Italians spend on average more than 6 hours on the Internet every day. 45% of the population has at least one social account: here are the data from the Digital 2019 research
It's clear by now: we spend more and more time online and the daily minutes in which we are connected continue to grow. It's a trend that has been going on for several years and is unlikely to reverse with the arrival of new 5G connections and other technologies that will further improve our online experience. But how much time do we spend online, exactly?
The "Digital 2019" report by Hootsuite and We Are Social gives us a very precise answer: on average (worldwide) we are 6 hours and 42 minutes online every day. Half of this time we spend on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. And if these numbers seem a lot when considered on a daily basis, they seem even more if we project them into a year: 100 days we spend on the Internet. But who are the biggest "consumers of online time"
research data
If we segment the figures by country, it turns out that developing and middle-income nations spend more time online. Internet users in the Philippines, for example, spend 10 hours and two minutes online every day, followed by Brazilians with 9 hours and 20 minutes. In more industrialized countries these numbers drop, and a lot: the Japanese are connected for 3 hours and 45 minutes a day, the French for 4 hours and 38. Italians are very close to the world average: 6 hours and 4 minutes of connection per day.
Looking at the data on the use of social networks, the report shows that users of at least one social network have grown in the last 12 months by 288 million, reaching 3.5 billion people. Translated: 45% of the world's population has at least one social profile (provided that this figure is not tainted by the huge amount of fake profiles and bots). In Italy 59% of people use a social network (mostly Facebook), while in the United Arab Emirates even 99% do so. In Nigeria just 12%.
Are we all addicted to the Internet, then? A survey of Chinese teenagers last year found that 26.5% of them show some form of Internet addiction. So it would seem that the trend is really towards addiction, at least among the younger ones. But the data from the Digital 2019 report also shows a very slight drop in the time spent online on average worldwide (7 minutes less). According to the report's authors, however, this is due to the fact that the new generation of Internet users has a different behavior than that of the past: since the web is increasingly complex and multifaceted, the very young are still trying to figure out how and how much to use it.