The average Briton now checks a mobile phone every 12 minutes and is online for 24 hours a week, finds an Ofcom study revealing the extent to which people now rely on the internet.
Ofcom also found that, for the first time, the time spent making phone calls from mobile phones fell, as users instead used messaging services such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
The media regulator’s annual Communications Market Report found that a fifth of British adults felt stressed if they could not access the internet, while for the first time ever women were spending more time online than men.
The report also showed the rapid growth of addiction to technology. According to Ofcom, just 12% of British adults said they never used the internet.
The total amount of time spent online by Britons has also doubled over the last 10 years, with a quarter of adults saying they spent more than 40 hours a week on the internet – a move driven by the uptake of smartphones.
The internet has seeped into many aspects of our lives; two in five British adults – rising to 65% of those aged under 35 – said they looked at their phone within five minutes of waking up. A third of adults checked their phones up until the moment they went to sleep, a figure which rose to 60% for the under-35s.
The prevalence of mobile phones has also meant that attitudes to their use in public had changed. While 83% of Britons aged over 55 said they thought it unacceptable to check a phone during a meal, this figure almost halved among people aged 18-34 who were more comfortable with looking at notifications while eating with other people.
Ofcom said the “seismic shifts” in the ways Britons consumed media could be traced back to the June 2007 launch of Apple’s iPhone and the BBC’s decision to issue its iPlayer catch-up streaming service product a month later.
Combined with the growth of smart TVs, this has posed a big challenge for traditional TV broadcasters, upending the status quo and opening the doors for firms such as Netflix and the expectation that of being able to watch quality, streaming, video on a smartphone.
Ofcom said that broadcast programmes with mass appeal that could mean the entire nation tuning in at the same time – classed as those with more than 8million viewers – were increasingly rare.However, the regulator noted that high-end drama and big sport events continued to lead to mass viewing via traditional broadcast TV and that “despite more choice across more platforms, broadcasters continue to account for the majority of our viewing”.