The Busy Thais
I'm a bit of an international trivia nerd, so I regularly peruse The Economist's Pocket World in Figures to learn more about the world. Tonight while I was eating at Zankou Chicken (you need to come to LA to try out this legendary eatery), I was glancing through PWIF and found these interesting media stats:
The average Thai watches an incredible 22.4 hours of TV per week - tops in the world.
The average Thai also spends 9.4 hours reading every week - second only to India's 10.7
The average Thai also spends 11.7 hours on the computer/internet per week - second only to Taiwan.
As if that weren't enough, the average Thai also spends 13.3 hours per week listening to the radio - tied with Turkey and Czech Republic for 4th in the world behind Argentina, Brazil and South Africa.
This is fascinating to me, because this means Thais are not getting "sufficiency theory." As I always suspected, sufficiency theory is nothing but another royal trend to be exploited by those who want to protect their political and economic interests.
Otherwise, there would be quite a bit of noise about these figures about Thai media consumption.
Just think if Thais did adopt sufficiency theory, the advertisers and those companies in the advert business would go broke quickly, and we all know that will never happen.
2 comments:
Those reading numbers are eye-opening, especially the reading number. The largest daily newspaper (Thai Rath) has a circulation of only 1 million. So where are most Thais getting their reading material, พลอยแกมเพชร, ต่วย’ตูน, and ขายหัวเราะ?
Comic books, magazines?
I thought the figure was high, but just from my personal experience I see Thai bookshops packed all the time.
Maybe it is not high brow literature, so I wouldn't totally write the stat off.
Of course, the troubling figures are the other ones.
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