The family together in front of the TV is dead: Facebook, Twitter and Spotify rule

Ever since the first BBC radio broadcast crackled into the nation’s living rooms, in 1922, the electronic media have been hailed as a force for unity, drawing families together.

As the wireless gave way to the television, all the generations would squeeze on to the sofa together to watch the same shows in their tens of millions.

But in the new, multichannel era of texting, tweeting and tapping away on computers, the generations are finding their entertainment in very different spheres.

In a report released today, Ofcom, the communications regulator, paints a picture of the new technologies not as an inducement to inclusiveness, but instead as a force for each member of the family to do their individual thing.

The Communications Market Report demonstrates how far Britons have become addicted to the internet for entertainment, becoming separated from other family members in the process.

Twitter, Facebook and Spotify are at the heart of the new entertainment, consuming hours of attention a week and even taking up time while people are supposedly watching television.

The image conjured up by Ofcom is of a distracted nation, where 36 per cent of people say they surf the net at the same time as they claim to be concentrating on the television at the other end of the living room.

James Thickett, Ofcom’s director of market research, said: “What we find is that there has been a trend for people to converge on the living room, to watch the 37in high-definition television, but when they get there they start to do something else like surf the internet as well.”

The conclusions will disappoint those who had hoped that programmes such as ITV’s now dropped Primeval and Nintendo’s not-so-trendy Wii might herald a revival of families watching or playing together.

Instead what Ofcom reveals is that, while television viewing is holding up at 3 hours 45 minutes a day, that is only because people are surfing the net at the same time.

Radio listening has dipped just below three hours a day as the new wave of social media emerges into the mainstream.

It is a phenomenon that has been described by the music channel MTV as “connected cocooning” — where teenagers and young people in particular spend large amounts of their time at home using the computer to interact with the world outside their families. But the habit is moving up the age range.

“This is a classic technology scenario, where we are seeing new services move from the first adopters to the early majority, where the 25-to-34 age group is catching up with teenagers and students,” said Mr Thickett, one of the regulators behind Ofcom’s 332-page study of media and communications trends.

Twitter, now two years old, is used by more people — 2.6 million — than are watching an episode in the current series of Big Brother, where the average number of viewers is two million. Regardless of David Cameron’s strongly worded views on the subject, tweeters now amount to one in twenty of everybody aged over 12.

Facebook users, who according to industry estimates now number more than 15 million, spend nearly an hour and a half a week networking online, more time than watch a television drama, or both new weekly EastEnders episodes. Nearly four in ten of the adult population say that they maintain a Facebook page, with recent increases in the older generations’ use.

Some 46 per cent of those aged 25-34 and 35 per cent of the 35-54 group now log on at home. Spotify, a three-year-old online music service that lets people pick and chose from a library of millions of songs without paying, is being used by its 900,000 listeners for half an hour a week.

Conventional radio listening, although still much higher at more than 20 hours a week, has fallen by 9 per cent over the last five years.

For those who put together and peddle the technologies that so infatuate us, the recession is not all bad news. Research released as part of the study shows that, when it comes to cutting their cloth, people are more likely to give up holidays and home improvements than they are their Sky subscription.

Asked in which areas they planned to cut back, 47 per cent of consumers said that they would sacrifice a night out, and 29 per cent said they would forgo books and DVDs. Only 10 per cent said that they would jettison their broadband subscription or pay closer attention to the cost of telephone calls. Only 16 per cent said that they would think of dispensing with their subscription TV service, half the number who would go without gym membership.

Source: Times Online (http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/personal_tech/article6740741.ece)