Scroll-down nation: Pinoys top social media users

Filipinos spend an average of 4,252 days—or 11.6 years—on social media “during their lifetime,” according to a new social media analysis that ranked the Philippines first among social-media obsessed countries in the world.

However, a sociologist from the University of the Philippines said that study should not immediately characterize the Filipinos’ relationship to social media as an “addiction” as the country’s conditions “predispose” and “forces” them to go online.

The analysis by OnBuy.com, a United Kingdom-based online marketplace that also looks at internet trends, looked at the social media patterns vis-a-vis the life expectancies of 45 countries around the world based on data from We Are Social and Hootsuite.

We Are Social and Hootsuite are creative agencies that focus on social media and e-commerce management and analytics. They regularly release their own reports on global social media usage.

The study showed Filipinos spent the equivalent of 102,054 hours on social media during their lifetime. Although Filipinos live up to 72 years on average, the Philippines still ranked in the bottom 10 countries for average life expectancy, Onbuy said.

Colombia, Brazil

Colombia came in second place, with an average of 4,220 days on social networks, while Brazil ranked third with 4,000 days. In contrast, Japan, a technologically advanced nation with a high life expectancy of 85 years, spend just 970 days (23,269 hours) online.

“It’s more worrying to consider just how many countless hours we spend trawling online,” Onbuy said. “It seems nothing is reducing our screen time.”

Onbuy did not explain how it arrived at those figures and whether population size were considered as factors in its computations of data from digital the two agencies.

This is not the first time the Philippines has ranked first in social media usage across the world, despite the country’s continuing lack of a robust internet infrastructure to support this massive use.

“The fact that Filipinos spend a lot of time on social media result from a lot of different factors,” noted University of the Philippines sociologist Athena Presto.

“It’s not just because we are so hooked, but also because our current context and circumstances predispose us to looking at our screens (more),” she said.

For one, she said, Filipinos are “culturally predisposed to using social media because we have this social construction of being sociable people.”

Lockdown, slow internet

Moreover, the ongoing lockdown has likely exacerbated this phenomenon, as people trawled social media to rekindle ties and keep abreast of reports about the pandemic.Slow internet connections and high traffic could also lead to spending a notoriously long amount of time online, Presto added.

“Sociologically speaking, it’s hard to say that Filipinos are addicted to social media … because the assumption is that it’s an abnormal activity and you are the only one who experience that,” Presto said. “So I don’t think it’s appropriate to describe our relationship with social media as addiction.”

If anything, social media helps amplify and maintain what she called the “Filipino-ness”—our sociability and bayanihan—especially during a time that requires people to be physically distant.

This was important, she said, as the Philippines coped with the struggles of a pandemic and recent typhoons.