Social Media and Superfast Broadband

The purpose of this post is to discuss the possibilities of a connection between superfast broadband and the amount of time spent by a nation on social media. The theory behind this theory is that in theory, the longer it takes for a page to load, the more time we’d have to spend on social media sites in order to fulfil our desired intentions. However, there is also the theory that the faster our internet connection is, the more we will enjoy spending our time on social media sites. Both possibilities are possible.

In order to conduct a proper analysis, we must discover how much time we, as a nation, spend on social media websites and correlate that to the state of our internet. We rest at 11th, spending an average of 5.3 hours per month on social media. A surprising figure perhaps, as I expected it to be somewhat nearer to 5.3 million! Either way, Israel and Russia lead the charts with 10.7 and 10.3 respectively. Argentina lie 3rd and the Philippines at 4th. Turkey meanwhile are 5th.

Now, it is worth noting that South Korea, the country with the best broadband in terms of internet speeds is not even in the top 20 countries. Neither are Japan or Finland, the second and third leaders in speed respectively. There therefore seems to be no correlation whatsoever between the state of a nation's broadband and time spent on social media.

So what does determine the amount of time spent on social media?

It seems as if the determinant to time spent on social media, is rather more to do with culture. Of course the economy of a country is somewhat a factor, however, only so much as depending on whether the people can afford to spend their time on the internet, rather than labouring for food. In short, following the inconclusiveness of this first investigation, it is clear that further analysis and studies need to be conducted to get to the bottom of the matter.

Of course, the amount of time spent by a country on social media could have absolutely nothing to do with any external factors. However, that wouldn’t be very scientific, would it?