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Generation-long Internet Research Project Funded
Wonko42 writes "Microsoft and AOL have put aside their bickering for a moment and teamed up to fund a research project that will examine the effects of the Internet on modern society. " The results of will be quite interesting-they are looking at not only the effects of usage, but also non-usage, which is equally important, IMHO. It looks like UCLA will be the key institution, and the time span is "at least a generation".
I think this may be true for campus support, but not research. I'm a former UCLA student and a former student of Prof. Cole's. His yearly violence study hasn't been biased towards any network. (It's been pretty damning of all of them.)
Also, I'm a former Computer Store employee and the fact that we were the fifth biggest campus seller of Macs (Stanford, Harvard, UT Austin and somebody else.) seems to tell me that there's quite a lot of Microsoft resistance on campus.
I will agree that the campus has become more in the MS camp and is susceptible to the Big Project that pushes a lot of money towards OAC and the MIC. Heck, UCLA was in IBM's back pocket for years.
But I don't think that has gotten to the faculty or Prof. Cole in particular.
Jason "formerly untulis@seas.ucla.edu" Untulis
Yes, it really is sad when our NT/ASP based Schedule of classes goes down. At least our core servers run AIX and Solaris. And the Computer Science research projects mostly use Linux and FreeBSD.
Those two companies, more than any others, have pretty much destroyed it... :-)
--
Get your fresh, hot kernels right here!
This is just the sort of fuzzy study that can be used as "proof" to further socioligical or political agendas. We (as in knowledgable and frequent users of the 'net) need to keep track this group's research to ensure that it is impartial. Consider the hysteria after Littleton, or the long running effort to censor anything that resembles porn. This study could be skewed in ways that could give credibility to all that silliness.
Of course, I don't understand why this is a big deal. The GVU has been running a Web user survey for years.
A really interesting bit would be the prominence of the Internet amongst 19-25 year olds, the people who were there and able to access it when it all went down. I know that I changed more in college than any other time in my life, and it was at around 17 or so that I started really doing the online stuff. Which lead to programming... which lead to college... which lead to my job. So the explosion of Internet babble at a certain age 'changed my life' (not to be lame).
A survey conducted amongst younger people will yeild the same results as surveying us about televsion when we were young: we grew up watching too much of it and thats about it.
Four-digit slashdot ID. Recognize.
It does sound like academic make-work to me also.
The Internet is in constant flux. It might not even exist in the form it does now, ten years from now. Usenet will probably be even more worthless (is that possible?), mailing lists will be too expensive to administer (metered cost per message sent- courtesy of the spammers) and the 'net won't any longer be a subsidised playground for the elite. As market forces have their way, the net will be a less 'free' but likely a more valuable (and hence 'expensive') medium.
The Net definitely won't hold still long enough for the doctor to get a tongue depresser into it's mouth. Certainly not long enough to conduct an objective study.
check out that dubious list of sponsors with big bucks vested in their futuristic eyeballs...of course it would be naive to expect otherwise. this research is a wolf dressed in sheeps clothing and although superficially may be of value to the masses [present and future] serves only the marketeers who will utilise it to furhter maximise their profit margins...yes. i bet they'd love to get into our lounge rooms. they must be pissed they missed out in the 40's and 50's. they won't make that mistake again...all those lost margins...
walt disney...they may as well have spelt out the FBI. even more insidious than the cash motivation has to be the political ramifications....*oooh, it makes them more politically active does it? how can we place control mechanisms on that...* and...*if i place this in the maze which way will the white rat run? let's block that hole shall we?*
how does it feel to be a guinea pig? guess 2000 people/case studies are about to find out.
BLAMMO shaken not stirred
2000 random people in the U.S.
More folks in Italy and Singapore in the 1st year.
What do you think the chances are that a REAL geek will be in the sample? What do you think the chances are that the geek's results will be discounted as an "outlier."
Now, if it had been the US, FINLAND and Italy...
;-)
More Meaningless Statistics. I can just imagine the first set of results next year--Big Study Shows Most Internet Users Also Use A Computer. I postulate that the results will be nonsense that the sponsors will (ab)use however they like.
If they use nonsense, then thats all they'll give off and it'll be ineffective. So who cares?
Damn man, you cant make me laugh this hard at work. People are starting to stare! But aside from the fact that your comment make my day, the general concept of it sounds about right :)
Of course, Microsoft and AOL can do whatever they want, it's a free country. But I have to ask myself it this is legitimately for knowledge we are better off knowing, or market analysis. Just the fact that AOL is teaming up with Microsoft on this deal is suspicious by itself. I really doubt if the results of the study will ever be fully released to the public, but unfortunately the article is lacking in details on that area...
So what about people that don't have a telephone?
Surely that should read "US society". Grr...
Because real hard hitting posts and users's critical analysis of a flammable issue would scare potential advertisers. Better to not insult and get rich than post contraversy and have to work.
Why the prominent statement that they're also looking at nonusage? What the heck IS an analysis of internet and computer usage, if it's NOT a comparison between people who do and do not use them?
Much better! At work, anymore, I do all our computer related purchasing via Internet - just look at a review at computers.com (or others), go to hardwarestreet.com and enter the billing data, they email a receipt in seconds and a box shows up the next day. I love it! To heck with reciting long strings of numbers to a human operator, or worrying that they bung up my email address.
I've found lots of books online at abebooks.com that would never turn up in the bookstores in my physical locality; and eBay, cheesus, I've found stuff I thought I'd never see again for sale there, person to person.
*ANY* technology, like fire, can warm your house if used properly. If used improperly it can burn it to the ground.
Chuck
(AC because my NT4/Netscape box developed an aversion to links and buttons. Re-b-b-boot!)
LOL... This is great.
:D
And yes you too can work for The Onion...
I guess it's good to know that this is going on, but there's really not that much actual content in the story.
I almost ask, "Why post it?"
Not likely. I bet it's cancelled in less than 5 years.
Well I must say that I've lost at least few weeks of productive time to mindless surfing, which is reported as "R&D management" to the work hour system ;) and I know I'm not alone. You don't even need WWW to get addicted to the net. Most of my Internet time has been wasted in usenet news. Thank God I haven't got into irc/mud-madness. That would mean throwing the rest of my normal life (in the eyes of other people) away.
Microsoft? Is that some kind of a toilet paper?
How relevant will the results of the research be to the rapidly changing, chaotic rules of cyberspace? I can only hope that it will provide insights in time to make use of them rather than point out patterns and trends that are obvious by the time they are published.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
"Microsoft and America Online both said the study will be used to better serve their customers."
:O)~
I think they meant to better milk ther customers? But Im not sure....
This study isn't really for us, but for our children. We can harvest some of the gains of a life-long study like this, but to realize the entire potential, it needs to run for its full course.
I guess in 100 years our children will know whether the Internet really was a benefit to our society and can build on our successes and mistakes, while keeping in mind the effect that it has on the human part of the equation.
There are so many projects now that are designed to be finished in _our_ lifetime, that we forget the benefit of stuff that spans generations. Look at all the monumental pieces of architecture that took hundreds of years to complete.
æeee!
How many years between Gen X and Gen Next? And then how many between Gen Next & the Millenials?
Since this is a piece of marketing, we have to use marketers definitions of generation, which appears to be logarithmic. "At least" a generation could be five minutes by the end of next year.
--
E_NOSIG
As far as "fluff" goes, hey, it's Sociology. This is hard-core stuff for them.
Study concludes: use of Microsoft products, especially in conjunction with AOL services, will lead to utopia in two generations or less.
Nothing like impartial funders.
Generation of people??
:)
It's hard enough to get a proper psychological study done over that length of time. For technology that's only been around that long to begin with, it'll be damn near impossible. Sounds to me like a publicity stunt designed to make the techno-behemoths appear sociologically minded.
Now, if they're talking a generation of chips, that's much more plausible. 18 months of non-usage is sure to have some serious implications on the Klamath.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
People who user the Internet frequently:
People who do not use the Internet:
If a "generation" ago, someone decided to sponsor a study of what using computers will do to people there would have been conclusions like "Excessive use of punch-cards causes people headaches." Things change so fast, that the Internet they study today will barely (if at all) resemble the internet they're studying 5 years from now....let alone an entire generation from now.
Am I the only one who thinks this is a bit of a publicity stunt?
Werd.
A good quote, that I think I read recently from slashdot via or from the mindcraft microsoft sponsored web server benchmark debacle, comes to mind...
...he uses statistics like a drunk uses a lamp post, not for illumination, but for support..
and thats about all I think is worth saying about this particular survey.
or is it only 12?
By that logic, in six years they'll have a really nifty "four-generation study". They can talk about all the planning and foresight it took to span the generation gap and get this report together. I'll bet people would actually fall for it, too. The same sort of people who thought that Jar-Jar sucked. Heathens, all of them!
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So basically, consider this study completely irrelevent.
They have to conduct the survey to the telephone because they including people who do not use the net as well as regualar junkies, and everything inbetween ... well that's the plan anyway - or what i got of it. If they must survey some people over the phone, they must survey everyone over the phone, because this is how research is conducted. The results would be skewed if only some people were surveyed over the telephone.
-- "It has recently been discovered that research causes cancer in rats."
Actually, my friends and I have tried to come up with good ranges of when generations start and when they end. You're right, they do seem to be getting shorter and shorter. Here are our humble conclusions (with catchy names! good with milk!):
Baby Boomers: 1955-1963
Flower Power: 1963-1970
Just Plain High: 1971-1977
Days of Disco: 1977-1983
Bad Eighties Music: 1982-1989 (overlap, so sue me)
Generation X: 1990-1994
Generation Y (or Why?): 1995 ---Just didn't catch on
Generation Next: 1996-present
NOTE: These figures indicate when the people of that generation were in high school and college. That's why the baby boomers time frame appears so off.
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