Popular restaurant chain ‘Frankie and Benny’s’ have introduced a ‘No Phone Zone’ in many of their restaurants to encourage families to put their phones away while eating in restaurants.
The Italian American restaurant chain have introduced their campaign in over 250 restaurants across the UK, including Lincoln.
The ‘No Phone Zone’ was launched on November 29 until December 7 after the restaurant conducted a survey into the number of parents and children who felt their family spent too much time on their phones while at dinner.
The restaurant’s survey found that 72% of children wished their parents spend less time on their phones and 56% thought that their parents didn’t listen to them while on their phones.
This all begs the question, ‘how much time do we spend on our phones every day?’
According to a survey conducted by dscout in 2016, the average person will touch their phone a massive 2,617 per day. This means the average person will touch their phones almost one million times a year.
The top 10% of phone users will touch their phone almost twice as much as this, resulting in nearly two million touches per year.
To put this into some more perspective, the average user will use their phone 72 every day, whether this being from checking the time or their notifications, to spending hours on end scrolling through social media. Facebook alone accounted for 15% of the total time used on each phone surveyed over a five day period.
On average we spend 2.42 hours on our phones every day.
The affect this has had on the city of Lincoln is clear. With the time we spend on our mobile devices increasing year-by-year, our mobile devices are now so important to us that they are being used to attract tourists to the city.
The City of Lincoln Council has recently launched free Wifi across Lincoln City Centre with the hopes of driving up tourism in the city. City of Lincoln Internet, colloquially named COLin, was introduced on Monday 19 November.