Which Countries Spend the Most Waking Hours in Front of Screens?
Mobile phones, TVs, and computers have become so integrated in our daily routines that they're often the first thing we look at in the morning and the last at night. But the total time spent with our screens in between varies by country, device, and activity.
A study(Opens in a new window) from ElectronicsHub quantifies how much time residents in 45 countries around the world spend in front of screens during waking hours.
The researchers looked at country-level screen-time data from DataReportal’s Digital 2023: Global Overview Report(Opens in a new window), combined with the average sleeping time for residents in each country from Sleep Cycle(Opens in a new window), to calculate the percentage of awake hours were used looking at each category of device.
South Africa emerged as a clear winner in overall screen time. Its residents spend over half of the day (58.2%), or 9.5 hours, in front of a screen, followed by Brazilians at 56.61%. Surprisingly, despite Japan's love for all things gaming and technology, it ranked the lowest of any country in the study at an average of 21.7%, or 3 hours 45 minutes per day with screens.
Americans were found to spend 42.58% of their day on screens (7.5 hours), and most European countries averaged around 35% (6 hours).
The statistics look a bit different when broken down by device. In terms of most mobile-phone usage, Filipinos take the cake, spending almost a third of their day on their phones (32.53%), followed by Brazil (32.46%), South Africa (31.52%), and Thailand (30.48%).
Americans spend an average 21% of their waking hours on their phones, equivalent to 3.5 hours per day, compared with slightly more for Russians (22%), and slightly less in China (19.5%). Japan, again, scored the
Read more on pcmag.com
