Britons squander one day a week glued to their smartphones
The growing pervasiveness of smartphone usage has been graphically illustrated by a new study which shows the average Briton now spends the equivalent of close to an entire day per week on their devices.
This equates to 221 separate instances of social networking, texting and emailing each day with most of us instinctively reaching for our phones as soon as wake up and putting them down last before heading to bed.
Luciano Floridi, professor of philosophy and ethics of information at the University of Oxford commented: “Consider obesity. Because of evolution, we are constructed in such a way that we eat as much as we can. That’s our biology — we are animals. And Darwinian evolution hasn’t caught up.
“We’re also social animals. If you give complete freedom to social animals, guess what happens: we overdo it. We’ve never had so many opportunities to communicate with each other. But we need to learn with social media what we’re learning with obesity — that overdoing it can be bad.”
The survey showed that women are bigger smartphone addicts than men, spending 23 minutes a day longer on their devices. Age was also a crucial factor with those aged 18-24 spending 4 hours and 20 minutes on their handsets whilst those aged 55 and over spent just 2 hours and 15 minutes.
However despite our prodigious usage a third of respondents believe that smartphone usage does not make them any more productive.
The survey saw 2,000 people quizzed by OnePoll on behalf of digital marketing firm Tecmark.