Time for Twitter

We will spend an average of 7.2 years of our adult life online, which equates to 6.1 weeks a year or 19.6 hours a week on the internet, according to research by smile, the internet bank from The Co-operative Bank.

With the huge growth in social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Bebo the results also show that people now spend an average of 3.6 hours a week on social networking sites.

Shopping online is also a popular activity, we spend an average of £873 a year, equating to a total of £54,000 over a lifetime.

The findings highlight that in a typical day the average person will spend 46 minutes on email, 34 minutes on social networking, 33 minutes shopping online, 33 minutes browsing for general information, and 22 minutes banking online.

John Barker, Head of Smile, comments, "The research clearly highlights that we carry out a diverse range of activities online. As the UK's first online banking provider, it is interesting to see that people view online banking as the second most useful online activity. In the current economic climate, banking online does provide added benefits, such as being able to monitor the money coming in and going out of accounts, which makes budgeting and planning finances much simpler.

From the findings it is also apparent that on average men typically spend more time than women online. However when looking in more detail, on average women tend to spend slightly longer on email and social networking sites than men, whereas men spend longer than women on online banking and shopping activities.