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Foundation Commissions $50 Million Online Study
PreacherTom writes, "It's not a stretch to say that kids use the Internet to play World of Warcraft and to tweak their MySpace pages. Still, the MacArthur Foundation doesn't think that is quite specific enough. The private, grant-making institution is commissioning a $50 million, five-year study to investigate precisely how and why young people use the Net. $10 million in grants is going to to individuals and organizations to work on projects that stimulate research in digital media. Sign me up."
since all of these technologies are relatively young and constantly changing, and any conclusions they may draw will likely be obsolete by the time they're published.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
...and I know that I wouldn't get it. But here's your sad end result: porn.
Now if they would now divert their attention elsewhere with that $50 million. Case closed!
A *5-year long* study about the Internet? Come on, by the time the study is complete, it'll be irrelevant as peoples' internet usage habits will have changed.
http://www.chmodoplusr.com/
I think 'generator sites' and stuff like YTMND or Objection! would be useful to investigate because there's a big cross section of users and influences all coming together to create wild and varied (well... maybe just wild then) content.
How can I tell if this is a trap?
Instead of focusing on the "old", they focus on the so called "young", yet we all are growing old and cannot do anything about it! Disappointed is me here. What the heck!
Porn.
Wouldn't the kids use the of internet have changed in that period of time?
It said "windows 98 or better" so I installed Linux
#4 Plagiarism
If you can read this, it's already too late.
i'm a bargain:
the answer is pr0n, WoW, and AIM
heck, i'm a nice guy, i'll cut my fee in half: $5 million please
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Odd that all of the things listed in the article's summary are less than 5 years old, will the results after 5 years even be realavent?
(except for the "porn" answer).
the internet is mostly a dump truck full of pr0n and Linux ISOs
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
it's the last wasteland.
the final frontier.
the wild west.
youth uses the internet because they aren't told how and why to do so.
They're using their grammar skills there.
But the Internet isin't a truck you dump stuff on, it's a series of tubes!
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
They're spending $50 million to do the same thing that spyware authors make money doing.
I'd do it for only 25 million dollars.
Parent, you sound remarkably like this story on Fark.
"MacArthur Foundation spending $50 million to determine why kids use the internet. Here's a clue: pr0n, WoW, MySpace - that'll be $18 million"
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
Can someone write a greasemonkey thingie so I never have to see 'itsatrap' again? And maybe strip out 'fud, notfud' as well?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
A bit off topic, I know, but this itsatrap stuff is really getting out of hand. Every single story on the front page now has "itsatrap". I love Admiral Ackbar as much as the next guy, but there is such a thing as overdoing it.
If I ran a foundation that somehow had its mitts on $50M, I'd want to find some way to get some of that money into places where it was more accessable.
Just like the SCO debacle could be interpreted as a way for Darl to pay his brother (SCO's main lawyer) hefty fees to strip SCO and get the cash into the family, I wonder whether a bit of sooping around here could uncover some similar interesting behaviour.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Honestly, I'm surpsied it's taken this long. Internet use and culture is fascinating, I don't see how psychology can be such an enormous field and yet no one's begun a real effort analyze internet behavior. If you read the article, I'm certain they aren't just going to be analyzing what people are spending their time on (yeah, yeah, we all know teens just look at porn between emo bulletin posts to their Myspace). It should be more indepth then that. Of course, it's debatable if psychological findings really mean anything, but I'm happy to see that people are finding potential in internet psychology.
There are so many carbon copy (WOW,MySpace,AIM) comments, which will be repeated by some other clueless bums trying to act smart. So we can safely say that Adults use internet to try to find one amusing statement/quote and repeat it over and over again till everyone is sick of it, then they move on to the next one.
Seriously, whats with the negative remarks. Don't you think just maybe some other purpose behind the study apart from which sites 'young' people like to visit and what they use to kill their bandwidth. If the question was more general "What do people use net for?" then the first comment would have been "Porn" - which although amusing and not entirely incorrect, would have been far from the complete picture.
For example: Most of the people hate seeing ads (targeted or otherwise) but there is a reason why websites have come to realise that putting huge blinking Flash ads on the pages is a bad idea and have started to move away from the stupid idea (Google ads anyone?). Online usage research can be productive if put to good use.
Politicians and Pedophiles: Two groups of exploitive bastards who are most dangerous when they're thinking of children.
In 5 years, the Internet won't look anything like it does today, those children will be in different age groups, and the results won't be meaningful anymore. You can't spend 5 years to determine something that changes significantly every 1-3 years.
It's not a five year study, it's a five year initiative TO STUDY online culture.
"... the MacArthur Foundation will give $10 million in grants to individuals and organizations to work on projects that stimulate research in digital media or explore new approaches to educational innovation....The remaining $40 million will be put towards fulfilling the broader aim of connecting researchers, educators, youth, and practitioners in different disciplines (and across sectors). A digital knowledge hub is already in the works, so that teachers from around the world can compare, contrast, and share research, tools, and findings through open-source software and online forums."
PowerLevel.com - A next generation marketplace for virtual items and services
I'll submit my own observation: people use the internet to post "it's a trap" on anything they possibly can.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
Girls don't browse porn.
Of course, it depends on what you mean by "young people."
What fraction of slashdot readers, male or female, have spent more than US$100 in the past 24 months on internet porn?
...are we scared yet?
Seriously.. given the rabid flailing and bandying of lawsuits by our friends in the media cartels, who is honestly going to answer "yes" to the question "do you download via P2P?" to anyone outside their known friends?
I thought the data was already in on this.. 30% of bandwidth is being used by bit torrent alone.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
... strip out anything which incorporates a word from the title or the name of the editor. And, since words from the title (thank you, but I understood that "Vista delayed again" was related to "Vista" and "delayed" without the helpful Web2.0 crew digesting it for me), fud/notfud, and stupid jokes comprise the entire set of Slashdot tags, we can just optimize out the feature to save screen space.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Back when I was a lad it used to take 30 minutes to download one 16 color pr0n pic... Now it takes only 10 minutes to download movies... I think the better question is what are the youth of today doing with all of the extra spare time?
If they spend 5 years performing the study an entire "generation" of network users will change over in that time. Think how much the online experience has changed in 5 years. This is a study in watching user tastes and technology change.
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
MacArthur Foundation Trustee: You've spent $49.98 million so far, and your report is due tomorrow. What have you found out?
Guy surfing MySpace and playing WoW: Ummmm...I'm almost done with it. I'll email it by COB tomorrow.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The internet is for porn
That was my first thought. In 5 years, about 80% of the data will be too antiquated to be of more than historical (or perhaps trendy (sic)) value.