Consumers now value Internet more than TV

What's more important to you? American Idol or The Working Guy at Yahoo! Tech? Ha! Working Guy stomps Paula Abdul—well, our overall media formats, anyway—as a new study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project says that consumers would have a harder time giving up their net connections than their television.

In a study performed last December (the results of which were just announced), the Internet scored the highest portion of responses, at 45 percent, in a survey of which technology would be hardest to give up, vs. 43 percent of consumers who picked television. Five years ago it wasn't even close: 47 percent of consumers said TV would be tougher to drop, while only 38 percent said the Internet. With more and more video and movie content becoming available online, the Internet's increased importance appears unstoppable.

Additional fun facts from the Pew study: 75 percent of Americans are online now, with half the country fully wired for broadband. And the faster your connection, the more important the Internet becomes to you, and the more time you spend online (while doing a wider variety of things) the more integral to your life it tends to become. Think of it this way: Broadband is the gateway drug to Internet addiction.

For the younger crowd, it's no contest: The Internet is vastly more important than TV, to the point where one university professor no longer plays a game with his students. He asked them to document how they spend 24 hours without using the Internet. It was simply too invasive and, apparently, too painful.

LINK: It hurts to lose that Internet connection