There are those who walk into a store not knowing what they may find. Then, there are those that come in to a retailer already knowing exactly what they want because they've done their product research online.

With nearly three quarters of the American adult population online, would it surprise you to know that we spend more time in front of our computers and online than we do watching TV? According to a new report from market research firm, IDC, that’s exactly what we are doing.

The report says that online users spend about 32.7 hours a week on the Internet. This is equivalent to almost half of the total time spent each week using all media (70.6 hours), almost twice as much time as spent watching television (16.4 hours) and more than eight times as much time as spent reading newspapers and magazines (3.9 hours).

It’s actually not just our computers connecting us to the Internet and increasing our internet usage. There are a wider variety of devices that consumers can use these days. Devices like Apple’s new iPod touch and iPhone. Most of the newer cell phones also have some access to the web, as well as many portable hand held devices that use Wi-Fi.

The report also shows that consumers tend to use the media they grew up with, according to IDC. The older the respondents, the more they consume TV, newspapers, and magazines; the younger they are, the more the Internet displaces usage of traditional media. The implications of this are not going unnoticed by traditional media. Many newspapers and radio entities are rushing to create some sort of online strategy in the face of dropping ad revenues… but that’s another blog.

The most frequently used online activities among the respondents are search engines (84 percent); mapping and navigation services (83 percent), personal research (77 percent), and using email (76 percent).