According to RescueTime, a tool I use to monitor my activity online, I spent two hours on Twitter, 74 minutes on Facebook and 42 minutes searching Google during the first week of October.
What the application can’t tell me, however, is what I gave up to do so. Would I have been working? Sleeping? Speaking with friends, rather than stalking them?
The answer is all of the above, according to Scott Wallsten, an economist and researcher at the Technology Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank.
In his new report “What Are We Not Doing When We’re Online,” Wallsten used eight years of federal data on Americans’ leisure activities to calculate the cost of all the time we spend on the Web.
While researchers have long debated what we give up to surf social media or get lost on Google, Wallsten has offered a definitive and detailed look at how apps and websites eat away at other pursuits. The short answer: Facebook’s gain may be our employers’ -- and friends’ -- loss.