IT, TV and Time Displacement: What Alexander Szalai Anticipated but Couldn’t Know

The study of how people spend time dates back more than 100 years. Serious attention to its societal policy implications was undertaken in Soviet Russia soon after its revolution in the early 1920s and continued into the 1970s (Zuzanek 1980). These were preludes of the masterfully coordinated Multinational Time-Budget Research Project. The project was the brainchild organized by Hungarian Professor Alexander Szalai (1972), a giant of a man, not just physically, but intellectually, socially and politically as well. An internationally distinguished mathematician, Szalai had the vision to understand how applying the full measurement properties of the classic quantitative variable of time to how people spend it had enormous scientific, policy and philosophical implications. One particular such advantage of time was its ‘‘zero-sum’’ property–one that allows analysts to identify the trade-offs in daily life as new household technologies, public policy innovations or socio-economic conditions diffuse through society. This feature is particularly appropriate for testing a major hypothesis of activity displacement, namely that of ‘‘functional equivalence’’–a feature discussed in more detail shortly in the context of the two major innovations in household communications technology in the second half twentieth century, namely television and information technology (IT). In the process of laying out all the detailed empirical and operational features of his path-breaking study (which was also the first social science project to be conducted across the virtually impenetrable ‘‘Iron Curtain’’), Szalai devised an elegant coding scheme to allow comparison of all daily activity. It is a scheme that not only worked in the 1965 study across both socialist and capitalist societies then, but has been similarly successful in subsequent studies in third-world countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The first digit of Szalai’s comprehensive two-digit code shown in Table 1 first divided daily activity into ten distinct categories, moving from paid work (codes 01–09) at the top to mostly passive free time activities (codes 90–99) at the bottom (including reading and conversations, as well as TV and relaxation). Personal care (codes 40–49) was in the middle of this scheme, flanked by family care activities (codes 10–39) on one side and by free time activities (codes 60–69) on the other.