An Honest Conversation About Your Technology Use | Hacker News Reader

An Honest Conversation About Your Technology Use

bedfordtechgroup.wufoo.com

Sampling bias. The respondents will be disproportionately the sort of people who waste time online.

The poll seems to be based on the premise that whatever time we spend not earning money is time wasted. I recommend reading "Momo" by Michael Ende for a different perspective. Time we spend learning new things is valuable. Time we spend communicating ideas is valuable. This isn't to say that all the time everyone spends on the Internet is worthwhile, or that many of us wouldn't be better off spending less time in front of a screen, but it isn't always easy to know beforehand what time is going to be well-spent and what isn't.

Am I the only one that hates having to answer on a spectrum from "Strongly Disagree" to "Strongly Agree"? I don't need 7 choices, just give me Yes/No options.

Yeah, that stopped me in my tracks. I'm really bad at answering shades of gray questions. Don't make me think!

Daniel, this comes off as an official Wufoo poll. Maybe I am different, but I thought the Wufoo guys were taking this poll.

Would have been to put your name on it in the intro.

There's anecdotes, there's opinions, and then there is data. I spent a couple of hours this morning creating a WuFoo survey about "how addictive is technology?"

I would appreciate it if you guys could take the time to complete and spread the word. I will share whatever I learn back on HN, of course :) I think if we can get enough folks participating, it should make for very interesting reading.

Asking for zip code, age, gender, and earnings is a little much for an anonymous survey. That is pretty specific.

Yeah, sorry about that.

I was torn about what to put in there. No right answer, really. At the end of the day I decided I would rather have fewer answers with more data than more answers with fewer data.

Things like gender, income, and zip are pretty important, actually. (I should have asked eduction level! doh!) The thing is, without any kind of specific tags, it's just a random opinion survey, whereas with the data it's possible to say something like "yeah, but that's only true for rich people living on the east coast", or "sure it shows a lot of internet usage, but the average age is 17, so probably you grow out of it" -- I think those kinds of observations are very important, and I wouldn't have wanted to do the survey without them. The goal here is to try to have a detailed conversation -- as anonymously as possible -- so that then I can post results back here and then we're talking data and not opinions so much.

"I get out more now than I did five years ago"

I mean, 5 years ago I was in college...

Not everyone has an identical college or post-college experience.

Of course not; that's half the point. It's an interesting interaction effect that could only be assessed by asking. And with only 2-3 additional questions, you could cover a wide range of educational and post-educational experiences (where education refers to an institute of learning; not meant to imply that learning stops after you leave school).

I was shocked by my answers.

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