Very next article after the previous one. warning auto-play video, thanks BBC.

    Over a third (40%) of the 554 people who voted thought that more than two or three hours was too much, but we know that most people spend at least two hours social networking and messaging every day. The majority of internet users do not have pathological relationships with social media, which surely means that two or three hours probably isn’t too much at all. We know that over a third of UK 15-year-olds use the internet for six or more hours a day, with much of that time dedicated to social networking sites. Despite their heavy consumption, such heavy use does not mean these young people are mentally unwell. Time spent online is only one factor. There are clearly other things to consider.

The same World Health Organization that is trying to claim being single is a disability and wants to put limits on video game play time, but not TV. What is completely lost in the article is that 16 year olds, boys in particular are not watching television. Old article. Spoiler, TV is for old people If people were playing 4 hour a day of games, and watching 4-6 hours a day of television, I think we would have a problem that needs addressing. Instead we are at the point of the shift where one medium is dying and a new one is replacing it. When I was home, the family watches TV ALL THE DAMN TIME. It's all shit. All of it. And from the commercials, the age they think they can target is 60. I did not see a single ad in two weeks on "normie" TV for people under 30 or so targeted. I know it has to be out there, and my parents watch prime time TV (some crime shows) and I also get that my sample is way skewed off normal. Daytime TV? Ads for Medicare and old people drugs. Fox News? Commercials selling fear, panic and social security. HGTV? Applebees.

Will be interesting to see what Hubski's take on this article is.

FirebrandRoaring:

    The same World Health Organization that is trying to claim being single is a disability

This part got me wondering, so I went looking.

This is what the author of the definition has to say:

    For the WHO’s Dr. David Adamson, one of the authors of the new standards, this move is about creating medical equality. He says, “The definition of infertility is now written in such a way that it includes the rights of all individuals to have a family, and that includes single men, single women, gay men, gay women.”

It's proposed to write infertilty — classified a disability — in such a way that would include any person not able to have children, couples and single people (apparently, because you can't fertilize the egg alone). It tries real hard to sound inclusive, but it seems both an attempt to bend the word of the "law" and a ham-fisted, unempathetic, stereotype-scientist act for equality. It's an inadequate measure to provide same access to in vitro fertilization to both couples and single parents-to-be. A bit of a miss, I would say.

FYI, the WHO online definition of infertility still takes it as a couple thing, for both definitions provided:

    Infertility is “a disease of the reproductive system defined by the failure to achieve a clinical pregnancy after 12 months or more of regular unprotected sexual intercourse.”… (WHO-ICMART glossary).

    “Infertility is the inability of a sexually active, non-contracepting couple to achieve pregnancy in one year. The male partner can be evaluated for infertility or subfertility using a variety of clinical interventions, and also from a laboratory evaluation of semen.” (Semen manual, 5th Edition).

Onto the article itself.

    Griffiths and his colleague Daria Kuss published the first ever review paper for what he calls SNS (social networking sites) addiction in 2011, at a time when there were only three papers on the subject.

...the paper that's both unreliable and heavily misrepresented. Its sample size is a hundred MySpace users (back in 2011, MySpace had [almost 30 million users]), and their cited studies have no more than 250 people of sample size. It's of same veritability as BBC's Twitter poll — which is to say, almost nil. Granted, however: it was born at the time of icebreaking of the unknown social-network addictions seas.

    They found that extroverts appear to use these sites for social enhancement, whereas introverts use them for social compensation.

Here's what the paper says on the matter:

    Research (mainly conducted on teenagers and students) has also shown that females use SNS in order to communicate with members of their peer group, whereas males use them for the purposes of social compensation, learning, and social identity gratifications (Barker, 2009).

Then, citing one of the three SNS-addiction papers:

    A second study (Wilson, Fornasier & White, 2010) of 201 teenage students (76% female) indicated that those with high extraversion and low conscientiousness scores predicted both addictive tendencies and the time spent using an SNS. The researchers suggested that the relationship between extraversion and addictive tendencies could be explained by the fact that using SNSs satisfies the extraverts' need to socialize.

Uh-huh... no. The paper itself is nothing to reliably use as an argument for SN addiction. The big one that they cite below, however, has 23k+ sample size, which may be a better source of conclusive data.

I didn't bother to dive into the other papers cited.

Like the article says, it's not the frequency or the quantity that matters: it's the context of usage. I could be depressed out of my mind and spend two hours in the "Recommended" part of the social network, absorbing with the morbid pleasure just how little people contact me in any sort of ways online, or I could spend the same two hours throughout the day discussing a project with my class-/group-/workmates. I could be browsing the endless newsfeed made of low-value posts of pictures reposted from Reddit, or I could be conversing with people all over the country and the world because we have no other way to contact each other.


posted 2281 days ago