I just finished reading – well, to be more accurate, rolling my eyes over – a Reuters piece about a new study (done by an advertising company, JWT) that concludes that there is a growing portion of our population that is increasingly dependent on the interwebs, oh noes! The title of the article is “Americans giving up friends, sex for Web life” (here’s another piece, titled “Americans give up sex for the internet: Who needs friends when you have an online life?”) – and might I also point out that “technology_addiction” is part of the piece’s URL on Yahoo! News.
There are definitely some interesting stats in there:
A survey asked 1,011 American adults how long they would feel OK without going on the Web, to which 15 percent said a just a day or less, 21 percent said a couple of days and another 19 percent said a few days.
But the overall tone of the article that frames the information paints this shift as something that is alienating: people who use the internet don’t have real friends, and they are turning down sex! Um, ok, I admit that I am pretty dependent on the internet for information and interaction in my daily life (I work from home online all day), but the internet actually facilitates my interactions. I mean, we all know that the internet is for porn and all, so some online interaction is solitary (if you get my drift), but people aren’t typically just on the internet, making sweet love to the technology itself. The Pew Internet and American Life Project has a nice page of stats about what people do online – at the very top of the list is email, which 91% of internet users do. Incidentally, “download or share adult content online” is at the very bottom of the list with a whimpering 4% of users, which seems kind of curious.
Point being, though online interactions are digital, this doesn’t mean they aren’t “real” – most people online are communicating, and you can’t get much more real or human than that.
The cool thing to come of this study and article is a term: “digitivity denizens.” Though of course this is a marketing term, I kinda dig it.
“We are calling them ‘digitivity denizens,’ those who see their cell phones as an extension of themselves, whose online and offline lives are co-mingled and who would chose a Wi-Fi connection over TV any day,” said [Ann] Mack, [director of trend spotting at JWT].
“This is how they communicate, entertain and live.”
Oh, those people and their crazy contraptions!
9:44 pm
My guess on that 4% stat?
People lie and don’t want to admit their pervy ways.
12:14 pm
Who wouldn’t prefer Wifi to a tv? Internet allows you to change your life. TV just lets your waste it.
2:12 pm
I’m wondering how large the sample size was, and how they selected the people in the study.
Also, I wonder if the 4% was because the question was phased in a way like “what do you spend the most time doing online” or “what is the main thing for which you use the internet”
Just some thoughts…
2:17 pm
Oooh! I wannabe a digitivity denizen! I like the idea of “digitivity” as a space that can actually be inhabited. Excellent.
4:16 pm
“Giving up” sex for the Internets? How else would people GET sex nowadays?
3:44 pm
“Point being, though online interactions are digital, this doesn’t mean they aren’t ‘real’- most people online are communicating, and you can’t get much more real or human than that.”
Hear, hear.
I’ve actually heard people lament the fact that people are online so much these days that they don’t have “real” or “personal” interactions… like talking on the telephone.
Um, how exactly is email, or reading/ writing/ commenting on blogs, a less real or less personal form of communication than talking on the phone?
And I’ll bet you that when the phone was invented, people complained about how impersonal it was and how terrible it was that it detached people from real forms of communication… like sending letters.
10:06 pm
[...] Writer Audacia Ray recently linked to a Reuters article on a study that purports to prove that Americans, increasingly, are forgoing sex for the Internet. [...]