Half of your waking life is spent online
UK telecoms watchdog Ofcom has worked out that the average Brit will spend almost half of their waking life watching television, using the internet or gabbing on their mobile phone.
The body said that us UK citizens get up in the morning, clean our teeth and almost immediately get connected in one way or another. In total, we spend about seven hours out of every day connected.
The most popular pastime amongst respondents was television, which accounts for about four hours out of the day. Ofcom said that almost a quarter of us have bought an HD telly this year and almost a third use the internet to watch television. That’s a lot of television.
This internet/television cross-over, called Media Multi-tasking by Ofcom, extends to other devices too, and the body found that over half of the 16-24 year olds it spoke to would make phone calls, or surf the internet while watching television – and vice versa.
Ofcom also found that only a quarter of older people – 55 and up – would be as easily distracted but we imagine that has something to do with grandparents finding phonecalls with their offspring’s offspring to be a maddening affair.
Even the once simple mobile phone is now its own communications superhighway, and compromises the ability to make phone calls, check emails, watch the television and surf the internet – if it made monosyllabic answers and grunts we could probably use it to replace teenagers too.
The good news, in the face of this ‘always on’ connectivity is that prices for services are falling. Ofcom found that monthly spending on communications had fallen this year. Only by under two percent, but a fall none the less.
http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/market-data-research/market-data/communications-market-reports/cmr10/uk/
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