Time of Use and Patterns of Internet Consumption in University Students: A Comparative Study between Spanish-Speaking Countries

Today, the processes of virtualization in higher education are decisive. The digital paradigm has an enormous influence on the university world, and will have even more in the future. Knowing how students access the Internet, how they consume it and how long they use it would be of great value for university policy, to facilitate the proper integration of information and communication technologies (ICT). The main objective of this study is to determine the time of use of the Internet by university students in different Spanish-speaking countries in the last eight years (2012–2019). It also aims to determine whether belonging to a common cultural space has an influence on this fact. The broad sample was composed of 2463 subjects from Chile, Ecuador, Spain, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela. The results show that there is no homogeneity in the time of use and consumption patterns among the countries analyzed. The particular elements and social habits of each specific country, and multiple variables within each of them, condition their use. In conclusion, it can be argued that the integration of ICTs in university contexts is a very complex phenomenon in which multiple factors are present. In this sense, the sustainable educational policies of each country—and even of each university—must focus on their characteristics and idiosyncrasies. Importing practices from other countries, or attempting to apply common patterns of integration, may not be effective because of differences in the very different variables present in each.