Internet Use Cuts Socializing Time

Sammy at Palm Addict writes "A new survey published in the New York Times states that using the internet has seriously cut into our socializing time. We spend less time watching TV and more time using the internet and following up email. 'The survey found that use of the Internet has displaced television watching and a range of other activities. Internet users watch television for one hour and 42 minutes a day, compared with the national average of two hours.'"

Comments

Does social engineering count as socializing?

[FreeUser]

How is watching TV "socializing"?

Go to the back of the class, slave^H^H^H^H^H^ consumer.

TV is socializing. We told you so, last night on TV and this morning on the Radio (another important social activity).

Most people watch TV with their freinds and family, right? And if not, they're less alone watching and listening to other people on TV (or the radio) than sitting in front of a silent computer, listening to their ogg or mp3 files. Indeed, they are far more social accepting our dogma and messages passively like good little cattle than persuing their own selfish thoughts and desires interactively, on-line.

Seriously, though, TV (and radio) are social engineering. Culture, opinion, taste, desire, even thoughts are cultivated and implanted through television ... which is really the biggest reason congress and the president are so eager to cooperate with the media cartels in weakening, and ultimately gutting, the Internet through copyright law, or at least changing it into just another medium for them to push their agenda down our throats, willing or no.

And I don't mean just the jackass who has been usurping the presidency since 2000, I mean every congress, and every president, since at least the founding of the FCC if not earlier, and most especially the republican congress and democratic president that signed the Sony Bono Copyright Extention Act and the Ditial Millennium Copyright Act, and the current republican president that has made hunting down filesharers a priority that takes precidence over searching the contents of containers and freight flights coming into the country, and a dozen other belated and long-needed countermeasures to terrorism and sabatage (not that terrorism is much of a threat compared to something that kills 50,000-plus people in the USA alone each year, such as automobiles, but they CLAIM it to be their #1 priority, so it deserves mention that they put the interests of the old media cartels ahead of that alleged priority). The reason is pretty clear IMHO ... the old guard media are a tool of control and coercion, and it coupled with the architectures of control in the form of copyright and patent law, are a tried and true means of enhancing and leveraging this control. They aren't about to let a disruptive technology like the Internet and P2P data sharing change that. If they could tame the printing press through copyright law, they can tame the Internet through modern extentiosn of that regime ... and get us uppity tech-savvy malcontents back on the couch where we belong in the process.

Welcome to the future. More of the same.