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Most Americans Don't Think Social Networks Are Good For the World, Survey Finds (axios.com)
A new survey from Axios finds that a majority of Americans don't think social networks are good for the world. An anonymous reader shares the key findings: Silicon Valley has a big and growing problem: Americans have rising concerns with its most popular products and a growing majority wants big social media companies regulated, according to new poll conducted by Survey Monkey for "Axios on HBO." In the past year, there has been a 15-point spike in the number of people who fear the federal government won't do enough to regulate big tech companies -- with 55% now sharing this concern. In that same period, there was a 14-point increase in those who feel technology has hurt democracy and free speech. The biggest spike has been among Republicans, presumably because of increased concern about perceived censorship of conservative voices on social media. About 40% of Americans still feel that social media is a net positive for society. Overall, 65% of people say smartphones have made their quality of life better. The study also found that nearly two-thirds (63%) of respondents say they sleep with their phone in or next to their bed; and that jumps to 73% among millennials. Also, "More than half (51%) say smartphones are the hardest technology for most people to live without," reports Axios. "And that jumps to 67% among millennials."
Guess I'm from a different generation. There are days I forget my phone and don't even notice that I did until I start looking for it when going to bed since it's my alarm clock. Which is also the one function I require the most out of it...
But take away my computer and you have a very confused person at your hands.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The study also found that nearly two-thirds (63%) of respondents say they sleep with their phone in or next to their bed; and that jumps to 73% among millennials.
I mean, the cell phone was invented so that users could be contacted / contact other useres more readily, almost all the time. I do not see a problem here.
This study simply confirms success at this metric, right?
When I went to work I left my phone in my car. Personal phones are prohibited in many US military workspaces. Didn't miss it a bit and actually worked at work.
It's a bit different when your job expects to be able to reach you on your phone. You just don't have one of those jobs.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I avoid social networking like the plague and my wife is on Facebook all the time. Just the types of little humorous clips she shows me really imitates me.. like I can literally feel the seconds being drained away from my life. First of all, many of them that are intended to show some funny moment are so obviously staged; and people on average really don't have a great sense of humor.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Smart phones are not social media. Why does the summary conflate the two?
I do.
That's why a loss of my computer would devastate me, it would be near impossible to reach me.
A phone call is by some margin the worst kind of communication you could have with someone. It gives you no time to ponder a suitable answer, it does not document the communication unless you deliberately do it yourself, it only allows for one simultaneous communication and it does not let you prioritize your communications.
If you need something from me, drop me a line in the instant messenger we use in house and you will receive an answer according to the importance of the communication and the availability of the information you require.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's a bit different when your job expects to be able to reach you on your phone.
What does that have to do with social networking?
You just don't have one of those jobs.
Do you look in the mirror in the morning and repeat that to yourself.
No sig today...
And I refuse to have one. Unless they're paying me to be on call, when I leave the office in the evening, my phone goes into a zip up case with its cables, and stays there.
My company recently suggested we should be doing training in our spare time. My response was basically "why is a multi billion dollar company asking me to donate my free time for training they want me to take?"
Sorry, no, I don't donate my free time to my employer. If you want to be able to reliably reach me after hours, pay me for it.
I don't get paid nearly enough to make a charitable contribution to the company's bottom line while the execs are getting huge bonuses.
More on topic, I have no interest in social media ... I'm old enough to remember spending a lot of time on IRQ, usenet, and BBSs. I just don't see what Facebook or Twitter is supposed to add to my life -- I just find it pointless and inane.
Now get off my goddamned lawn. ;-)
Well I get pages by SMS and that is the only way the system will work.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Findings, if TFS is to be believed, are meaningless.
To me, a "smart phone" is (1) phone (2) GPS (3) Calendar (4) email monitor (too small for real use) (5) text messaging (emergency/supplementary/alert short messages -- neither I nor anyone I know actually "texts" in the conventional sense) such as "Can't Answer Phone", "Downstairs", police-traffic alerts) and (6) Google: quick facts, restaurants and services such as flights (7) photo/video missions (scenic, birthdays, ...)
I have an "old people" Facebook account for some limited family/friend photo sharing and for advertising one of my businesses. I never access it from the phone and don't have any social medial apps installed. I guess technically that's social media -- I used Facebook for about an hour over the course of two days in the last seven months (funeral announcement).
So, yes, my S9+ is indispensable and it is next to my bed at night.
I used to have a GPS, camera, calendar, and alarm clock and I lugged
all that shit around (and some of it was implemented as a big paper book).
This damn thing fits in my pocket!
But I don't think that's what the point of the survey was.
Oh, other apps I have installed? Well, I have some music files on there,
but I don't normally play them from the phone. I also have a small
database of specialized information that I use for work - I look something
up on there about once a week. And I have some gas station and pharmacy
loyalty cards on the phone. All those replace paper I used to lug.
Those are all the apps.
sms, like in the 1990s?
Yes, like the 1990's. Believe me, the suckyness of it is not lost on most people who have to use it.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
As a fellow old man, I would not brag about it
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I know people who still have old fashion pagers, and I also know people who have changed to using apps on their phones to receive pages.
By far, the pager is considerably more reliable and useful than any app on a phone.
When my wife's pager goes off, you can hear it throughout the house. Meanwhile, we live in an area with crappy cell coverage, and sometimes you can't even get a signal on the phone.
Say what you want about old school paging technology, but it works, and has done so consistently and reliably for a long time -- and it does so in places where cell phones often don't.
Unless "The System" is a brand-new RealDoll, I'll have to pass on your offer.
#DeleteFacebook
Facebook is like any institution. You get out of it what you put into it. Compare government. People want to pretend it will function properly even if they ignore it, but it won't do that any more than will a car. It might look to be working correctly for some time, until you find out that neglect has been causing damage all along. All we put into Facebook is our information, we're not supplying any of the elbow grease, so it's not surprising that the machine we didn't build is churning our personal information into something malign.
Social networking is a neutral technology, being peddled by malicious actors. Until we build our own social networks, we're going to continue to be abused by social networks.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Usenet used to be great. I'm not sure if you would consider that "social media" but it rocked. There are still some news groups I read which are still good. Although the trolls and spam has gotten crazy.
"Social media" like facebook OTOH is a nightmare of crap. Seemingly sane, intelligent people post things that are insane and garbage. On both sides of the spectrum. The people who are middle of the road don't seem to post nearly so much.
The number of people who post political junk is amazing. The worst part is many of them are literally in a state of doublethink. On the one hand they complain about how high taxes are, and then they simultaneously complain the government isn't doing enough. If you point out that having government do more will almost certainly cost more, they get frustrated and tend to resort to magical unicorns to try and solve that.
Also, I don't care at all about the fact that the coffee shop screwed up your coffee. Big deal. To see you post some story about the plight of starving people while previously complaining about your coffee being screwed up makes you look like an incredible asshole. You should be glad you have the funds to afford your cup of hot coffee, and be glad the water to make it is is (mostly) OK.
So which one is it? The post starts off talking about a poll relating to social media, but then turns into hand-wringing over smart phones. To be sure they often go together, but this kind of fuzzy thinking is more click-bait than actual, you know, informed discussion.
Don't let your employer dictate how you live your life. We've allowed them to take away our agency just because they're not willing to be properly organized or to pay for sufficient employees to cover their needs. And never, ever accept this kind of intrusion on your life as "the new normal". It's only normal because you allow yourself to be exploited.
People let their employer dictate their lives in a way that they would never accept from their family or loved ones.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If you don't think social media is good, don't use it. End of story.
OK, but make sure that it's actually easier for you, and not just easier based on the fact that you haven't been given sufficient resources to do the job without having it intrude upon your private life.
People in tech cede way too much control over their lives to their employers, IMO.
You are welcome on my lawn.
... in many ways.
Facebook is looking to deploy AI on our photos to determine demographics like race, age, presence of boats, goats, grand kids, political affiliation, religion, sexual preferences, and they are going to make even more money then they do now.
I have a bot that deletes everything older than the current month. I'm a photographer and I don't want to feed that goddam machine, which pisses me off because Facebook was a great venue. I don't bother to post photos.
In fact, I'm down to 20 Friends. Used to be 750. They don't know it, but I'm doing THEM a favour, as well.
I still rely on Facebook to keep in touch with family, but because my footprint is shrinking, I'll eventually just bring it down.
I know of no way to circumvent. Email was compromised way before Facebook was created.
Other social media platforms are just as bad. In my professional opinion, we're screwed.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I would be happy with a mobile phone that just had the maps feature (to navigate around a city), the telephone (to call taxis) and web browsing (to view bus timetables), without all the social media baked in (Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, Instagram etc...).
Having overlays for public transport bus routes would be a big boost. Presently it involves scrambling around downloading PDF's from the bus company, viewing google maps, and trying to munge the two by scale and location in order to figure out where the buses go. Sometimes the only way to figure out a bus route, is to actually take a bus ride there and back.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I don't understand all the social network hate - my Facebook bubble consists of relatively 'normal' (by my standards) people, with about 10% people I don't even remember having added, but their posts liven up the echo chamber a bit, so that's cool.
I mostly use it to share articles I found interesting online, some jokes and some of the nicer life events (hey! i'm at the beach! anyone want to hand out?). I don't really see the haem in that, and it helps me stay in touch with other people that wold otherwise have dropped of my radar.
I think social media is akin to gambling - it's a horrible life consuming thing if you fall into that hole too deeply, and even though you curse at the casinos, you still go. That is a real problem.
But if you choose to participate in gambling just by participating in some raffles or bingos, I don't think it is too bad.
... people who are committing acts of egregious, extremist hate speech. Are you saying that conservative beliefs are based on hate? Because a lot of Christian conservatives are going to have a real problem with that characterization.
Racism, homophobia, and threats of violence are not indicative of what it means to be conservative any more than marching in topless protests are indicative of what it means to be liberal. The people who do those things just happen to fly that particular banner in this country right now. Just a few decades ago, it was mostly people on the left who were racist. In another hundred years, they'll have moved on to some other party.
There will always be people who can't deal with people who they perceive as being "not like them". At best, this should be tolerated, at worst, shunned or blocked entirely. Supporting people who act like that merely because they happen to agree with you on some issues is really no different than supporting the Nazi Party (NSDAP) merely because you believed in German reunification with the other German-speaking parts of Europe, immigration reform, elimination of indentured servitude, welfare programs for the elderly, government support for small businesses, eliminating property taxes, replacing civil law (like most countries use) with common law (like what the U.S., Great Britain, and their former colonies/possessions use), building up the nation's education system, free college tuition for high-intelligence people without adequate means, banning child labor, encouraging physical fitness in children, abolishing mercenary groups, forming a national army, stamping out libel, and a strong central government.
The Nazi Party actually had a lot of things that superficially looked like good ideas. Evil people don't win people over by being purely evil. They do it by telling you they're going to make your country rise to its full potential, to make it great again, to fix your infrastructure, to improve education, etc. But when they also spew lies and hate speech (and pretty much everybody can recognize the small minority of very vocal "conservative" voices who do exactly that), they cross a line, and those particular people should not have our support, even if we agree with their position on everything else. There are a few positions that simply cannot be tolerated in politics, and in my opinion, those clearly qualify.
The fact that one such xenophobe managed to make it to our nation's highest office will be a great source of national shame for decades to come. The fact that he has not managed to destroy our democracy as Hitler did, nor fully convert members of his own party to that xenophobia, nor defeat the separation of powers intended by the founding fathers to prevent any one person from having too much power, by contrast, will be a source of national pride for at least as long. I said two years ago that if Trump became President, it would be the truest test of our constitutional democracy that this country had ever seen, and I've been proven correct time and time again, but the foundation of our nation holds, and that is a true testament to the wisdom of the founding fathers. There is still no wall. There is still no possibility of a wall. There is no sweeping ban on Muslim immigration. Appalling border enforcement situations have been exposed and acted upon harshly. The lunatics are still not running the asylum. And that is as it should be.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Not so great for the US. We demonstrated to the rest of the world how stupid and easily manipulated we are in the last presidential election.
I'm sure they had a great laugh, but they're probably not laughing so much any more. But the Russians are still laughing...
When radio was new, people became addicted to it.
When TV was new, people became addicted to it.
Same for computers, modems, email, internet, Web, social media, etc.
Remember when you had to constantly tell your friends not to send you those email forwards promising free money from Bill Gates? People have moved on.
On social media, people were obsessed with photos of their restaurant meals, now it's selfies. Eventually, people will get bored with the petty stuff and start using it for what it's really good for: keeping in touch with not-so-close family and friends.
Nope. This is the slander. When you take a carefully thought out comment noting that some people in the alt-right movement are actively using the rhetoric of hate, and then claim that I said everyone on the right is that way. I did not. There are some who do. Many of those folks have gone so far across the line that they have gotten banned from platform after platform. Pro tip: If you've been banned more than once, it probably isn't because of your political views.
The founding fathers were against government censorship, because only the government has the power to censor people in a way that has the force of law behind it, creating a chilling effect that leaves people in fear of trying to spread their competing ideas.
What you are talking about is not censorship, but rather the right to refuse publication. In the era of the founding fathers, printers chose what they would and would not print. If you wanted to print something else, you bought your own printing press and printed it yourself. In the same way, people with non-mainstream ideas, no matter how extreme those ideas might be, are also free to buy their own servers and publish content themselves.
Unfortunately, what you and many on the far right are advocating is an entirely different sort of law. It would be akin to the founding fathers requiring printing presses to print anything for anyone who is willing to pay. Now I don't know about anybody else, but find it really ironic that people on the right are against any regulation of businesses all the way up until suddenly a few businesses start to say that some of their rhetoric crosses a line into unacceptable troll behavior and insist that they take it somewhere else, and suddenly those ultra-right folks want new regulations on businesses so that they can publish whatever they want on any service that they want, even if the people who own that service and the overwhelming majority of users on that service (including most Republicans) want them to go away.
Sorry, but that's not the way the real world works. In the real world, you have a right to free speech. You do not have a right to free speech on someone else's dime. Period. Full stop. And I'm sorry if that hurts your precious little conservative snowflake ego, but too bad. And just to be clear, I would say precisely the same thing if it were a leftist making similar statements. The alt-left and alt-right are basically equally harmful to a functioning society. The only real difference is that the alt-left don't whine "they're censoring me" every time they get kicked off of a major service. They just find another rock to hide under. For all the people on the right complaining about liberals being a bunch of whiners, the right sure does whine a lot. Just food for thought.
Pretty much, and that largely reflects European politics in general. Had they stuck to those parts of their platform instead of slipping in the whole "master race" thing and trying to conquer Europe, they would probably still be the centrist party of Germany today. After all, Europe is still quite socialist, at least when compared with the United States. But, of course, that wasn't the point of their platform. They just used those points to push through their radical antisemitic agenda.
All movements like that, regardless of politics, look an awful lot alike. For them, politics are merely a tool to enable people who crave power to take it. The purpose of voting is to at least try to keep people who crave power from taking it.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.