and less communicative families”

So how much time do we actually spend with our families? Well apparently a few years ago respondents reported that they spent an average of about 26 hours a month family time. If that doesn’t sound much then it gets worse. By 2008 this had dropped to just 18 hours a month.

So is the Internet killing off the family as we know it? The survey didn’t go as far as to actually come out and say that but who knows. ( Personally I think it might be Stumble Upon