The average U.S. consumer now spends as much time online as watching television, according to research being released today by Forrester. That’s crazy!! The net is definitely where it’s at now. Hit the jump for the full article.

@funkmasterflex

(WSJ) – To technophiles, it might seem strange to think of people ever watching TV more than they surfed the Web. But the stat marks a big shift for the country at large; this is the first year in Forrester’s survey that people have reported spending equal amounts of time on the two activities — 13 hours a week.

And it’s not because people are spending less time watching TV; those numbers have remained about the same. It’s because Internet usage has grown so dramatically — 121% in the past five years. So what are people doing less? Listening to the radio and reading things like newspapers and magazines offline, according to the survey. (We at Digits guess they might be spending less time doing other things too, like “going outside.”)

E-commerce and social networking have seen the biggest rise in popularity since 2007, the survey of more than 40,000 people showed. Three years ago, only about a third of Americans were shopping online, and now nearly two thirds are. Only about 35% of people visit social-networking sites like Facebook regularly, but that’s up from just 15% in 2007.

As for all the tools that have generated the biggest buzz in the tech world — microblogging services like Twitter and streaming radio like Pandora — well, those haven’t quite caught on among the masses. Even reading blogs is something done by only by 18% of people in the survey.

“The reality is these activities will never have the mass appeal of something like email,” which is used by 92% of people, writes researcher Jacqueline Anderson in the report. Her theory is that people are most likely to adopt technology that fills a general need and fits easily with other things they were doing anyway.