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If you’re like me, you’re constantly grabbing for your smartphone or iPad when you watch TV to look up an actor, a movie review or something else that piqued your interest. This morning as I commuted to work, I started a shopping search on my smartphone that I cut short, figuring I’d complete it with plans to hopefully make a purchase later today on my laptop.
We move seamlessly from one screen to another and increasingly use several at the same time. That’s not surprising. But it might shock you to learn that on average we spend 4.4 hours of our leisure time each day in front of screens, according to research commissioned by Google and revealed in this Google Mobile Ads Blog blog post today. Ninety percent of all media interactions were on a screen of some type or another, which leaves 10 percent for radio and print versions of newspapers and magazines, the study found.
And our smartphones are crucial. We may use them for shorter stretches of time than we use the TV, personal computer or tablet — but we are gravitating to them more and more frequently.
Per interaction, the time spent staring at a particular screen ranged from 17 minutes for the smartphone and half an hour for a tablet to 39 minutes for a personal computer or laptop and 43 minutes for TV. However, 38 percent of our daily media interactions occur on a smartphone, 24 percent on a personal computer, and only nine percent on a tablet, the research found.
Most of the time when we use two devices simultaneously, it’s to do e-mail, followed by browsing and social networking.
TV watching gets the brunt of our distractedness. Seventy-seven percent of the time when we are using a TV we are using another device at the same time. About half the time, we’re grabbing for our smartphones, according to Google.
