You know, when I was a lad, we were always accused of spending too much time “in front of the computer playing games“. Then came email and its capacity to swallow hours of your day. Then, when broadband rolled around, it was just ‘mindless surfing’ that killed your online time.
But now, recent research by Nielsen has proved what only the people still stuck on the island in Lost don’t know: these days, when people waste their time on the web, it’s on social media.
The stats? Apparently, we spend about 23% of our time online twittering, poking and liking versus about 8% on email. One imagines that the rest of that time is spent doing constructive things or, maybe more accurately, looking at porn.
As you’d expect, it’s the behemoth Facebook that dominates 85% of that ‘spare time’ in which we should probably be doing something productive. A little bit surprising though – especially to people like Techi readers – is that only 1% of that extraneous surfing is on Twitter.
Really? See, for me, that’s more like, oh, 75% Twitter, 20% email and… um… you know what? Forget I said any of that. I’m going to get back to… erm.. work. Yeah, that’s it. Work.
Does blogging count as social networking? Because I (and I bet a lot of people) spend a big chunk of my time doing that.