Most Americans Don't Think Social Networks Are Good For the World, Survey Finds (axios.com) 98
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."
Re:I went to work and forgot my phone this week (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:I went to work and forgot my phone this week (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 cons
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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 buse
Re:I went to work and forgot my phone this week (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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, n
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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 nev
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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.
Re: I went to work and forgot my phone this week (Score:2)
As a fellow old man, I would not brag about it
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Wasn't this the whole point? (Score:2)
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?
Re:Wasn't this the whole point? (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally I still use a regular alarm clock and even wear a wrist watch, because that's how I grew up. But seeing how modern cell phones have become these all-in-one devices I am not at all surprised that other older and 'discrete' tech gets displaced by these new devices and that people want to keep them close at all times. That's one of the many other factors that have to be considered here as well.
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I made conscious decisions which other people find disturbing. I only accept general calls on my land line, I allow pick up calls on my mobile that I am expecting at that time. I make calls with the mobile to keep a record, of the call not the content. Really shocks people when I tell them I do not normally answer my mobile phone, I used to be a slave to the phone at work and a mobile phone hugely exceeds my tolerance. I used to really enjoy driving to meetings and refused a mobile because of brain tumour i
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Both Sides (Score:1)
I’d love to have a discussion about this but the extremists on both sides will overwhelm any reasonable disussion so I’m off to enjoy Thanksgiving. And the family members who advocated lynching a black man are out having Thanksgiving somewhere else.
[John]
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Unless "The System" is a brand-new RealDoll, I'll have to pass on your offer.
Time sink (Score:5, Insightful)
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I avoid social networking like the plague and my wife
And you wonder why your marriage is falling apart!
Just the types of little humorous clips she shows me really imitates me
Imitates you? Oh my, so she shows you clips that mock you? Well, now we know why you avoid her! ;)
Not the same (Score:5, Funny)
Smart phones are not social media. Why does the summary conflate the two?
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In the french media, they call it "sites internet" instead of "sites web" because they're afraid of the big bad english word "web".
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Because an awful lot* of social media-ing is done on smartphones.
(*) most?
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Social media is also accessed over WiFi service. Would it make sense to ask people if they like WiFi service in connection with social media?
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FWIW, most of what people do on their smartphones is social media, and most social media is consumed on smartphones, so conflating information about them might be a perfectly valid thing to do.
Games and texting and listening to music and web browsing aren't social media. That's most of what people do on their smartphones.
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YouTube isn’t social media. If "Messenger" isn't Facebook's, that’s not social media either.
Games don’t crack the top 10 because they are many.
Meaningless (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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J.P. Prewitt : Male models don't think for themselves.
Derek Zoolander : That's not true!
J.P. Prewitt : Yes it is, Derek.
Derek Zoolander : [meekly] Okay.
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Where is the website where old people like me still complain about Eternal September?
I want to go back to 1991 and never see perpetual brown wave of pimply brainless drone imbeciles.
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Oh, so that's why Trump was elected.
Like any institution (Score:2)
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 informa
Gray beard here. Usenet vs "social media" (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Conflating social media and smart phones (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
just say no (Score:3)
Social media is dangerous ... (Score:4, Interesting)
... 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.
Social media isn't bad - it's how people use it (Score:2)
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
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... 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 o
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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 gon
Actually, they're great for the rest of the world. (Score:2)
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...
Growing pains - social media is still young (Score:2)
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: