Reading Ofcom\u2019s recent, UK Communications Market Report 2018,\u00a0 isn\u2019t necessarily everyone\u2019s cup of tea. However, it offers some fascinating information. It is now over 20 years since the iPhone was launched by Apple\u2019s Steve Jobs. At the time it was lauded as a \u2018game changer\u2019 for the communications industry and since competitors launched and marketed viable alternatives, the use of these little \u2018communication devices\u2019 has become ubiquitous. According to the Ofcom report, 78% of UK adults now use a smartphone to connect to the internet and people polled in the research claimed to spend 24 hours a week online\u2014which was more than twice as much as in 2011. Twenty-four hours a week works out at 1,248 hours a year. With an average lifetime now estimated to be around 80 years and deducting, say, the first fourteen years of one\u2019s life for less digitally enhanced growth activity, that adds up to over 82,000 hours staring at a mobile phone screen\u2014over 9 years of one\u2019s life. That may seem like a lot, but anyone studying heavy users\u2019 interaction with their phones might claim the figures should be higher. They might point out that many people, alerted by notifications from their favourite online activity, be it social media or gaming, spend more time interacting with their phones than not. The \u2018always connected\u2019 world that people live in now means it\u2019s more likely that heavy users are online for even longer than the Ofcom report suggests. Something that concerns Jenny Radesky, M.D., an assistant professor of developmental behavioural paediatrics at the University of Michigan Medical School. In an article published earlier this year she pointed out that \u2018habit-forming design approaches\u2019 used by app, game and social media designers are potentially dangerous to children\u2019s developing brains because they are more susceptible to persuasive design elements such as visual and sound effects, virtual rewards and the gratification of \u2018likes\u2019 from peers. One of the greatest worries is users losing the ability to focus. In September, France\u2019s ban on the use of mobile phones in school grounds comes into force. It is part of their \u2018detox\u2019 programme for those young people that lawmakers believed were becoming increasingly addicted to their phones. It will be interesting to see if it helps a generation of French people to become more focused than the same generation of British. Perhaps it might result in focus competitions, maybe even a new Olympic sport. Then someone might develop an app so they could play focus games on their phones. Oh dear…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Reading Ofcom\u2019s recent, UK Communications Market Report 2018,\u00a0 isn\u2019t necessarily everyone\u2019s cup of tea. However, it offers some fascinating information. It is now over 20 years since the iPhone was launched by Apple\u2019s Steve Jobs. At the time it was lauded as a \u2018game changer\u2019 for the communications industry and since competitors launched and marketed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[13],"class_list":["post-3858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-editorials","tag-fergus-byrne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3858"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3858\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}