While Americans are spending an increasing amount of leisure time engaged in online activities, total leisure time has remained constant since at least 2003. This paper uses data from the American Time Use Survey from 2003-2010 to investigate the extent to which online leisure is substituting for other leisure activities. The analysis suggests that online leisure, especially online video and social networking, appears to come at the expense of watching traditional television, socializing, and relaxing. However, the net crowding out effect is incomplete—each minute of online leisure is correlated with 0.27 minutes less of other leisure—suggesting that at least some online leisure occurs concurrently with other, offline, leisure. Nevertheless, both the amount of time engaged in online leisure and the magnitude of the (negative) correlation between online and offline activity are increasing, suggesting that online activities are taking the place of a growing share of offline leisure activities. Additionally, some evidence suggests that new online activities also crowd out previous online activities. In particular, online leisure is increasingly negatively correlated with time spent on personal email.
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Scott Wallsten is President and Senior Fellow at the Technology Policy Institute, a Policy Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), and a senior fellow at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy. He is an economist with expertise in industrial organization and public policy, and his research focuses on competition, regulation, telecommunications, the economics of digitization, and technology policy. He was the economics director for the FCC's National Broadband Plan and has been a lecturer in Stanford University's public policy program, director of communications policy studies and senior fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation, a senior fellow at the AEI–Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, an economist at the World Bank, and a staff economist at the U.S. President's Council of Economic Advisers. He holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University.
