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Absolute Shocker: Canadian Kids Use Internet To Socialize
from the what-will-they-think-of-next?!? dept
It's always amusing to see studies or news articles that find it absolutely shocking to discover that people use the internet -- a system created specifically for interactive communications -- to communicate. Yet, here's an article talking about how "surprising" it is to find out that young people in Canada use the internet to socialize. Apparently, whoever wrote the study thought it was just for surfing porn and downloading songs or something. However, if you really look at the findings, they're not at all surprising. The internet has become another way for kids to communicate, and it's often better than other tools. Also, the guy talking about the study contradicts himself. First he talks about how surprising it is that "teens had given up in-person communications and moved to online." Then he says: "It's not that they're not talking to each other in person, it's just that they're talking even more with this new vehicle."
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No Subject Given
Based on all my nieces and nephes, I would say teens aren't giving up in-person communications.
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Face To Face
(Emphasis mine)So he never said that teens had given up face-to-face conversations at all, just that he was surprised at how much they had moved online.
I think that's the primary point of the story, too. It's not that teens are merely using the Internet (which we all know), but how much they have taken to it. Whether that's really surprising or not is, of course, another issue.
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Re: Face To Face
"the extent to which teens had given up in-person communications..." (empahsis mine)
That looks like he said they had "given up" in-person communications to me. If they're simply using online communications to augment offline, then there's no giving up at all, which is what he implied later.
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Re: Face To Face
I suppose the "extent" referred to could mean the percentage of teens that literally stopped using in-person communications, but the later comment that they haven't stopped all in-person communications makes that interpretation unlikely.
However, if you interpret "given up" as "stopped altogether", I can why you'd think there was a contradiction, which is why I wanted to offer an alternate explanation. I think we can both agree that "given up" was a bad choice of words....
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Hate the Weak
Before IT professionals laugh too hard, perhaps they should be asking themselves what they know of the basics of gerontology, or of non-internet etiquette. There are vast numbers of people for whom time passes quickly, and the internet is just a lot of vague mumbo jumbo. Wasn't it this site that had an article deriding IT professionals for taking lessons in table manners? Slob ITers will never get promoted into positions of respect.
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