Category: Internet Culture and Technology

Thanks to Vika of words’ end for pointing me to unready.org. She pointed out that Ready.gov has been around for a while. (See my earlier post, The new cold-war: Ready.Gov.) I still wonder why they would be advertising so widely and in the Guardian of all places.

The BBC News has a story titled, ‘Infomania’ worse than marijuana (April 22, 2005.) A study for Hewlett Packard claims that some are getting addicted to messaging and that this reduced intelligence. The study was led by Dr Glenn Wilson, a psychologist at the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) at King’s College, London.
This was from Geoff T.
Continue reading Infomania: research on the loss of IQ from IT

From Humanist, two interesting links on the “digital divide”. The first is a report from the Morino Institute, From Access to Outcomes: Digital Divide Report and Dialogue. The report has 10 sensible premises starting with the obvious, “Focus on narrowing social – not digital divides”.
The second is from an issue on “The Digital Divide” (Spring 2001, Vol. 1, No. 2) which has articles of interest on, TCLA:. The Digital Divide:. Politics & Education:. Framing the Digital Divide. In particular there is an article by Randall D. Pinkett, Redefining the Digital Divide.

Michael Geist, a law prof at the University of Ottawa, has a good summary of the copyright plans of Industry Canada and Canadian Heritage on his site, www.MichaelGeist.ca.

Unlike the US legislation there is no sign that anti-circumvention provisions will apply to devices. There is also a more fair ISP provision.

Geist concludes, “The devil will be in the details but this represents a major shift away from the embarrassingly one-sided Canadian Heritage Standing Committee recommendations issued last May. While that report clearly pushed the agenda forward, the governmentís response has certainly recognized the need for some balance.”
This is from Slashdot.org

Ourmedia.org is a new open service that lets users upload and make available multimedia works. With support from outfits like the Internet Archive, it aims to give anyone a place to post content. An open Lulu. Go for it!

Connotea, “a free online reference management service for scientists” is like CiteULike – providing an online shared reference tool. The idea is catching on!

Contrary to most expectations, it does not appear that spending time with media takes away from the time children spend in other pursuits; in fact, it seems that those young people who spend the most time using media are also those whose lives are the most full with family, friends, sports, and other interests. (p. 14, “Executive Summary”)

Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-olds is a Kaiser Family Foundation study of the media consumption habits of teens. They conclude that teens have unprecendented access, that they are watching media simultaneously (which is why you can’t sum the hours), and that it may not be affecting traditional media consumption like TV, music and reading. The study has thorough information on computer use, including game console use.

A national Kaiser Family Foundation survey found children and teens are spending an increasing amount of time using ìnew mediaî like computers, the Internet and video games, without cutting back on the time they spend with ìoldî media like TV, print and music. Instead, because of the amount of time they spend using more than one medium at a time (for example, going online while watching TV), theyíre managing to pack increasing amounts of media content into the same amount of time each day.

The study, Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-olds, examined media use among a nationally representative sample of more than 2,000 3rd through 12th graders who completed detailed questionnaires, including nearly 700 self-selected participants who also maintained seven-day media diaries.

Continue reading Generation M: Kaiser Family Foundation Study

Internet Use in Canada is a 2003 report that shows that 64% of Canadian households had someone using the Internet regularly. There is a wealth of material linking out from the report, see the links at the end of the report and to the side for details. Some of the interesting statistics:

• Households with children are more likely to have access to the Internet. (See Characteristics of household Internet users, by location of access.)
• Another interesting result is that the reading materials are the most popular type of item that people buy. Books, magazines and newspapers were bought by 30% of e-commerce households. Could there be a correlation between Internet use and reading?
• Playing games has gone from 12.3% in 1999 to 27.9% in 2003. Household Internet use at home by Internet activity outlines what Canadians use the Internet for, from e-mail (52.1% in 2003) to listening to the radio (13.1% in 2003).

For a list of the different tables around internet use see, Canadian Statistics: The People: Culture, leisure and travel.
Continue reading Statistics Canada: Internet Usage in Canada

According to a BBC story, Global digital divide ‘narrowing’, the World Bank is reporting that the developing world is catching up in usage and access to tehnologies. The World Bank doesn’t feel we need a World Summit on the Information Society. WSIS is going on anyway. WSIS has two summits, Geneva 2003 and Tunis 2005. Check out their WSIS: Declaration of Principles; Building the Information Society: a global challenge in the new Millennium. This presents a vision of the importance of the Information Society connected to freedom of expression (and opinion) and human rights.
WSIS was endorsed by the UN General Assembly (Resolution 56/183)
Continue reading Digital Divide

InSafe is a Council of Europe sponsored organization promoting Internet safety information. Did you know about Safer Internet Day? One is tempted to mock such earnestness. Or you could,

Write about your journey with friends from all over the world in the exciting and sometimes dangerous cyber world of Internet and mobile technology. Take along a magical helper from the Kingdom of Internet safety.

I’m taking Alpha Dog who is good at “digging down spam”.
But seriously, what makes this site so bizarre is that it is written for children, but designed for adults. I can’t imagine any child reading pages of this stuff without any graphics and I find it hard to imagine adults reading this without cringing. Perhaps the graphical version is coming. Compare with the Canadian Media Awareness Network (MNet) to see what I mean.
Continue reading Internet Safety Day