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I started in the computer world in the late '60s.
In the '70s I predicted; "Computer games are a fad and will never catch on."
In the '80s I predicted: "Networking will never catch on to the masses."
In the '90s I predicted; "The Internet super highway will become a wasteland of addictions, a den of iniquity, rife with highway robbers, and flooded with junk traffic".
In the 2000s I stopped predicting. I figured that I finally got it right and it was time to stop.
met wife through VK, me a trasnplanted Cherokee irish guy in Crimea 2001 choose to live here, twitter more entertainment value
Apparently kids today are better at the 'marshmallow test' than they were 50 years ago. (Said test involves a child being offered one treat now, or two treats later.) So apparently the rise of the internet is actually teaching children about how to better judge the value of waiting. Pretty interesting speculating on the connections therein.
I think like everything internet and social media has its up sides and down sides. Being from the generation who has seen both sides of the world, I grew up with very restricted access to the internet (we had like one computer at home and you had to beg to have 15 minutes for a school project) and only got to have my own laptop when I went to the university. Heck, for a long time at school the whole family would have only two cell phones - one for my dad and one for the rest. If you went somewhere you would take the phone and call home when you wanted to be picked up. And now I own a desktop, a laptop and a smartphone. And that's considered the norm.
So, I remember the times when you had to fill your time with books, movies and real life hobbies that had nothing to do with computer. Like drawing. Or writing first attempt at books in small notebooks. I also know that nowadays the first thing you do when you come home is to turn on your computer and check out your e-mail, daz forums and deviantart. Then the evening is spent either setting up a daz scene on the desktop, while checking out internet in between test renders, or watching a movie on my laptop while the scene is rendering. Spending a day without touching some kind of internet-connected device is unthinkable. To do that you need to be on a plane for most of it or hiking up the Himalaya.
I have parents that nag me that I don't read enough. I have seen people who would feel respect towards me just because I was reading a book while waiting on a flight. And that was a sci-fi book in English, not exactly a classic like "Oliver Twist" or "War and Peace". I take the bus every day to work and I know how many people are staring at their smartphones during the whole trip. I'm one of the few who just stares around. Nowadays seeing people reading a book on the bus feels me with respect towards them just as well. Even though I know it's actually bad for the eyes. Although it's perfectly possible to read the same book of the smartphone screen, seeing someone with a smartphone makes you suspect the worst (they're playing candy crash sugar!), anticipate the middle evil (they're just reading the facebook feed) and only at back of your mind you might think they're doing something requiring a deep concentration.
Personally I don't mind the internet. I moved to a different country for my PhD and it filled the gap I needed to not feel lonely leaving all my friends in a different country. One of my best friends I met on DeviantArt, we've met a couple of times in real life and skype regularly. And I know I wouldn't have learned DAZ and how to render on the level I do know without this community, who are always willing to share tips and knowledge. Personally I would love to have a European meetup of DAZ'ers just to see people in person.
But then I'm one of those people who hate feeling they didn't do anythig useful during the day. If I spent the whole day just checking out stuff on the internet I feel empty, unproductive, parasitic to myself. I need to have something I can say I did. Be it a render, a cleaned up apartment, a sorted pile of chess games that needed to be digitalized or a nice movie I watched. Maybe that's why I don't hang that much. I barely use Facebook (it nags me every time my last update is from several months ago), I use it only for messaging people when I really need something. I use DeviantArt a lot, but mostly to get inspired by art, share knowledge and to get feedback on my works. And mostly I have a once a week schedule for it anyway. I log in once a week, post a new piece of art, clean up my message center (and get temporally blocked because I comment too much in a span of an hour, so I always have to take a break) and log back out. It can take up to 3-4 hours of straight commenting, but I don't mind. I might check it out during the week, but I tell myself not to reply to any comments, since then it starts to feel like a pressure to reply as soon as you see it. And then they reply and it's an infinite cycle. Having a once a week reply moment spares you the energy and stress. I do it when I have the time to reply properly and don't have to run somewhere or are busy with something else.
So, as long as social media isn't the thing in itself, as long as it is a means to an end (in my case art feedback and small social support), it's not bad. It's only when you hang in there just for the sake of hanging, then I think it's the next evolution of sitting in front of a tv, watching some soap or a football match. It's a brain killer. Or more said brain occuppier. It keeps you busy while not adding anything new. And that, in my opinion, should be avoided. Of course when you come home from work and you're tired you can relax in your own way. But it shouldn't be the only thing you do, at all times, all the time. Just like sitting in front of a tv with a beer all day wasn't considered enlighting for the previous generation. Heck, there's even a book about doing nothing: "Oblomov", about a guy who did nothing but lay around at home. So I'm not sure it's an internet phenomenon. It's more of a human lazy nature.
TL;DR: It's not the internet that's bad, it's what you do with it.
This could almost have been written by me. I just use Twitter for following my local footie team and for trying to keep updated with what I need to know re my daughter's school, who have a very patchy way of keeping us all in the loop. 'Shall we inform the parents via Twitter this time, text, Facebook or just not bother at all? Put something on the school website? But we only use that for displaying error 404 messages!'. I've only ever tweeted once, when I tweeted the goalie of the footie team. I can't even remember what I said but it gained me a handful of followers, including the sports reporter of our regional newspaper. Bizarre.
I'm on Facebook all the time, and most of my family and friends know that they're more likely to get a quicker response from me on there than any other way apart from picking up the phone and calling. I'm very fussy about who I'll 'friend' though, and it's a source of great amusement to others how small my circle of friends is compared to theirs. I have a backlog of friend requests that I haven't got the heart to delete, but I can't bring myself to accept them either. Some of these people are actually relatives. I am a Very Bad Person :)
I don't think I'll ever stop being amazed by the internet. Every time I tax the car online I think of my dad, driving endlessly round trying to find somewhere to park near the post office so that he could go in and pay his car tax. He died in 1991, and wouldn't believe what we can do now. My husband's dad doesn't have a computer and would barely recognise one if he fell over it, but he was round ours at the weekend talking to his brother in Australia via Skype. They've both got voices like foghorns, and as they echoed around the house I was downstairs thinking 'Wow. One of those people is half a world away and they can see and hear each other as if they were in the same room'.
This overawed-ness is probably typical of someone who can still remember being fourteen and how thrilled we were to get our first house phone, even though we couldn't afford an upstairs extension like the 'posh' people :) My daughter is fourteen, and her world could not be more different. We have two house phones here that are hardly ever used because everyone has their own mobile and laptop, and she speaks to her friends face-to-face online every night. Obscure homework doesn't mean trekking round to the library in the hope that it will have the answer, but quickly consulting Google in the near-certainty of finding it. She does physically meet up with her friends though, and they've recently taken to gathering together and studying. Studying. Teenagers. Voluntarily. Her world most certainly was not mine :)
I was watching a fascinating video that looks at some scientific research that clearly shows how the music industry has become more and more cookie-cutter, uniform, and uninteresting in recent years, owing in part to people's decreasing attention span. And part of that is a result of what I was referring to, the instant-gratification, point and click internet mentality that's apparent in social media. But it seems like it's also apparent in musical tastes.
And one amazing thing it mentioned was that the vast majority of pop hits in recent years were written by just two men.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVME_l4IwII
BTW, if you're interested try to watch for more than the typical 4 minutes. It's 20 minutes long, but has some reallly interesting stuff past 4 minutes. The stuff about compression is very interesting
If you can cope with dust and flies, hop on a plane for 15 hours or more, drive for roughly 8 hours during daylight hours only (too many kangaroos after dark) and I'll take you out to dinner, to the bowling club. You'll probably have to bring your own water, as we're already on water restrictions.
But, in regards to the OPs question, regardless of whether they're family or friends, I don't really care what someone's doing every waking moment of the day - which, as far as I'm concerned, is what facebook does best. Catching up with friends every so often, when I dare to venture into the city is enough for me. Regular phone calls to and from family keeps me in the loop.
I don't mind taking a moment to read a couple paragraphs when someone has something interesting, or unusual or insightful, or funny or even angry to say. But constant updates of mundane daily activities earn a quick ignore.
How do you figure this is due to attention span, though? I've always thought it was a sign that the music industry was using the now massive amounts of available data to hone in on exactly what appeals to humans on a gut instinct level. Designs for a lot of things are starting to rapidly converge just because we're getting good at design.
You might want to check out the video. I think it answers those questions. There's a difference between using the data to hone in on the best click bait, and using the data to develop the best and highest quality stuff overall. Though I think that distinction is becoming less and less relevant to most people nowadays.
It's in my post above...the youtube link
Dude, you should watch the video. At 1:54 he refers to a Spanish study, and later on refers to other studies.
As with anything on YouTube you take it with a grain of salt, but if you're really interested I'm sure you can check to see if you can google the studies. I haven't done that, so yeah, it could be all bogus.
It just seems to me that when people's arguments that the internet is totally awesome are supported by stuff like "because myself and another guy use it for honorable educational purposes, therefore everyone does". And then you show them rational arguments with statistics and studies and rational thought to the contrary, it gets dismissed. And they fall back to their beliefs based on no data whatsoever. Other than, "because I like it", that is.
By the way, maybe you're proving the point. Agonizingly slow, so dismiss it and move on. And by doing so you might miss some real good content. Solely because maybe the guy didn't focus enough on the click-bait aspect of his video, and grab you in the first 10 seconds.
Yeahhhhhhh no I'm avoiding him because the video looks like it IS pure clickbait.
EDIT:
Minute 1: The Beatles existed! You like the Beatles, right?
Minute 2: Then Justin Bieber existed! What Went Wrong? You hate Justin Bieber, right? And Lady Gaga, and Britney Spears. Why would you like them? Haha modern music is awful.
This is pure clickbait. I'm going to finish it but he's not exactly grabbing me with data here.
Well if you have better data I'd love to see it.
By the way, if you want lots more data and studies, check the "Today's Youth are Depressed" on the same channel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPh8QoSdBPM
Okay, I watched it.
First study: Spanish National Research Council. Summary: Music is getting louder and less varied. This is an effect that we already agreed existed, not a cause. I see nothing about this being related to short attention span. (My first suspicion is that increased loudness is likely linked to much better sound equipment.)
Minute 3: "Music. Is. Getting. Worse." Sorry, your data hasn't said that yet, British? guy.
Halfway through minute 5: Using similar instruments, "in truth, it sucks the creativity and originality out of music." Oh, I wasn't aware until now. Actually, I used to think vocals only groups tended to have remarkable creativity and variation between them, with one. single. instrument. But carry on.
Minute 5: Notes an observation by Metzger that pop artists started to use the same three-note sequence in their music (oh no! three whole notes!). Apparently this is called the Millenial Whoop which is staggeringly hilarious. Still an effect, not a cause.
Halfway through minute 6: the surprising conclusion that people include things people like in their songs because people like them. Also the far less obvious conclusion that people only like things people like because people are familiar with them (I'm pretty sure his cause and effect is exactly reversed here, and actually people are often familiar with things they like because they like them).
Halfway through minute 7: Lyric Intelligence in Popular Music. Music is now easier to understand, therefore dumber. By this metric Roundabout must be the most brilliant piece of music on the planet, not counting instrumentals, which have infinite worth.
Minute 8: You like Bob Dylan right? And you don't like people who say "woooooooooo" right?
Halfway through minute 8: Two people wrote most of the music on the top billboard charts. Awesome! People must really like their stuff! I wish I was that good. Wait, no, it's actually bad that people like these two. Around this point I start drinking. Hey, it's the weekend.
Minute 10: Apparently, researchers believe that the hook starts sooner in modern music because our attention spans have drastically shortened. He doesn't bother to credit the researcher, but hey, I found it. The hypothesis here is that since we can skip songs we don't like easily nowadays, songs that appeal to people quickly beat out songs that don't appeal to people quickly. Sure. Makes sense. They tested this on top-ten singles from 1986 through 2015 and found that the data supported that songs were being more attention-grabby. Then, they tested popular 2015 songs vs non-popular 2015 songs from the same artists, and the hypothesis that attention-grabbiness made songs successful was not supported. This is an extremely important part of the study. Let's see if British? guy talks about it.
Minute 12: He didn't talk about it. Hypothesis: that's because this is a clickbait video which ignores data that doesn't support its conclusions. Also, dynamic range compression, key to playing music on devices with low dynamic range (like earbuds), is apparently just a "powerful, yet so very, very wrong" shady tactic used by producers to make their music "louder."
Minute 15: Music is less varied because "we, the people" used to be in charge of determining whether an artist was successful, but now it's very expensive to publish, so the producers push what they want to push. A fair enough hypothesis. Yet "music is worse because producers control it" directly contradicts "music is worse because 'we, the people' choose music that appeals to our short attention spans," which he was espousing, oh, three minutes previously. Maybe the short attention span is a thing!
Minute 17: Producers take a "pretty young face, and simply force the public to like them."
Halfway through minute 17: You only like music because you hear it everywhere.
Halfway through minute 18: Did you really like your favorite pop song the first time you heard it, "or were you, in fact, repulsed?" Hey, British? guy, "we only like songs we're acclimated to" directly contradicts "we only like songs that grab us immediately," which you were espousing, oh, seven minutes ago. The short attention span is a thing!
The rest is just him talking about how liking whatever you want is okay, but we have to make sure we don't let creativity and the soul of music die.
And this is why I ask for studies, not YouTubers.
Too funny
He was really fun to listen to, don't get me wrong. Very appealing guy. I just wish he would have made the very well-supported case that music has started to get more homogeneous, then laid out a bunch of the ideas for why it was happening, because we really don't have a properly understood single cause yet.
My own links for my claim above: http://nypost.com/2017/09/22/kids-are-actually-getting-better-at-the-marshmallow-test/
and also interesting, on what can CAUSE the pursuit of instant gratification.... https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2012/10/16/science-marshmallow-test-delayed-gratification/1636207/
Man, marshmallows are educational.
Here's my two cents on the question:
I own Facebook stock but I avoid Facebook like the plague and will continue to do so until I have copyrights over my personal data, the same way that artists have copyrights over artworks they create. I use YouTube for Instructional videos, usually as a watcher, but one that a friend made with me (you can hear my voice but not see my face) has over 250,000 hits, which I am told is a fair amount. I go on to forums on graphics places such as Daz and Rendo, and while I probably give away too much in comments and help and questions I ask, I do not have any place online where I knowingly post my personal information in one spot. I have not seen the need to go on twitter or instagram, but it is not a hard line to rule out. The one I am having trouble with is Linked-in which I feel I am being forecd into using, but which has not helped anyone I know personally to obtain a job unless they are already a consultant. I also used to write for a local newspaper, so a lot of my articles were online for almost a decade or more, but then the company upgraded to a new system and didn't port over any information that was more than a year old. As far as graphics is cocncerned, I firewall my expensive software from the internet and that machine is not allowed out to the hacking, virus filled internet, ever. I communicate on a laptop, and may pick up a tablet at some point. I generally don't text or IM, but have a girfriend that texts me all the time, so it is hard not to reply.
a) keep it on topic
b) keep it civil
All of the above.... FREE PR! In the old days, people had to hire publicists, now we can do it all ourselves! Publicists can do a way better job, but at least you can try your best to get your name and work out there. At a Comic-Con convention, some girl came up gushing and wanted a photo with me and said she was a big fan. I have fans??? Really??? Social media....
Also, I get all my news on Twitter! I follow like 40 news publications, about 10 senators, several individual news anchors, some world leaders and certain political celebrities. I get notifications from Twitter anytime major news breaks, read most inane tweets by a certain person in the WH for humor purposes and often shock and fear (unfortunately) and it's a great place to keep up with breaking news. News anchors will often post live from events before it even gets on the news or anywhere else and you can choose which stories to read, compare facts from various publications, and avoid long hours with the TV. I didn't even know how to pronounce Mueller because I only READ the news, never watch it on TV. I like READING. Social media is bringing back reading and writing!
I'm a HUGE social media fan and have even worked for a few small companies, helping them with social media PR. It also gives you a good look at what is going on worldwide outside your little bubble. I live in LA and had no idea what a bubble I lived in until I saw such opposing opinions and ideals on social media (although now it's coming out, many could have been paid "bots".) The one problem is you have to really check who's real. But it's interesting to read people's comments on Twitter and get a feel for people's opinions from all over the world.