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Addicted, me?

10:14am Tuesday, 8th August 2006
So, the average Briton spends the equivalent of 50 days online every year according to a YouGov survery in today's Guardian, showing that internet use has passed TV out as the medium of choice, with surfers spending an average of 23 hours per week on the net. But what does this really mean for us in the day to day? Is the internet better fun than our significant others? Are our blogs wittier than our conversation? and do we have more friends in cyberspace than on our street? Chances are the answers are yes. Find out you are ruled by the net here.

Comments

1
Well, those are issues we raise in the forthcoming work on Conversations.  You're right, by and large, the different relationships of our lives and the conversations that we are having are changing.  We now have the means at our fingertips to pursue more fragmented interests and are more likely to speak to people who share them than we are converse with those who do not.  But who are the 'we'?  I'm now responding to Niamh, who sits opposite me and people reading this are more likely than not very aware of who and what we all do down on Tooley St ... but would we be likely to be having this conversation with our next door neighbour, or somebody who has never visited a blog?

The key point is that this does not reflect what we seem to want and value about communities (see the pamphlet, out later this month).   Furthermore, given that the structures of our public sphere (everything from the communiy group to the Speaker in Parliament) are based on conversation, if the way that we're having conversations and the motivations with which we pursue them are changing, that poses some pretty big questions.
Posted by Sam Jones  at 10:40am on Tuesday, 8th August 2006
2
We're halfway through a project at the moment - The Digital Curriculum - that seeks to answer some of these questions. As part of our research we've asked a bunch of young people to keep 'Digital Diaries' over the summer, recording what media they use, when, why and who they share it with. We're hoping that these diaries and the follow up focus groups will start to shed some light on whether digital technologies are changing young peoples' social networks, how they learn and whether they think schools should do anything about it.

We are still looking for other young people to talk to -  if you would like to find out more about the project or get involved in the research please visit the project page or e-mail Hannah Green at hannah.green@demos.co.uk.
Posted by Hannah Green  at 10:42am on Tuesday, 8th August 2006
3
I saw that piece, and, at the risk of sounding like someone who works in marketing, wondered whether 'surfing the web' was still a meaningful expression. What do you do when you surf the web? Just click around aimlessly? Play with the refresh button? If you're talking about digital flaneury, in which you hang out 'on' the web like a dandy wandering round Paris for no reason, then fine - but I doubt anybody spends 50 hours a week doing that. I imagine much of that time is better described as work, shopping, ebaying, emailing friends and instant messaging (not to mention the piracy and porn that keep the broadband industry ticking over). Maybe if these activities add up to x number of hours per week, that is interesting to some people. But hardly an addiction.
Posted by Will Davies  at 1:54pm on Tuesday, 8th August 2006
4
Flaneurism? Or maybe flanage?
Posted by Jack Stilgoe  at 2:18pm on Tuesday, 8th August 2006
5

Aside from the incriminating time at which I am posting on this particular blog, I would be disappointed if most of people's time on the internet could be considered work. I wonder if such surveys can often seem to get us talking about what the 'real' trends are, and less about what we hope they might be.

And, unrelated, I'd rather like to think that 'piracy' over the internet, through bottorrent sites like PirateBay and so on, is not such a bad thing.
Posted by Pete Bradwell  at 12:25am on Wednesday, 9th August 2006
6
The net isn't all porn and piracy (and I agree with Pete's comment on piracy too). One of the most significant things about broadband and particularly Wi-Fi at home and work is that the web is always on, always available to tap into, much like radio and TV.

Your usage patterns change because it usually is easier to look something up online - from train times to searches to shopping to reference to YouTube - than it is to use more traditional means.It also serves to highlight the false distinction between work and play/liesure in an working environment that is much more based in a knowledge economy versus production/labour.

Lastly, it's hard to tell whether these figures include doing several of these things all at once. Amongst some of my friends (who are pretty wired - well, wireless - but not terribly geeky) it's not uncommon for several people to be surfing the Web whilst watching TV together. That's a laptop each in the living room whilst watching TV. You surf during the boring bits, basically. Much the same as reading a magazine in front of the TV.

Are we more interested in the Web than each other? Not really, a lot of the time we're sending each other links to stupid YouTube stuff we've found and there are several levels of communication going on at once.

Perhaps also it's a sign of TV's general decline in terms of its role as an audience aggregator given the massive change in the media space.

Posted by Andy Polaine  at 7:15pm on Wednesday, 16th August 2006

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