Global EditionASIA 中文双语Français
Culture
Home / Culture / Art

Wake-up call for a non-stop world

China Daily Hong Kong Edition | Updated: 2019-11-25 11:15
Share
Share - WeChat

The new London exhibition 24/7 is a wake-up call for our non-stop world.

Douglas Coupland, Slogans for the 21st Century (2011-present) [Photo/Stephen Chung for Somerset House]

There are more smartphones in the world than there are people and the device's proliferation is outpacing the growth of the human population, according to the United Nations' International Telecommunications Union. The inability to switch off has become one of the most important and pressing issues of our time. It has been estimated that, in Britain, people check their smartphones every 12 minutes, when taken as an average over a 24-hour period.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings named the company's biggest competitor: not Amazon or YouTube, but sleep. He explained, "We're competing with sleep, on the margin. And so, it's a very large pool of time." There's so much competition, it can seem as if there are not enough hours in a day to actually stop and sleep. And when we're sleep-deprived, our ability to pay attention reduces drastically and our productivity drops, creating new economies around self-tracking devices and other sleep aids.

1 2 3 4 5 6 Next   >>|
Most Popular
Top
BACK TO THE TOP
English
Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site.
License for publishing multimedia online 0108263

Registration Number: 130349
FOLLOW US