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FirebrandRoaring  ·  2500 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How much is ‘too much time’ on social media?

    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.