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I screen, you screen, we all scream for more screen!

It’s true, we’re a planet addicted to screens. We all spend our days toggling our eyes between our work computer, our home laptop to do leisure internet activities, our television to settle in for nightly Netflix, and our phone screen, scrolling various social media platforms and whatnot.

If you look closely while we sleep, our faces are flickering with the neon light of a screen.

With so many screens and so many binge-able shows and addictive apps hustling for our attention, it’s no wonder that most of us say that we have an addiction to our digital devices. The official statistic is that one in two people in the US admit they have an issue with screens.

@carlabezanson screen night #fyp #foryoupage ♬ original sound – 🧁 snarly carly

According to a global study conducted by tech website Electronics Hub, out of 45 countries worldwide, South Africans hold the highest average percentage of their day spent on screens.

Data analysts at Electronics Hub re-examined how the world spends time in front of their screens in 2024 by using data retrieved from Datareportal’s Digital 2024: Global Overview Report. The study calculated how much time a local person in each country spends looking at screens as a proportion of the average time per day they spend awake. The study also analysed which countries spend the most time on different devices and different social media platforms.

To determine the average screen time by country, Electronics Hub reviewed data from DataReportal (2024) and Sleep Cycle. They ranked countries based on the average daily hours spent looking at screens as a percentage of average waking hours. They also ranked countries based on different types of screen time across different devices and media platforms. Data is correct as of March 2024.

The average Saffa spends 56.80% of their daily waking hours looking at their screens. That’s nine hours and 24 minutes, which is the highest proportion of any country, echoing last year’s findings.

Research has shown that SA children are exposed to over three hours of screen time outside of school, while another study revealed that children watch more television in more dangerous neighbourhoods. If the alternative is joining a gang, then stick to the screens, kids.

Despite their love affair with all things tech, Japan reportedly spends the least time scrolling, with just 22.76% of their waking hours allocated to screen time.

Click to open the map in full-size

Then, South Africa and Brazil are among the top countries for time spent on social media.

South Africa comes top again for the most time spent on social media, with the average local spending 22.26% of their waking hours scrolling through the likes of Instagram, TikTok and Facebook, the latter of which is by far the most popular, claiming a 68.35% local market share.

Click to open the map in full-size

Nowadays, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone on the street in any part of the world without a smartphone in hand, so the study also ranked the countries in which the typical resident spends most of their waking hours staring at those pocket-sized screens.

South Africa remains number one when it comes to the most phone-addicted country, with 31.72% average screen time. Brazil takes spot number two, with just a fraction of a percentage less (31.57%) followed by the Philippines (31.45%) and Thailand (30.18%).

Turning our attention to computers, South Africans are trumped by Russians.

The study discovered that people in Russia are the biggest PC users, spending over a quarter (27.07%) of their waking hours on them.

For the average local, it’s likely that at least some of that time on the PC is spent gaming: the platform Steam counts 9.5 million users in Russia (the third-highest count of any country in the world), and PC games lead the local market in revenue.

Electronics Hub explained that Russia faced reduced shipments from smartphone producers like Apple and Samsung in the fallout from the war in Ukraine, surpassing South Africa by 1.99% to take the top place in average screen time.

Then, in the world of Television, South Africa ranks second as the biggest TV watchers. As the birthplace of television and arguably the most influential country in terms of programming, the US dominates the ranking when it comes to the highest percentage of a day spent watching TV with 28.7% while South Africa follows suit with just over half an hour less screen time.

Screens of all kinds are fine-tuned to be perfect time-sinkers, so it can be really difficult to keep track of how much time you’re spending on screens and then get off.

Weirdly, there are some apps and digital devices that have safeguards to help you snap out of the tech trance.

But ultimately, if you need a bit of help unplugging, you have to show yourself that the real world has just as much to offer as the screen. I know, that’s a tough nut to crack.

[source:electronicshub]