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Americans Using Internet 'Just for Fun'
Ant writes "CNET News.com reports that nearly one-third of American Internet users go online just for fun." From the article: "A survey of 1,931 Internet users conducted by Pew Internet & American Life Project in late November and December 2005 found 30 percent of respondents said they went online "for no particular reason" on the previous day. That was up from 21 percent in a November 2004 survey. The survey also showed that 34 percent of online men were surfing for fun on an average day in December, compared with 26 percent of women."
That means that 2/3s are actually using it for actual work.
From the article: "A survey of 1,931 Internet users conducted by Pew Internet & American Life Project in late November and December 2005 found 30 percent of respondents said they went online "for no particular reason" on the previous day. That was up from 21 percent in a November 2004 survey.
Poor saps.
I Slashdot with well-defined and concrete goals in mind.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
The survey also showed that 34 percent of online men were surfing for fun on an average day in December
Well, I guess looking at porn is fun...
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
"for no particular reason"
I thought it was spelled pr0n
Yeah, I saw a yard gnome once, it didn't scare me - Space Ghost
December seems like the month that has the most goofing off in it in general, in the lead up to Christmas. I wonder if they'd get the same numbers if they ran the survey this month.
This would describe about 30 hours out of my 40 hour work week.
I wouldn't call the hours and hours I've wasted at stupidvideos.com fun. Well, I guess I would.
firestream.net
As the fine folks of AvenueQ would say... "just grab your d*ck and double-click!" :)
http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/internet4po...about getting your ass handed to you by a bunch of 12 year old script kiddies in Counter-Strike.....
> "one-third of American Internet users go online just for fun."
According to my ISP (CenturyTel) the Internet exists solely for "entertainment and education".
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
That entire 1/3.
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
"Seeing how much porn is on the Internet, and assuming Internet porn addicts have fun with it, I am suprized to hear that only 33% of the US surfers use the internet for fun"
They probably need to take into account both types of masturbation: physical, and mental.
I think they misspelled "Pr0n".
2000 users. More than this number of internet users can be found at any average sized University...
If the "survey" is made at a uni, maybe there will be a 100% of "using internet to study"...
Also if you go to a nurcery school, maybe there will be more than 60% of female surfers...
This surevy really says nothing at all..
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I'm just reading it for the articles...
I wouldn't consider "just for fun" the same as "no particular reason." In fact, the latter, which was the true response, could indicate that those people go online because they feel compelled to, sort of like an addiction.
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
Ah yes. I know it seems impossible, especially for those who've failed statistics & probabilies classes, to make target populational inferences from a survey population. But it is quite possible and quite common.
Using well-established statistics and probability, it is mathematically safe to say that within some given margin of error--three percent is common--that if you asked every single Anerican the same question, their responses would match the surveyed population.
Note that this populational response accuracy does not speak to whether the question is formed in a neutral, accurate manner that elicits meaningful responses from the survey population. The statistical accuracy can just say that given this (well-formed or poorly-formed) question, this target population's response will follow the survey population's response.
I'm sure mnost of us are almost always within a few feet of an internet connection.
When I'm at work, or at home, I've got machines with 24/7 internet connectivity. I use the internet to check my mail, the weather, any news updates, settle disputes, find out things, look around to kill time, verify syntax of command, read movie reviews, and practically every thing else.
Sometimes I'll go over to my home machines, and just check about a half a dozen tabs in Mozilla which are always up just to see if anything new happened since the last time.
For many of us, the internet has become ubiquitous, and just sort of always there. It's hard to nail down any one specific reason why I'm connected. It's just there all of the time.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Well, I went online today for "no particular reason", and just happened to stuble across this article in my RSS reader. I wasnt out LOOKING for articles on how people waste time on the internet.....
(on a side note, i'm sure that those 66% that DID have a reason, that reason would be pr0n... oh wait, why the hell am I still on slashdot?)
"30 percent of respondents said they went online "for no particular reason" on the previous day"
This survey found what people claimed they went online for. How many were actually going online to look for something (discussion with people, interesting articles, etc.) but weren't aware of this? Don't make the mistake of taking survey results as anything beyond "this is what people responded with when asked these questions".
It was in Humor.
have you ever been hit by a Clue by Four?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Of course people are going online just for fun. The internet is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. It's just a medium.
Why do you read books? Is it purely for research purposes, or are you just having fun?
Why do you go to the mall? Are you there strictly for purchasing things, or are you also there to have fun?
What the national media has not seemed to grasp yet is that the Internet is not some spooky alternate reality with a different set of rules than the real world (for most people). It's just a way of moving information back and forth and communicating. Yes, it's the first medium to combine those two purposes. But people don't use the Internet just to use the Internet... they're just doing something that happens to be on the Internet. Asking why people go online is about as insightful as asking why people wake up in the morning.
Why do you wake up in the morning? Is your life just to work and make money to provide for yourself and your family, or do you also like to have some fun?
It's just a means to do other things, people. Some of us do work on it, some of use play on it, and most people do both.
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
Fun would be a particular reason to go online. Saying that one has no particular reason for going online is saying that one may have more than one reason for doing so, not necessarily just "fun."
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
I am proud to say that 1/3 of us surf as 9/10 of us live. Used to be, back in the day, that only the more athletic, outgoing types got to have fun, but thanks to the miracles of technology, the pocket-protector and taped glasses set gets to fritter away our lives idly as well. Ah the miracles of technology....
I myself dream of the day when all the people of the world can sit at home in a dark room, untouched by soap or natural light, listlessly reloading slashdot and the onion, and googling in the hopes that they'll find something new and interesting. It is this persistant optimism that there is a better way to be lazy that is at the very heart of American culture, and this is the greatest gift we have to give the world.
... considered looking at pr0n to be a meaningful activity, rather than "fun" or "no particular reason".
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
I didn't realize WoW subscriptions were quite that high yet. Impressive. =)
-Chris
Time IQ - Web Based Time Tracking
When I was a boy, I had to walk 18 miles, uphill, in the snow, with no shoes on, just to get to Yahoo.com. And back then, it only had 4 links.
// This is not a sig.
Hahaha! Porn pornity porn porn porn! The joke here is that the internet has porn on it! Haha! I made a funny. Excuse me a moment while I go change my pants.
Please, people!
At any rate, it's another one of those surveys that attempts to rigorously show what we all already know. People use the internet as a medium for social interaction. Whoopee.
I'm a little worried, though, that computer users answered "fun" because they had no idea what they were doing on the internet. That's probably unfounded, though. Most of them are probably members of the thronging myspace jackass horde.
The other 90% are really teriffic liars.
shut up.
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.