The Internet is addictive; no one who has tasted what it can offer can resist its allure. All the world over, we see the number of online users increasing every day, and Canadians – young and old alike – appear to be embracing the ubiquity of the World Wide Web in greater numbers than before.
A newly released 2014 Factbook from Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), which manages Canada’s .CA (News - Alert) domain name registry, does indeed vouch for the fact that Canadians “rank at or near the top in common online activities.”
With smartphone adoption stated to be the fastest in Canada, it perhaps comes as no surprise that the digital workstyle trends that are emerging clearly suggest that right from entertainment, finance, chatting to shopping and surfing, Canadians have almost (if not quite) overtaken their British and American counterparts.
According to CIRA, Canadians are just behind the U.S, but far ahead of the global average when it comes to spending time online. English-speaking Canadians, however, stole a lead over their French-speaking compatriots by averaging seven more hours online per week.
But when it came to surfing, the Canadians took the cake and topped the list with 3,731 Web page visits per month, far greater than the global average.
The craze for online video and TV remains high all over the world and using the smartphone on the go for entertainment has become the rage. Canadians have made their mark here too, and figures show that the average viewer spends at least 25 hours watching videos every month, a close second to the United Kingdom. This large active smartphone audience for video and TV seems to be growing rapidly and is reported to have jumped year over year, from 21 to 37 per cent.
Given the popularity of social media sites, Canadians, like people in the rest of the world, are partial to hanging out, sharing activities and photos. CIRA notes that almost 24 million Canadians, or 69 per cent of the population, visited at least one social networking site last year.
Embracing a digital workstyle is a phenomenon that seems to be happening to people in all parts of the world, no matter how remote. The Web beckons us all and our lives seem to switch from the “traditional mode to the digital mode” automatically; after that, there’s just no turning back.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson