People are spending most of their waking hours staring at screens

Via Marketwatch

Swipe. Click. Binge. Repeat.

Americans spend more time than ever watching videos, browsing social media and swiping their lives away on their tablets and smartphones. American adults spend more than 11 hours per day watching, reading, listening to or simply interacting with media, according to a new study by market-research group Nielsen. That’s up from nine hours, 32 minutes just four years ago.

In the first quarter of the year, U.S. adults spent three hours and 48 minutes a day on computers, tablets and smartphones. This is a 13-minute increase from the previous quarter, and 62% of that time is attributed to app/web browsing on smartphones. Television still accounts for most media usage, with four hours and 46 minutes spent watching TV every day in the first quarter of this year.

But the time spent on video game consoles and internet-connected devices such as Google Chromecast GOOG, -0.14% Apple TV AAPL, +5.47%  and Amazon Fire TV AMZN, +0.52%  rose to 40 minutes per day from 35 minutes per day from the previous quarter; 26 of those minutes are on internet-connected devices and the rest are on game consoles, Nielsen said.

Media use is reaching new levels of intensity. Parents with children aged eight to 18 years of age spend over nine hours with screen media each day, according to a 2016 survey of 1,700 such parents by Common Sense Media, a San Francisco-based organization that examines the impact of technology and media on families.

That compares to the more than 4.5 hours tweens spend on screen media on average every day and 6.5 hours spent by teenagers every day, according to a separate 2015 survey of more than 2,650 children by the same organization. Based on Nielsen’s latest report, however, the time people spend online has increased significantly, even over the last four years.

And that swiping is expensive: Apple stock cleared the $200 mark on Wednesday after the reporting better-than-expected fiscal third-quarter results late Tuesday, making it increasingly likely that Apple will be the first U.S. company to reach a $1 trillion market capitalization. The company’s profit was helped by app sales and increasingly expensive iPhones. The iPhone X costs $999.