Study Shows How Many Miles Kentuckians Scroll on Their Phones Each Year

If you're old enough to have lived in a time not just before the advent of mobile phones, but long before, do you remember that time? In all seriousness, we're in our fourth decade of having this boon to technology, so if you don't, that's understandable. And that feels weird.

Zeroing in a bit, we had mobile phones long before we had social media. I'm not sure what the "scrolling" action was when we could just get the Internet on our phones, but it escalated precipitously when Facebook came along. The rest of the crew (Twitter/X, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, et al) followed, and the rest is history. We might spend as much, if not more, time scrolling than we do anything else. It's easy, and it's there. And downtime will always exist.

The Nation's Top Scroller

Lo and behold, data exists that tabulates how much we all scroll on our phones. It wouldn't have occurred to me, but I guess there's data for everything. Tollfreeforwarding.com is a telecommunications company that provides businesses with international toll-free and local phone numbers, making them the perfect outfit to crunch another set of numbers to reveal which states stay glued to their phones.

The results are in, and Arizona residents win the big prize, hanging out on their Androids or iPhones for a whopping 8 hours and 50 minutes each day. Man, that sounds like a lot, but I'm going to zip my lip from here on in, and you're about to see why.

Kentucky Scrolls More Than 8 Hours a Day, 105 Miles Per Year

First of all, kudos (I guess) to Washington State for coming in second at 8 hours and 17 minutes. Right behind the Evergreen State in third place, you'll find Kentucky. It seems that we here in the Commonwealth scroll on our phones an average of 8 hours and 3 minutes per day. Add up the distance (from the top of your phone to the bottom), and that comes to more than 105 miles a year. That's about the distance from my hometown of Owensboro to Louisville.

I can't honestly think of another equivalent technological breakthrough (cars and microwave ovens, for example, that we use nearly as much as we use our phones. And it's not going to stop. I suppose we'll keep "logging miles" on our devices until someone figures out a way to make the information just appear in front of our faces.

Then, data will pop up telling us how much we're scrolling through the air.