Brits spend almost an entire day of their week online watching Netflix and scrolling through Facebook , according to a study.We spend a whopping 21 hours browsing the net each week with over six of those solely using social networking site Facebook. Experts say it’s due to a fear of “missing out” on what friends and colleagues are getting up to and users tend to check the site before they go to bed.
The findings, collected by gadget insurance provider www.row.co.uk, found that UK visitors to Facebook spent 850 million hours last March using its services.Of the UK’s 32 million Facebook users, that works out to a massive 26.5 hours per visitor every month.Zoe Cairns, Founder of ZC Social Media, said: “We spend hours scrolling through our timelines and catching up with what’s happening in our friends’ and families’ worlds.
“Checking our phones has become a regular habit with many people checking them when they first wake and the last thing they look at before they sleep.
“People feel like that have lost something so important when they leave their phone at home and they are unable to check up on the online news and what their friends are up to.
“Checking our phone is a new life habit. We have a fear of logging off and missing out with what’s going on.”
Users spent an average of 58 hours 39 minutes each month browsing or using apps on smartphones, compared to 31 hours 19 minutes browsing on laptops and desktop computers.There has also been a 10 per cent rise in the proportion of adults who only use smartphones or tablets to go online, and not a PC or laptop.
When it comes to internet safety, it seems people are just as trusting of smartphones as they are of laptops or PCs, as 32 per cent of people agreed they would be just as likely to use a smartphone for online banking. The majority of internet users say they have happily controlled their finances on the web. Just over eight in ten internet users say they have bought something online, while almost seven in ten say they have banked or paid bills online.