Britons 'Preferring email to Face-to-Face Conversations'

Phone calls and email are increasingly replacing face-to-face conversations, a study from BT has suggested.

According to the telecoms and broadband provider's new 21st Century Life Index, up to one quarter of Britons prefer to communicate electronically or over the phone rather than in person. BT also said that the average weekly time spent on the internet stands at six hours.

Marked developments in the way that online behaviour has matured in line with internet technology were detected by the study, with 44 percent saying that they surfed the web from home. In 1998, BT found this figure to stand at just 14 per cent.

Internet shopping is also proving increasingly popular, with a majority of users having made a purchase within the last three months. Fraud was found to provide the biggest single online concern for users; a decade ago, slow connection speeds were cited most frequently.

John Petter, head of BT Retail’s consumer unit, said: "The technological advances people hoped for ten years ago have become the reality today and we are already living in the technological utopia envisaged in 1998.

"The pace of innovation and opportunity is unrelenting in the 21st century. The challenge for us is to harness that innovation to ensure it delivers the services people want, that enrich their lives and make their businesses more efficient."

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