A recent study shows Americans are sitting more and connects this to increased media usage:

That’s what Yin Cao and an international group of colleagues wanted to find out in their latest study published in JAMA. While studies on sitting behavior in specific groups of people — such as children or working adults with desk jobs — have recorded how sedentary people are, there is little data on how drastically sitting habits have changed over time. “We don’t know how these patterns have or have not changed in the past 15 years,” says Cao, an assistant professor in public health sciences at the Washington University School of Medicine.

The researchers used data collected from 2001 to 2016 by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), which asked a representative sample of Americans ages five and older how many hours they spent watching TV or videos daily in the past month, and how many hours they spent using a computer outside of work or school. The team analyzed responses from nearly 52,000 people and also calculated trends in the total time people spent sitting from 2007 to 2016. Overall, teens and adults in 2016 spent an average of an hour more each day sitting than they did in 2007. And most people devoted that time parked in front of the TV or videos: in 2016, about 62% of children ages five to 11 spent two or more hours watching TV or videos every day, while 59% of teens and 65% of adults did so. Across all age groups, people also spent more time in 2016 using computers when they were not at work or school compared to 2003. This type of screen time increased from 43% to 56% among children, from 53% to 57% among adolescents and from 29% to 50% among adults…

The increase in total sitting time is likely largely driven by the surge in time spent in front of a computer. As eye-opening as the trend data are, they may even underestimate the amount of time Americans spend sedentary, since the questions did not specifically address time spent on smartphones. While some of this time might have been captured by the data on time spent watching TV or videos, most people spend additional time browsing social media and interacting with friends via texts and video chats — much of it while sitting.

Does this mean the Holy Grail of media is screentime that requires standing and/or walking around to avoid sitting too much? Imagine a device that requires some movement to work. This does not have to be a pedal powered gaming console or smartphone but perhaps just a smartphone that needs to move 100 feet every five minutes to continue. (Then imagine the workarounds, such as motorized scooter while watching a screen a la Wall-E.)

Of course, the answer might be to just consume less media content on screens. This might prove difficult. Nielsen reports American adults consume 11 hours of media a day. Even as critics have assailed television, films, and Internet and social media content, Americans still choose (and are pushed as well) to watch more.