One Fifth of People Admit to Reading Their Tablet on the Toilet
Here’s a fascinating fact for you… People are so taken with their tablets these days, they don’t even put them down to go to the toilet, writes James Chapman of Bella Bathrooms.
We recently carried out fun research where we asked 100 people questions about their tablets. Amongst those who owned tablets, the average use was 80 minutes a day – and 21% of those people admitted using their tablet whilst on the loo and another 7% owned up to using their tablet in the bath.
Our small study can’t claim to represent the population as a whole, but why do you reckon
so many people choose to use their tablets in the bathroom?
Bathrooms Equal Better Reading?
I can’t claim any in-depth psychological understanding, but I can make an intelligent guess as to why people might find the toilet conducive to tablet reading.
The bathroom has an established role as a reading place. Stacks of magazines and books have been placed in bathrooms for many years as an aid to, let’s be coy here, distracting our mind as our bodies move waste products through our digestive systems.
The tablet is used by many people (41%) to read books so you could say it’s the modern equivalent of the magazine pile.
Privacy Rules
Secondly, the bathroom is one of the few private places left to us as 21st century citizens. There are some people who are very upfront about the human body and its functions, but most of us choose to visit the bathroom (by which I mean toilet) by ourselves, locking the outside world out.
The modern workplace is often noisy and frantic – phones ringing continuously and people having conversations across desks – so a five-minute trip to the office toilet armed with a tablet may be an essential stress break. [Others might call this skiving; I couldn’t possibly comment.]
Keep Posting
And finally, arguably the worst reason of all, there’s our modern 21st century disease. Social media and all of the different ways there are to communicate can give a person a feeling of needing to be contactable 24/7. That includes toilet trips, so the tablet must accompany them just in case that essential email, Tweet or Facebook status update hits the in-box in the middle of a Number 1 or 2.
