Britain’s Digital Addiction: 121 mobile phones per 100 people

Posted by Tanya Hall

November 21, 2008

Communications regulator Ofcom revealed yesterday that we in Britain are the most gadget-obsessed people in the world, including the US. There are more camera phones, digital video recorders and digital televisions per capita in the UK than anywhere else.

People in the UK are the most likely to use mobile phone as a camera and we have the second fastest take-up of social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo, second only to Canada. Ofcom report that 50 per cent of British internet users access social networking sites, which is up 11 percentage points on last year.

Prof Simeon Yates, director of the Culture, Communication and Computing Research Institute (C3RI) at Sheffield Hallam University said, “One of the things that is becoming clear is that for a lot of reasons British people, especially those under the age of say 40, have got used to using their mobile phones for communication, whereas in the US they are used to using their computer and in Japan they still use their phone in a different way.”

Britons are still using our phones for their intended use of course, making a total of 99bn minutes of calls last year, and each person sending an average of 972 texts. How have we reached these astronomical figures? By averaging 121 mobile phones for every 100 people in the UK.

Source: Guardian

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