Photo by Stefan Spassov on Unsplash
It’s official. According to a report by the Media Technology Monitor, as well as data from other research bodies, Canadians spend more time online than the people in any other country around the world.
From online shopping or making a secured online casino payment, to browsing social media and watching YouTube videos, it seems that Canadians prefer online activities like these to actually spending time with other people – and they have done since 2010, if previous research is anything to go by.
If you’re intrigued by this information, read on. This post will explore the statistics to find out exactly how much time Canadians spend online, and try to understand why they consistently top the list of the world’s biggest Internet consumers.
How Much Time Do Canadians Spend Online?
The Media Technology Monitor wrote their report based on data they collected from telephone interviews with 4,157 English-speaking Canadians at the end of 2016.
They discovered that the Canadians they interviewed spent an average of 24.5 hours online every week. One year later, according to subsequent research, they were spending 68 hours a month on their mobiles and smartphones alone. That’s approximately 17 hours every week – which suggests that their overall online time, including that which they spent using their laptops, desktops, and tablets, has far exceeded 24.5 hours in the space of just two years.
As you might expect, Canadians aged between 18 and 34 spend the highest percentage of their lives online: approximately 5 hours a day, on average. This is a pattern which we see all over the world, as younger generations are typically more tech-savvy, use more social media, and often rely on the Internet for work.
This is a cause of concern for psychologists like David Mensink, who told CTV News that missing out on face-to-face interaction was almost certainly weakening many millennials’ relationships.
“It’s called social media, but in some ways that’s a misnomer because we’re not always interacting with people,” he said.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzUb_GeLDg8
Why Does Canada Spend So Much Time Online?
You might have been surprised to learn that Canada consistently overtakes tech-heavy superpowers like China when it comes to their Internet usage. Experts have suggested various reasons for why this is the case, from long cold Canadian winters that keep people indoors, to geographical distance between families – which means that many people rely on platforms such as Skype, FaceTime, and Facebook Video Call to keep in touch with their loved ones.
While these could potentially be contributing factors, neither of these qualities are unique to Canada alone. A more straightforward explanation seems to be the fact that a noticeably high percentage of Canadian residents are currently set up with Internet access.
In 2017, around 90% of Canadians had access to the Internet in their homes. This figure included 74% of the country’s senior population – residents who were aged 65 and above – who all said that they used the Internet on a regular basis at home.
This is a particularly high percentage for people in that age category. Unsurprisingly, senior citizens around the world are by far the least likely age group to have Internet access, especially in countries such as China where the older generations overwhelmingly live in less developed rural areas.
With Canadians spending so much of their lives online, the challenge for many people will be keeping time for face-to-face interaction. And as the world negotiates a period of unprecedented change, the question is: which country will we see at the top this list next year?
