The results of a survey conducted by ad agency JWT spell trouble for the propagation of the human species. According to the study, based on a survey of 1,011 American adults, 20% of the respondents said they are having less sex because they are online. (Of course it isn't clear from the press reports if those people said anything about having sex online in lieu of the real thing.)
The Web also cuts into a lot of other kinds of live human interactions, with more than a quarter, or 28%, of the respondents saying they socialize on a face-to-face basis with peers less than they used to because of the Internet.
Overall, the majority of those surveyed felt that they couldn't go a week without going online, with 15% feeling that they couldn't go a single day without getting on the Internet, 21% feeling they couldn't go a couple of days and another 19% saying they might not feel OK if they didn't get online after a "few" days.
Yeah, that pretty much sums it up for practically everybody I know and it's far, far worse among the teens I know (boding even darker prospects for the species). I vascillate all the time in terms of whether this hyper-connectedness is a good or bad thing and whether I'm wasting far too much of my life staring at a back-lit piece of glass.
Clearly Mark Evans thinks it's a sorry shift in society.
The only word to describe this situation is: sad. To think people would be willing to give up some of the real pleasures in life to surf the Web suggests something is terribly wrong. The need to be connected has got completely out of hand.
It might be sad but it's a reality and one that will only intensify as more and more human transactions and rituals migrate to the Internet, and as young people today reach true adulthood. Oh well, we don't need that many new babies anyway.
Cynthia Brumfield at 12:12 PM|Comments(0)
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