Translated material
Nastic Gryzunova. Seine. Issue 63.
| Russian Magazine / Net-culture / Seine www.russ.ru/netcult/nevod/20000222.html |
| Seine. Issue 63. Nastic Gryzunova Publication date: February 22, 2000 Review of current online events and publications |
Again according to height
There are five people to congratulate - the winners of the ROTOR++ rating for 1999 have been determined. In the first round, representatives of the Commonwealth of Online Periodicals EJE selected the jury, in the second round the jury nominated worthy candidates, and in the final the same jury ranked the worthy ones. As a matter of fact, this is a ranking of the preferences of the jury members - respected people, luminaries, continue as desired. The organizers formulate it this way: “ receiving ROTOR++ is a fact of recognition of merit by colleagues in the shop .”
From the resulting list, it is sometimes quite difficult to draw definite conclusions about what the position of a particular participant is (in some categories there are two places, in others three; the first place is divided in an incomprehensible way as first-second, and the second and third - according to human rights; in in general, some confusion). In order not to be mistaken, I congratulate all participants just in case (except for myself - I’ll probably look for some other reason for congratulations).
So, according to the rating, the following individuals are key in the following categories:
Man of the Year - Anton Nosik
═
Designer of the Year :
The Incredibility of Online Loneliness
It's too noisy here to be people.
Accident
Last week, the Stanford Institute for Quantitative Society Research published the results of a study on the behavioral characteristics of Internet users. The organizers of the study were, on the one hand, a group of Professor Erbring from the Free University of Berlin, and on the other, the InterSurvey company, one of whose investors is Stanford University. As always, when it comes to the influence of the Internet on progressive humanity, this study caused a furor, tragic headlines on the front pages of major Western publications, and then noisy debunking, cries of unscientificness - in general, “the fifteenth phenomenon; everything is the same.”
Strictly speaking, there was nothing fundamentally new in the researchers' program - nothing that had not been calculated dozens of times already (colleagues of Stanford specialists from other organizations were quite disappointed with this circumstance). We recorded all types of activities that users encounter online. We calculated how much time is spent on which type of activity. We found that the average user has at least five different things to do on the Internet. They casually declared the concept of “digital inequality” a myth: the results of the study quite clearly show that using the Internet or refusing it depends not so much on the level of income, but on the education received and age. In addition, the figures confirmed that a user's online activity depends on the duration of his experience with the Internet: the longer he uses the Internet, the more activities he has there.
In short, nothing new yet. The last thesis of the researchers, which, in fact, provoked the hype, sounded like this: the more time people spend on the Internet, the more they lose touch with society. Stanford experts also added to this: the more users are online, the less they turn to traditional media, the more time they work at home (as well as in the office), the less they commute to work and the less purchases they make offline. (according to the study, up to 15 percent of respondents experience a decrease in social activity, 27 percent of users who spend more than 10 hours a week online communicate less with friends and relatives by phone). Norman Nye, one of the co-owners of InterSurvey, gave a number of interviews in which he very seriously expressed concern about the growing gap between individual users and society.
The general opinion regarding the user’s self-isolation, which increases in direct proportion to the number of hours spent on the Internet, boiled down to the short formula “some kind of nonsense.” “ Apparently ,” wrote Scott Rosenberg of Salon Magazine, “ all those people you correspond with online—family members, friends, colleagues, long-lost classmates, new characters you met online—are not real people. Because so It happens that you communicate with them on the Internet, and not by phone, not by mail, and do not talk with them on the street, they become phantoms, and your “contacts” with them are fiction .” For some reason, the Stanford smart guys ignored the fact that, by getting used to the Internet, a person acquires a lot of new acquaintances and the degree of his sociability increases several times (due to saving time required for travel, for example).
In addition, the study was criticized in terms of its methodology. InterSurvey specializes in online surveys. During its offline work, the company has accumulated a database of potential respondents amounting to no less than 35 thousand people. These individuals agreed to regularly answer questions as part of InterSurvey's online surveys; In return, the company provides them with free Internet access and WebTV equipment. Experts reasonably note that the status of these people is not entirely clear: on the one hand, in the survey they are considered as non-users and are taken into account only for statistics, on the other hand, they are already users. In short, the broad gesture of InterSurvey determines the behavior of survey participants, and the data obtained cannot be considered completely reliable.
In general, loneliness on the Internet was declared unlikely - by a majority of votes with a small percentage of abstentions (those who take into account the possibility of mental disorders, in which embroidery on a hoop can become a reason for leaving society). A person who tends to limit his contacts with society will most likely not turn to the Internet. Sometimes I think I went to the wrong door at the time.
Digit
As usual, at a moment when it was not expected at all, the next Internet Index came out with number 26. As usual, from it you can glean a number of numbers that are beautiful in their meaninglessness. As usual, I give excerpts with great pleasure.
So, this time Win Trees told the world that...
- The number of issues of the New Yorker in which traceroute data output is published is 1.
- The amount that Microsoft did not pay for resuming the delegation of the passport.com domain name , which led to failures that affected many Hotmail users , is 35.
- The approximate number of online holiday orders received from women in 1999 (in percentage) is 50.
- The number of Mexicans who had access to the Internet in 1999 was 916 thousand.
- The number of Internet users who “ like spam or have some benefit from it ” (in percentage) - 3.
- The number of network companies in which Queen Elizabeth II acts as an investor is 1.
And so on. I invite you to enjoy this inhuman beauty yourself.
News in brief
| | ||