What were you doing on the 30th December 2011? Eating left over Christmas cheese whilst watching TV? Searching the internet for bargains? Or spending one of the last days of the Christmas Break doing something exciting? The day probably didn’t seem overly significant to most people in the UK, however for the people of Samoa it was, as on this day they were unable to do anything.
This was not a result of collective Christmas excess, but because this year the 30th December did not exist – both Samoa and neighbouring Tokelau skipped the penultimate December day in order to synchronise time zones with their biggest trading partners New Zealand and Australia.
Whilst the science of time baffles me slightly, this somewhat bizarre bid to boost the economy prompted me to think if Britain was to eradicate a day in our year what would we actually miss?
The 30th of December fell on a Friday and, according to Touchpoints data, on this day of the week the average UK adult watches 4 hours of TV, spends 2.94 hours out of home and 1.58 hours social networking. 90 minutes of their media time is spent using multiple media channels at once. In addition, the average UK adult spends almost eight and a half hours a day communicating with others (unsurprisingly this figure rises slightly when you focus on females!).
In addition, figures from Mediatel suggest that the average daily readership of the big national newspapers (Mon-Sat) is 23,712,000million.
This data becomes more significant when we look at the average time a UK adult spends awake. On an average Friday a Brit is awake for approximately 16 hours, with nine and a half hours spent consuming some kind of media.
So how about for the specific day of the 30th December? Well if Britain had decided not to bother with this, we would have missed out on TV programme Tweets of the Year and the film The Artist would have missed its scheduled release date.
Whilst it may have been a confusing time for the people of Samoa, and there will not be any Samoan babies with the birthday 30/12/2011, it wasn’t all bad as people still got paid for the day’s work even though the day didn’t exist. This story also proves interesting in a time of economic uncertainty, as it demonstrates how countries are trying different things to boost their chances of economic stability. David Cameron has also expressed a desire to change the UK time system by staying on British Summer time all year round in order to line-up with major trade partners in Europe and encourage more evening sport. Whilst not quite as drastic as missing a day it will be interesting to see whether Samoa has started a trend and other countries start playing with time.
MEC OPINION: At first thought missing a day of the year wouldn’t seem like something particularly important in the media industry, however what this data demonstrates is just how much media infiltrates our lives and missing a day would mean losing rather a lot of media consumption.
