We spend an average of 3 hours and 15 minutes on our smartphones, and the top 20% of smartphone users have daily screen time of over 4.5 hours. 1 With the average user spending 143 minutes daily, the world spends 720 billion minutes using social platforms. Over a full year, that adds up to more than 260 trillion minutes, or 500 million years of collective human time. 2 We spend at least 3-4 hours daily picking up our phones, using social media platforms, and interacting on instant messenger platforms, among other media. That means we spend at least 1/8th of our time daily surfing the internet; if you are going to be alive for 80 years, that would amount to close to 10 years of your short life spent surfing the internet.
90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years. Everyday, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data–so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone
Social media is one of the greatest innovations in the past three decades. But having said that, I also believe, like most technologies, are beginning to cause more harm than good. We are all in a collective digital slumber, busy scrolling through our timelines, as educator Neil Postman noted in his 1985 book “amusing ourselves to Death.” The quest for virality and validation is so seductive that it takes a lot of self-discipline not to fall into the trap of spending an enormous amount of time on these platforms.