Millennials check their phones over five times more often than adults do daily.

Evidence

Nothing summarizes young life in the hive better than the insights of Facebook’s own North American marketing director, Michelle Klein, who told an audience in 2016 that while the average adult checks his or her phone 30 times a day, the average millennial, she enthusiastically reported, checks more than 157 times daily. Generation Z, we now know, exceeds this pace. Klein described Facebook’s engineering feat: “a sensory experience of communication that helps us connect to others, without having to look away,” noting with satisfaction that this condition is a boon to marketers. She underscored the design characteristics that produce this mesmerizing effect: design is narrative, engrossing, immediate, expressive, immersive, adaptive, and dynamic. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1429

Categorization

• SHARE: A striking single data point about millennial phone-checking frequency that would land well with anyone in behavioral design or media studies.
• XREF: connects to: Smartphones capture nearly three of the average American’s waking hours. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1038

Broader Connections

• Smartphones capture nearly three of the average American’s waking hours. #expands (0.78) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1038