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65% of Americans Spend More Time With Their PC Than SO
Ant writes "PR Newswire reports that 65 percent of consumers are spending more time with a computer than with their significant other (SO). The "Cyber Stress" study confirmed consumers' growing relationship with technology in their everyday lives. In fact, more than 8 out of 10 Americans (84%) say they are more dependent on their home computer now than they were just three years ago."
From TFA:
SupportSoft sells support; so they're interested in a dystopian state of affairs. (For my part, I'm still not convinced we're not dealing with a slashvertisement.)
That said, computers play some yet-to-be-determined role in the splintering of society; as the space-time-continuum is warped, and proximity becomes irrelevant: neighbours become irrelevant.
A real dystopia, therefore, might be the flattening of human relationships into one indifferent, indistinguishable mass.
But since Europeans and European-Americans aren't breeding anymore, it doesn't matter: you'll all be dead within a generation.
In my family, my wife is a writer. I'm an IT guy. At night, we play WoW together.
Added together, our total time at home together (including sleep) is about 11 hours. That means 13 hours is spent with a computer seperately right off the bat.
Considering our nights are often spent playing 3-4 hours of WoW, that puts it at 17 hours on the computer per day. Even at best, we would spend probably 3-4 hours a day together, which wouldn't even put a dent in the usual 8-10 hours at work with a computer.
-WS
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
Who the hell comes out with studies like this? Whos idea is it to waste money studying and interviewing people to come up with useless stats like this and what are they trying to do? Since almost everyone uses computers, almost everyone knows that they're usefull for just about everything, and almost everyone knows that there's rarely something wrong with people who spend "too much" time on them, I guess we're left with the logical assumption that it's either the Amish or really old politicians sponsering these stupid studies. I bet they presented the stat in the way they did disregarding that like 90% of that time occurred at work. Ugh, why don't they just stop living in the 90's and give up their ridiculous notions that everyone who uses a computer is an antisocial loser and shouldn't.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
What percentage of people spend more time at work than with their significant other?
The vast majority.
What percentage of people who have a PC with broadband at home (the demographic targeted by this study) use a PC at work?
65% doesn't sound far off.
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Tag this one as "shill".
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
People spend more time with lots of things than with their SO. I would argue that this can be healthy.
After all, if you want to get sick of someone there is no better way than spending every waking moment with them.
I know it's all down to personal preference, but I find that time apart is every bit as important as time together.
The trick is to balance the two - too much of one or the other is bad, you need just the right amount of together and seperate time.
My Computer Music Tutorial Videos
spend nearly all my time outside of work on my PC. Then I got a job in the PC world, and then I quit being on it outside of my normal job.
Then I met a girl, and got married. Since she turned out to be a complete psycho bitch (I should have known...should have known) and now spend all my free time *back* on the PC, and away from her as much as possible.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
And I'll bet these people are a little less glued to their televisions than they were three years ago. And instead of going to the movies or getting hammered at a bar, they might find an online game to be a bit more entertaining.
The obvious downside is that I'm sure that some people are probably less active than they were before, but not all of them. If you percieve this to be a growing threat or strain on relationships, market software/hardware that makes the PC experience something shared between two people. I know tons of couples (and families) that have two or more computers and they simply play games like WoW together.
Honestly, I don't see anything unhealthy with this trend so long as the people excersize or go out walking/running once a week or more.
My work here is dung.
65% spend more time with their plow horse/tractor/butter churn/machine tool/slide rule/whatever than they spend with their spouse. The division of labor has always taken spouses away from each other to some extent. Of the discretionary time that spouses could choose to either be together or apart, well, has that changed significantly?
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
That, and does it consider time spent sleeping with your SO (and yes, I actually mean sleeping, not other "activities") as time together? My guess is that it doesn't. So, this is a very believable statistic. I spend all day at work with a computer, and some time at home. I only spend about 5 - 6 hours of waking time with my wife a day. It really doesn't say anything about how our lives are spent, just acknowledges that computers are becoming a bigger part of our lives, but they are not necessarily intruding upon our time with our families.
How do the following get counted:
* Time spent chatting with your SO online
* Time spent with your SO in a room together both using computers where you're talking with eachother, etc
Seems like those would be time on computer as well as time with SO. Then the question becomes how quality that time is considered to be.
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I've been married for 10 years, and my wife an I are both hardcore gamers. We have conversation, we watch some movies... but the main thing we do is play games together. Incidentally, we both play on the same team nearly all the time.
:)
I may be a nerd, but I know what works for my relationship
-WS
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
Sure. In a 168-hour week, I spend 56 hours sleeping, 50 hours at work on a PC, 8 hours at home on a PC, and maybe 36 hours quality time with my SO (4 hours per day during week, 8 hours per day on weekends).
Does this mean I'm "ignoring" her for my PC? No, it means that I work.
Back in the 1800s men on the farm probably spent more time with their horses than their wives...hmmm, that didn't sound so good...
"You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense." - C.S. Lewis on Intelligent Design
After doing the RTFA stuff, I noticed something, umm, interesting? It doesn't bother to distinguish between using the computer at home, and using the computer at work. Considering the fact that MOST people spend more of their time WORKING then being AT HOME, 65% seems rather low now, doesn't it? I mean, is it REALLY true that 35% of Americans don't have to deal with a computer, constantly, at work? Good for them! Stupid B.S. sensationalist studies give scientific studies a bad name.