Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Since when did the NYT become the Journal "Duh!"?
There are only so many hours in a day and if you spend them doing something that you couldn't do in the past, you aren't going to have them to do things you would have previously done.
Or am I missing something?
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
Television is a kind of socialization/socializing?! WTF?!?!!
How is watching TV "socializing"?
I don't know about the rest of you, but I find the Internet very useful in planning social events, something which increases socializing time. I'm hardly less social because of it.
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
I think that doing email and chatting on IRC count as more social than watching TV. At least it's a form of communication, whereas TV is just brainless.
...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.
I was under the opinion that things like writing email or posting here on Slashdot were a bit more "socializing" than sitting in front of the TV watching a set of commercials interspersed with bits and pieces of some reality show.
This tagline is copyrighted material. Please send $10 for an affordable replacement.
"It's a bit of a two-edged sword," said Nie. "You can't get a hug or a kiss or a smile over the Internet." Many people are still more inclined to use the telephone for contact with family, he said.
I didn't know you could get a hug or a kiss or a smile over the phone. Time to start dialing those 900 numbers.
Free XBox, PS2
So, what the blurb is saying is that people are communicating with people instead of watching television - and that is seen as cutting socializing time?
And disregarding the slashdot blurb, if this is communicating with friends using IM or email, rather than by phone (as seems to be the case among people I know), how is that in any ways worse?
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
...but that's why I use it.
Esoteric reference.
Thanks to Instant Messaging...
omg lol kthxbye
We can only presume the pages of the report are stuck together..
From th article:
According to the study, an hour of time spent using the Internet reduces face-to-face contact with friends, co-workers and family by 23.5 minutes, lowers the amount of time spent watching television by 10 minutes and shortens sleep by 8.5 minutes.
Looks like a good way to gain about 18 minutes/hour...
Join moola.com, play games to earn money.
I watch as much TV, if not more, than ever before. However, due to wi-fi and having a tiny notebook, I can now sit and work/write/do research with the TV in the background, which means my TV watching is semi-productive. I tend to leave the TV on Sky News or something.
Having the Internet to hand makes TV more fun, as you can look up movie trivia on IMDB, or get indepth information on things you've just heard in a documentary. I find it hard watching TV on its own now without playing on the Internet at the same time. TV is a great background activity, though not a good foreground one, IMHO.
Reduces solcializing by 23.5 minutes, watching tv by 10 minutes and shortens sleep by 8.5 minutes, leaving a net gain of 18 minutes a day.
So, does this mean for every hour I play on the Internet I get 18 minutes added to my day? I'd say that's a bonus.
As for the socializing, yeah, uh-huh whatever. Didn't do it before the Internet, thats what MMORGs are for.
I also question the premise that watching TV is socializing. It's a passive activity and most people have the bare minimum of conversation or interaction while watching. When I was in high school, my mother would always demand that I get off my computer and spend time with the family, expressly considering TV to be "family time." Bullshit. I was interacting with people on boards and through e-mail and the rare blog back in the day, and my interactivity (not to mention intellectual exercise) stopped utterly when I had to go sit on the couch.
Read jack phelps dot net
I definately spend less time watching TV (shows) because I grab ad-free versions off the net. That'll shave off 15 minutes from each show right there.
Two TV shows without adverts and I have a half hour of my life back.
If you watch less TV and spend time in chat room and forums, you are actually socializing more with other people ( /. may or may not be included ).
When you watch TV, do you watch it with other people? If you do, do you talk to them while the show is on...probably not. But if you are on the internet talking to people in a forum, more than likely you are also watching your email, IM other people, or have another chat/forum open. You are actually doing something other than absorbing mindless crap from the TV.
In reality, MORE is to LESS as TV is to SOCIALIZING.
I'm not a doctor, but I play one in bed.
The majority of time that I spend on the internet is spent communicating with others in some way. I would think that sending email and participating in forum discussions qualify as socializing. Heck, even the time I spend playing WoW counts as socializing, IMO, because I am in constant contact with my guildmates.
Television is an entirely one-way connection: you watch it. Even if you happen to be sitting in a room with other people, if everyone is watching the TV, no one is actually socializing with anyone else.
And furthermore, DUR! What a brilliant study: hey, guess what I figured out, if you spend time doing something, you can't spend that same time doing something else. Somebody give me a grant!
...maybe that's what we want? Not everyone's life is fairy-tale perfect, ya know.
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
Yea...it's strange like that. You can talk about a TV show, but when you try to talk to someone about a forum discussion they just look at you weird.
Or is it just me?
I don't know about anybody else, but I watch tv while I'm on the computer. My room mate and I watch tv in our room while we're sitting in front of our computers doing stuff online. So I get my recommended daily dosage of television every day right alongside my chronic internet usage. Hooray for multitasking! And hooray for being a college kid with little better to do than watch tv and be online at the same time.
don't mess with the united dubyan states of texamerica - we will get nuculear all over your ass
> They mean the psychiatric definition of "socialization"
This is the kind of bunk psychiatrists push around, without consideration for reality.
I spent 10 years being sent to a eight different psychiatrists for depression & social withdrawal, went through numerous attempts at 'socialization' before I found a good doc who diagnosed a simple vitamin B absorbtion problem, cured by injections.
Eight psychiatrists couldn't tell the difference between someone who has symptoms of a Vitamin B deficiency and someone who is genuinely depressed & withdrawn.
For comparison if you had a computer that didn't boot and it was sent to eight computer techs from a certain school who diagnosed it with various windows related problems, but it was a Mac, and not one of them picked up that it was actually a Mac, then you'd have to be concerned about the whole state of computer techs from that school and come to the conclusion that they were taught rubbish.
Similarly, Psychiatry/Psychology is bunk.
no you are not.
I sometimes do it, but my computer and TV are facing each other. In other words in order to watch tv I have to spin around in my chair and look up. in order to surf the web i must spin back.
makes it easy to ignore commercials. Also I can flip on the history channel, and when you hear something cool spin around to check it out.
Of course I am running about 2 hours of tv a day, but only Monday, Friday, Sat, and Sunday.
I don't count the half hour morning news segment. as I am surfing the web for the majority of it. Just enough to hear the weather reports, and traffic outlooks.
Note to self find easy to use audio based local weather reports for OS X. I don't normally drive enough to worry about traffic anyway.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
At least in finland porn is often called hydraulics. Fluids and pumping motion after all. Except in some japanese flicks.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
I completely disagree with the gist of this article. On-line game playing, reading and responding to e-mails, IM, etc. are forms of socializing, much more than staring blindly at the TV. My family lives overseas; with IM and e-mail, I communicate with them at a much more constant, intense, intimate level now than when I was a kid sitting around the family room with us all in the same house. In those days, we'd all wind up veged in front of the TV paying more attention to it than each other. As for friends, I'll always have one or two or more long running IM chats going, sometimes they heat up, other times they do quiet for a while but I am socially in contact with different people all day, instead of just a few minutes on the phone. Also, the article doesn't even mention that, while doing stuff on the net, I (and most people I know) have the TV droning on in the background anyway.
I recently struck it up with a very nice man from Nigeria...
you insensitive clod!
I even watch 1 hour and 42 minutes of TV a week much less that much per day. I get home, and bam into gameland. Chat with friends, mix music. Why on earth would I want to rot my brains, when I can use the internet to learn and stimulate my brain.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Since when did sitting in front of a TV count as social time?
--LWM
Oh yeah, definitely. I'm way too busy talking to people in IMs, e-mails, message boards, chat rooms, and IRC, to socialize with anyone.
I am NOT a number! I am a - oh wait, I'm number 761710. Look! 761710!
Unless you meant to imply that we are SUPPOSED to be mindless robots who follow hours of sitting in front of the tube with gathering at malls consuming crap.
/. is "media on fire".
TV is far less of a participatory (McLuhan's cool-to-hot [print-to-television]) medium than the internet (including downloading P0rn!)
In McLuhanistic terms, web browsing on
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I RTFA'd, and I thought it was odd that the article leads off with "a study says internet use impacts TV viewing." Well, duh. So I looked at the report's company website - Knowledge Networks. They're a bunch of Stanford professors who build a product marketing research company. Ah, there's the connection. They wrote a report that says "folks are using the internet - your TV advertising is less effective." Makes more sense now. You might consider this report to be an advert for their Syndicated Products. After all, if you're in Product Marketing, you need professional study info and long-term trend analysis info to back up your current crop of wild-assed guesses, right?
For me, Internet made me socialize due to my speech and hearing impediments. It is a lot easier to communicate online and I get to meet all kinds of people. I love the Internet. I could live without TV.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
This is positive. Following up email means that people are actually communicating with each other, whereas television generally meant the opposite.
With only a few notable exceptions, I have tended to long be of the opinion that television has been probably the single most worthless and negative piece of technology invented thus far...and its one claim at redemption IMHO could be the statement that it was a stop on the journey to the invention of the computer monitor.
Even at its most banal, the Internet is generally still encouraging some degree of both literacy and interactivity from its users. The "idiot box" on the other hand, is richly deserving of the term. It has been proven that in some cases a person's level of neurological activity is higher during sleep than it is while watching television.
The obsolescence of television, if it occurs, is not an event that I will waste any time mourning whatsoever...and I am in fact inclined to believe that if the universal death of television were to take place tomorrow, an intellectual rennaisance of unparalleled scope would almost certainly take place in the weeks, months, and years to follow.
I mean, if a band wants to make a song that "the man" doesn't want you to hear, they'll have a hard time getting it published by a big record label or played on the radio stations that are all owned by ClearChannel. So, maybe they'll release it for free over the Internet. Not that they will be, if the government ever were successful at eliminating all copyright infringement, it's only the non-corporate-sanctioned independent voices that people will be able to find on filesharing programs.
... and now take for granted that only "bad" people want (or need). The implication is that anyone using a technology like Freenet must be bad ... which is a tiny step from asserting that Freenet (and similar technologies) should be banned. Indeed, as I mentioned above, there are powerful forces asserting that very thing right now ... and some courts who are agreeing.
... at which point those very nay-sayers will chime in with "hind-sight is 20/20" ... never once admitting they were wrong and those they shouted down were right.
... no actual copyright infringement need have occurred, indeed, no evidence of infringement need even exist, for a publisher (website) to be shutdown (censored).
The efforts are aimed primarilly at banning the technologies. Congress, the president, and the media cartels are trying to ban P2P technology, not just go after those who violate copyrights. Lose the technology, and you lose the conduit by which indie bands and indie filmmakers can disseminate their wares and reach a marketplace without going through the cartels.
We've seen comments like that in other threads, decrying Freenet as "encouraging" despicable things like child pornography because it tries to insure privacy and anonymouty on the Internet, the kind of privacy and anonymouty we took for granted just a couple of decades ago
In the next decade or two we are about to get some very ugly lessons in why GOOD people need anonymouty and privacy
So no, I don't think legislation like the Sony Bono act and the DMCA are doing a thing to erode corporate control over the media. The Internet has been doing that, and Sony Bono, the DMCA, and other more toxic legislation now pending are designed to slow and ultimately thwart that, and to return control to those very same cartels by means of a huge, legal club with which to financially whack any who threaten their cartel. Remember, the DMCA lets you silence a websight by mere accusation
That is hardly empowering the little guy, or eroding control of content by the big guy. Quite the opposite.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
1 hour 42 minutes instead of 2 hours? That's like just saying that internet users are smart enough to use their computers during all the commercial breaks.
I'm a extremely shy guy by nature(until I know you) so in actuality thanks to the internet, I'm socializing more than I would otherwise.....
Next generalized pointless study please......
I don't know about you, but I backed that off to 0 hours and 0 minutes a day. The problem isn't with the internet displacing TV. The problem is with TV no longer being interesting.
Lets face it, the content gets more and more mindless, and the commercials get longer - TV is cutting it's own throat with this one.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
It's like back when Seinfeld episodes were new. Everybody would go home, watch them, then talk about them around the water cooler the next day. If you didn't see the episode, you couldn't be in on any of the master of your domain jokes.
A "TV" is the screen to which you plug videogame systems.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Maybe the researcher is confusing socialization with inprinting.
Communication medieval ages (before radio)
1. Hoardes watch church/political leader (talking head) say NI and they like it ! Hell yeah !
2. Hoardes start saying NI by imitative imprinting
3. NI NI NI NI NI NI !
Communication renaissance (after telephone)
1. Hoardes still do the above
2. But now they also use telephone and keep on saying NI NI NI NI !
Communication pre golden age (TV and radio )
1. Rich ones become talking heads (initial private and government TV)
2. NI NI NI (BUY) NI NI NI (VOTE ME)
Communication golden age (internet)
1. Much more people become talking heads !
2. NI NI NI (BUY) NO NO NO NO DON'T !
3 ????
4. Profit.
Massive jailarity chaos ensues, welcome to meme era. All your internet belongs to us.
Let's see... Wednesday Caleb was over, hanging out. I met him through a Linux Users Group email list.
:)
Last night my wife and I went to a local amateur circus performance with a coworker and his family, including some of his relatives who were visiting Florida (where we live) from MA and WVA. I originally met this coworker online. At the time we lived 400 miles apart. In fact, the online meeting led to his *becoming* a coworker, and now we live 15 miles apart and see each other -- including families -- regularly.
Last week I went out drinking with some guys I semi-hang out with on IRC during work. We socialize on IRC in between job tasks, and get together at least twice per month to drink, go sailing, watch movies, listen to music, etc. We arrange most of our get-togethers by IRC and/or email.
I correspond with people all over the world by email. In the last two years I've traveled on business to 12 U.S. states and six other countries, and in every one of them there were people I already "knew" and enjoyed meeting F2F for the first time. These are people I never would have met without the Internet. And it goes the other way, too. People I "know" through email or IRC show up here and I show *them* around.
Does reading and posting to a West Wight Potter (make of sailboat I own) forum count as socializing? What about when members of the forum get together for group sails, as happens at least a few times every year here in Florida -- and once or twice a week in San Francisco Bay, where there are a lot more Potter sailboats?
There are two local business people I met (through mutual friends) on Linked-In with whom I have lunch monthly; we bounce ideas off of each other and give each other advice on careers and such. This isn't anything formal, and we aren't in similar businesses. We just like each other, and it's nice to get an outside perspective on some of our ideas.
What was that about the Internet cutting down on socializing? For whom?