The chances are you’ll be way off the mark. The figure is just one small part of the seventh annual Communications Market report which was published by
Ofcom last week.
It is an important piece of research because it looks at how we use a wide range of different types of technology, breaking that down by market sector, geographically and by age. Those involved in the study completed diaries detailing their media use, and while the sample size was small at just 1138 people, the results have been factored up to give a picture of what we are doing as a nation.
There is a lot of detail in the research too – the report runs to nearly four hundred pages. And it makes fascinating reading.
Obviously there is a lot more data in the report than I can summarise here so I am just going to pick out a few things that struck me as interesting.
First, the answer to that question in the headline – how long do we spend on TV/mobile phone/comms devices per day?
Well, the report says consumers spend 45 percent of their waking hours using media content and communications services. That is a bit over 7 hours per day. But, and here’s an interesting thing, we actually manage to spend 8 hours 40 minutes worth of time on these activities by multitasking.
Those in the 16-24 age group are best at multitasking getting 9.5 hours of media use out of 6.5 hours of actual time.
This doesn’t seem to mean that people use computers or phones while watching TV. Indeed TV seems to be a mostly solo activity with most activity on mobile phones and computers being done alongside other media consumption.
In reality, this isn’t quite as startling a factor as the headline suggests. You could be listening to the radio while using a computer, or checking your email while on the phone for example, and I am sure most of us have done both of these at some time.
The study shows that social networking is increasingly popular accounting for nearly a quarter of all time spent on the internet. It is important to older age groups as well as the young with 48 percent of those in the 35-54 age group using social networking sites and 20 percent of the 55-64 age group also doing so.
But the old tech is also still very important. We manage to watch three and three quarter hours of TV every day and with all the technology options on offer it seems TV is the one we’d miss the most if it were taken away.
There is a huge amount of detail in the report and I could go on. But I won’t. Instead, I suggest you download the report and peruse it for yourself. You’ll find it at the Ofcom web site
here.