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The mind boggles does it not? We recently carried out a fun piece of 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. (Something we at Bella Bathrooms definitely DO NOT recommend…
Now our small study can’t claim to represent the population as a whole, but it is rather fascinating that so many people choose to use their tablets in the bathroom. Why is this so?
Bathrooms Equal Better Reading?
Again, I can’t claim any in-depth psychological understanding of why people might opt for the bathroom as their tablet use place of choice, but I can make an intelligent guess as to why people might find it conducive to tablet reading.
First of all, the bathroom (or toilet specifically) has an established role as a reading place. Stacks of magazines, books and old newspapers have been placed in bathrooms for many years as an aid to, let’s be a little coy about this, distracting our mind as our bodies move waste products through our digestive systems.
The tablet, as we found out from our research, is used by many people (41%) to read books so it can be thought of as 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. I know there are some people who are very open and upfront about the human body and its functions, but most of us choose to visit the bathroom (by which I mean toilet) by themselves, locking the outside world out.
It can often be the quietest room in the house – devoid of music, phones, TVs, radios and other people – and so the perfect place to read a book or watch a movie in peace and quiet.
The modern workplace is often a busy and frantic location – phones ringing continuously, people having conversations across desks, visitors coming and going – so a five-minute trip to the office toilet armed with a tablet may be an essential stress break for some. [Others might call this skiving; I couldn’t possibly comment.]
Keep Watching
It may well be our tablet fiends find themselves caught short in the midst of watching a gripping programme or film – with the tablet, there’s no need to stop the film to visit the loo. It can come with you.
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 with each other can give a person a feeling of needing to be contactable at any point of the day. That includes when they are on the toilet, so the tablet then must accompany them just in case that essential email, Tweet or status update on Facebook hits the in-box in the middle of a Number 1 or 2.
You can read the full results of our research here.
