Comment by arihant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arihant | Hacker News Reader

While we can jump to being disgusted with Facebook, looking at the countries they surveyed it is more likely that they did not communicate their questions the right way. This could either happen due to language barrier, or due to lack of understanding of the users.

What I think is this - when they said "Internet", 3-4% users understood that to be open Web, with browser, a .com and the whole package. They responded correctly that they don't use it. But correctly identified that they spend time on Facebook. So in users' mind, they correctly distinguished open Web from the apps. However, they conflated the term internet with the web.

And a lot of people will make such distinction. If you don't do any Web browsing but remained in contact with your family over Whatsapp, you will term it as, "I was off the Web to save time, but I did use Whatsapp." That does not mean what this article concludes, that you don't think that Whatsapp uses Internet.

Those 3-4% of respondents are still mistaken. It is a common misconception that the Internet is the same thing as the Web. You can use Facebook and not the Web, but you can't use Facebook and not the Internet. This research is trying to figure out how many people hold that exact mistaken belief.

I believe arihant understands that distinction, going by their sentence, "However, they conflated the term internet with the web." arihant's main point was that if the point of the survey is one understanding of words, then the wording is going to be very important. (And wording is already important in surveys.)

But that's not what their conclusion is. Their conclusion is that people think that they aren't using Internet when they're using Facebook. This makes it sound like these users don't get the concept of Internet. While I think they do get the concept but messed up on terminology.

This article makes it sound like these users think Facebook works with some kind of magic dust. That's not it. They do get the concept, I think.

If the surveyor cannot themselves distinguish between knowledge of terminology and understanding of concept, I can only conclude that their communication with the people surveyed was equally malformed.

I agree that they don't get the concept of the Internet, my reading of dublinben's comment is that the issue is deeper: even the article confuses the Internet (the wiring, routers, etc.) with the web (the pages and software/servers). The sarcastic word 'Interwebs' came about to poke fun at those who didn't understand that difference.

Precisely. They might as well have asked them if they use TCP/IP. What percentage would answer yes to that?

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