Internet Users Are More Social Than Non-Users

FePe writes "The UCLA World Internet Project has concluded from a study that Internet users spend more time on social activites than non-users. Many other interesting facts can be seen on the page. For example, in the United States 73.1 percent of men use the Internet compared to 69 percent of woman." Also interesting is how net users watch less television than their offline counterparts. Update: 01/16 03:46 GMT by M : Yep, pretty much the same story as yesterday. To be fair, Cowboyneal did say it was news to him. :)

What kind of social activities?

[Ignorant Aardvark]

Online people may spend more overall time in "social activities" - but a lot of these social activities probably don't really count. Is someone who spends 6 hours a week in a chat room socially better off than someone who spends 5 hours a week hanging out with friends at a mall?

Another point to mention: I watch TV at least as many hours as I am on my computer. Why? All of the rooms that I have computers in also have TVs in them, and I always have a TV on in the background when I'm on the computer.

Why is this surprising?

[kaiwainz]

For me, I maybe lucky to watch 1hour of TV at night, and that is *if* I am lucky whilst on the other hand I would much rather prefer surfing the net, looking for news that interests me and possibly chat to a few friends.

I completely agree with the UCLA, the people I find that are the *least* socially active are those who are couch potatoes where as for me, I'm able to surf for the information I want, get it straight away then go off and do something else where as if I watch TV, I would have to sit through ads, a couple of feel good news stories just to get to the news story that I could be interested in.

With that being said, however, yes, there are people on the internet who hide behind their computer screen, too scared to face the world so instead they create a whole new persona specifically for "online communication".

Now sure, Internet is great for communication, however, like any form of communication, one has to take it in moderation. Simply restricting yourself to online friendships is neither healthy or longterm.

Now, if we all lived in isolated vacuums then I am sure it wouldn't be so bad but unfortunately these people take their anti-social leanings into work, the net result? you end up with a handful of possibly talented employees but can't work together with others to solve problems.

In IT we spend WAAY to much time worrying about skills when what the concerntration an universities and other training institutions ensuring that balanced people are graduated who not only know their "stuff" but also have the soft skills required for work that requires close colaboration.

I e-mailed the god damn editor.

[sam_handelman]

I stay home on Thursday night, in spite of the legion of sophisticated bisexual women clawing at the door to my Manhattan apartment, putting aside a rich evening of culinary, cultural and sexual exploration of the kind that all geeks regularly enjoy, in order to selflessly devote myself to keeping slashdot running smoothly.

I e-mail the on-duty editor with a problem - as I am instructed to do.

I do so with at least ten minutes to spare before the story actually goes live.

What does the editor do? Absolutely nothing!

What is the point of even *having* an on-duty editor if they can't filter out duplicate stories! Jeez!

No big surprise

[Do not eat]

I used to be an anti-social geek until I discovered the internet. Upon discovering how easy it is to communicate with people when not face to face, I learned to like people and interact with them. I was able to hide any apprehension, and by subverting this I gained real confidence in myself. This of course translated over well to the real world, and now I consider myself a people person. And no one thinks I am a geek. So this article comes as no surprise to me, and I'm sure that I'm not the only person in this boat.

Internet geeks are social by nature.

[mac os ken]

Geeks are social by nature. As a defense mechanism they usually move in herds when leaving the sanctity of their computer desks. In the untamed world (the mall or school hallways for example) the likeliness of a geek to be singled out and picked on by a predator/bully is divided by the number of fellow geeks in the group. Hence the the geek uses safety in numbers, a trait found only in intelligent social animals.