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In the heyday of rock music, no stadium gig was complete without a slow number that prompted the crowd to hold aloft their cigarette lighters to create hundreds of flickering points of light. Now the same effect is created by hundreds of people holding up their mobile phones as the audience takes photo after photo to prove they were there.
This is most likely to occur in the UK as the British use their mobile phone as a camera more than anyone else. They are also among the world's fastest adopters of social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo, posting the subsequent photos or at least updating their status to relate how great the gig was, as a way of keeping in touch with an ever-expanding and ephemeral collection of "friends".
The British love of camera phones, social networking and even digital video recorders and digital televisions - there are more per capita in the UK than anywhere else, even the US - is revealed in research by the communications regulator Ofcom published today. It paints a picture of an increasingly tech-literate nation, with a strong desire to keep in touch, that is now spending almost twice as long on the internet as it did in 2004.
Prof Simeon Yates, director of the Culture, Communication and Computing Research Institute (C3RI) at Sheffield Hallam University believes that British consumers - especially younger ones - have wrapped the mobile phone into their lives in a way that is less pronounced in other countries.
"One of the things that is becoming clear is that for a lot of reasons British people, especially those under the age of say 40, have got used to using their mobile phones for communication, whereas in the US they are used to using their computer and in Japan they still use their phone in a different way."
The Japanese, for instance, are hindered by their language which makes composing a text message a rather cumbersome process. Many Americans, meanwhile, grew up with free broadband access, as it came bundled with cable television.
In the UK, the ubiquity of mobile phones has accompanied the explosion in social networking. Despite their reputation as being reserved, the British seem more and more willing to share everything online. Ofcom's latest International Communications Market report shows that 50% of British internet users access social networking sites, up 11 percentage points on last year and second only to Canada.
Increasingly, Britons use mobile phones to tell friends what they are up to. "For an awful lot of people, the mobile phone is core to maintaining their relationships with people," says Yates. "They are trying to maintain very large but slightly ephemeral social networks, which are bigger than the networks we used to try and maintain, and one way to do that is to send little moments of contact: 'here's a picture of me at a concert', for instance, and it does not require any conversation to follow."
The sheer size of the US market means it tops the global league for doing this - with 4 million Americans regularly accessing social networking sites on their phones - but the UK is in second place.
The Ofcom report shows there were 121 mobile phones for every 100 people in the UK last year, the second highest market penetration among the world's seven top economies - excluding China - after Italy at 154%. Italians regularly have one pre-pay phone for work and one for personal use while 40% of households in Italy have no fixed line at all, compared with about one in 10 in the UK.
Britons used those phones to make a total of 99bn minutes of calls last year, compared with 52bn in 2002, and send an average of 972 texts each, up from 708. American mobile phone users topped the calling league with 2.1 trillion minutes last year, but Irish mobile phone users sent the most texts, composing 1,848 each, or 154 a month, up from 118 a month in 2002.
Asked whether they use their mobile phone as a camera, 59% of Britons surveyed by Ofcom said they do, compared with 58% in Italy and 52% in Japan.
The dramatic growth in mobile phone use helped the global communications market grow 6.1% last year, to £876bn.
The report also shows that British internet users are spending more and more time online, currently 839 minutes a week, up from 385 minutes in 2004. British internet users are only outpaced by their American counterparts who now spend 913 minutes a week glued to their screens.
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Wouldnt dare guess on my online hours.
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