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When Does Technolust Become An Addiction?
An anonymous reader writes "According to a CNet article, an incredible one in three people aged 16 to 24 in the UK would not give up their mobile phone for a million pounds. 'The phone-centric survey, called Mobile Life, was carried out across the UK and questioned 1,256 people aged 16 to 64 on a variety of topics ... So young people really like having a mobile phone and we all love buying gadgets. But before you dismiss this research as stating the bleeding obvious, think about this -- if someone had told you even ten years ago that people would be taking out second mortgages to buy flat screen TVs, would you have believed it?' Is this just the result of deliberately skewed marketing dressed up as research, or is this another indication of western culture's obsession with communication and technology? How much is too much tech?"
if someone had told you even ten years ago that people would be taking out second mortgages to buy flat screen TVs, would you have believed it?
That sounds like a really bad deal (for the closing costs alone). Why wouldn't you just take out a personal line of credit from the bank?
(Obviously, the best solution is: don't buy it if you can't pay for it that month, but we're talking about the lesser of evils)
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Shouldn't this be from the "how-to-get-your-press-release-printed-widely-for- no-apparent-reason" dept?
Other stories under this heading mostly include "Dixons announces that will no longer be stocked in their group stores".
How many of the people mugged for this "survey" actually thought that the herbert with the clipboard was actually going to give them a million quid?
These surveys are worthless, and we all have a duty to make them more so.
Disclaimer: I used to work in market research as an analyst, so I know what I am talking about.
The surveys cost a lot of money to generate. So they have a value from that perspective.
The surveys are paid for by major corporations and governments and health organisations.
Governments determine policies, and corporations design products and price points based on the data within the surveys. They are referred to constantly within parliament if government owned, and taken as gospel. Health surveys are used to allocate funding and tackle major medical issues affecting the population.
Based on those facts, I cannot support your theory that the surveys are worthless.
Now, as for the reliability of the data, that is another question entirely. Sample sizes are often small enough that you'll see "bad" figures like the million-dollars-for-a-phone factoid this article is about. So what does that mean? That the survey, even if bad, is worthless? No. Quite the opposite. Even if the data is bad, we can see the data is being used to generate articles and who knows what else within the corporations churning over the data.
I'd say this is a pretty clear example as to why it's important to be honest in a survey, and why participating in a survey gives you (a very small) influence over government and corporation. Would you be so quick to dismiss this?
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Humans lie for amusement
I do that frequently when websites force the user to fill out a profile for whatever lame reason. I am usually an 70+ year old female CEO or CFO of a fortune 1000 company who makes purchasing decisions for 100,000+ person departments, my hobbies are usually woodworking, knitting, and fly fishing, and my annual income is always stated (for the purposes of maximum database poisoning) to be less than 15,000 per year or more than 250,000. Does anybody answer such surveys honestly anymore? Do the advertisers actually believe that this information is accurate? They should just save their money and dump the survey companies.
I don't think the problem is people buying lots of gadgets, the problem is the story never ends. Gadgets will always deprecate in value fairly quickly (dvd players worth 50 euros now have the same fucntionality that dvdplayers worth 500 euros had a few years ago) and one also needs to get a replacement every x years (computer/laptop/ipod). Also because of technological progress, a gadget can bacome obsolete fairly quickly (palm/newton) for those wanting the latest features.
While I myself love gadgets too and always have the newest computers/phone/ipod/laptop etc me & my fellow geeks have to accept the cold hard truth: it is money thrown down the drain.
I don't have a TV and don't want one, nor a car, motorbike or high end computer, but I would not give up my cell phone or net connection for anything. I was past thirty when I got them, so I know what life is like without them: It is lonely and disconnected. Until I happened to feed the words "Helsinki underground music" into a search engine some years ago, I didn't know that I had a lively scene of peers in my home town. They sure as heck never showed up on television, radio or any news stand publication, being too far beyond the mainstream and too few to interest advertisers. But they have mailing lists, web sites, record labels and net connections to similar artists all over the world. That's what the net means to me.
And the cell phone means that I can take a walk in the city when I don't have work and not miss a job offer from my customers. God, how I hated sitting next to that landline phone, waiting for work!
So I'm not addicted to technology, but the people it brings me. You simply cannot compare a cell phone to a flat screen TV - the latter is a dead one way channel.
Rene Kita
Artist, noise musician, freelance translator