We are all media junkies now. We Britons spend more than four hours a day watching television, the highest level of consumption for at least five years, which is probably good news given that there are 510 channels to choose from. We bought 9.55m television sets last year, fewer than in 2009, but twice the number sold back in 2002. Of those 9.55m sets nearly a third were larger than 33in. Let the boasting begin.
Radio listening has never been greater either – a record 91.6% of us listen to at least 15 minutes in a week. Then there's internet use, up in 2010 by 17 minutes a day, to just over two hours a day. And then there's talking – well, on the telephone – which has become 20% more popular on the Ofcom measure since 2000. One might be forgiven for wondering how we fit it all in.
This wasn't what was supposed to happen. The rising popularity of digital technology was, so the theory went, intended to displace traditional media. But while Facebook may be so addictive, as Ofcom notes, that it takes up five times the amount of our time as the next most popular website, the impact of the internet is, if anything, economic. Piracy has hit recorded music sales – down 8.6% to £1.2bn – and now DVDs, whose sales fell by 5.7% to £1bn, even with the help of the first half of the last part of Harry Potter. Newspaper sales are down, but online audiences are up. Overall our desire to consume media has never been greater.
Ofcom, though, gives us some clues as to the secrets of the new British efficiency. So hopeless, for example, is our addiction to smartphones that it turns out that a fifth of adults are prepared to admit they use their iPhone or BlackBerry on the toilet. Nearly four in 10 of us will answer the phone if it wakes us while we are sleeping. We have become the generation that is comfortable consuming two media at once: answering emails while watching the television. So much, indeed, for British manners.
What the deluge of official data also shows is how we come to expect technological change. The faster-faster model of media and technology consumption is demonstrated by the fact that while it took 15 years for mobile phone ownership to reach half the population, it is expected that internet-capable smartphones will reach the same proportion in just five years. It took 13 years for radio to reach half the population when the National Programme (today's Radio 4) came on the wireless, 10 years for colour television in the era of Pot Black, and, Ofcom estimates, it will take about six years for the same to apply to Kindles and iPads. After all, 1.5m of these devices have already been sold in the UK.
Perhaps at some point the frantic pace of consumption and computing will stop, but probably only after the last unwatched television programme has been deleted from the last Sky+ box. Which will be on at least 3D.