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Digital Drugs: Meet the Users
"It's too much. It's hard to just stop using the net or something. Like right now I'm filling out this form when I should be concentrating on a different task."
"I am so used to brevity now as a product of twitter, article summaries, etc that it is a huge chore to sit down and read something longer - a long blog post, or a book. I find myself wishing all information were condensed into a paragraph or two at most. I don't like this trend in myself and wish my ability to concentrate/focus on longer written material would return."
"I would like to be more in control."
"I would like it if other people, such as yourselves, would stop demonizing this perfectly normal behavior in a reactionary fashion."
And so we begin our journey into the mind of the average techie internet user.
With hundreds of entries, you should start to be able to see correlation occurring -- if you ask the right questions. For this survey, we asked a bunch of demographic questions -- income, zip code, attitudes towards technology.
And we found no correlation at all. Nada. Zilch. Zippo. Bupkis.
Well almost.
There was only one interesting result from looking at the correlation -- you're doing a lot more of it now than you were five years ago, especially those other guys. Boy are they losers. With a correlation coefficient of .65, you related "I think the people I know are wisely spending their time online" with "I think the people I know are spending their time more wisely now than five years ago" -- and overall you disagreed that you thought they were spending their time wisely. The other measurements, comparing how much game use or social activity you had -- had a .5 relationship between past use and current use. So not that good.
The interesting story here so far is the inability of people -- even people interested in their technology use -- to make independent rational judgments of how much time is lost. Even though you recognized the hours you spent doing things non-productively, time you could spend making money or engaging in a more rewarding hobby, the hours spent didn't relate to the amount of money you thought you lost. Even the relationship between time you thought you lost per day and time you thought you lost per month had a low correlation coefficient. -- at around .6
So even though this sounds like a rigged answer, I'm left with the conclusion that, for better or worse, the perception that time is being used inefficiently on technology use is not related to income, social proclivities, or opinions towards technology. In addition, while some of us feel that a lot is slipping away while we click, we're cognitively unable to reasonably quantize this for ourselves for whatever reason.
Is this -- this feeling that 5 hours on the net was great but maybe I could have gotten the same benefit in 2 -- related to psychological traits? In other words, maybe people who are unhappy with their technology use are simply showing signs of some mild depression (which still might have been brought on by tech use, but let's talk chicken-and-egg another day)
I hate like hell to say it, but I think I need another survey, one that uses a more standard measurement of depression, along with a measurement of addiction. Perhaps throw in some questions about triggering mechanisms, both to begin tech use and to end it. Why DO people stop using technology, anyway? I know when I get into the zone programming I have to physically pull myself away from the computer -- I'd code through the night. The only reason I stop is simply acknowledging that at the current level of sleepiness I'm probably making more errors than helping. But that's just me.
Not sure, though. People hate surveys and don't like filling them out. In addition, this isn't a study -- this is hit-and-run pseuo-science. Stringing together half-assed results from a questionnaire. On the flip side, however, I don't have to be right. I have have to keep failing and continuing to optimize. This is the most important first step in science -- finding data. It's not about suggesting or proving theories, just beginning to see possible patterns. So it is worthwhile.
I remain convinced that anything that people report that hurts them, on average, in the thousands of dollars per month is something we should look at. Something we should try to fix. I need to keep exploring this.
One guy said he felt like he was losing 7 thousand dollars a month on inefficient tech use. The thing he wanted most? A neural interface and some kind of Wikipedia brain-augmentation device, so he wouldn't have to spend so much time typing. He knew he was doing something against his larger wishes, knew it costs him real money, and knew he needed help. But what he wanted was to be able to do it faster.
Damn interesting topic.
The more data the better, so if you haven't completed the survey please take the time to do it now.
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