

An Honest Conversation About Your Technology Use - DanielBMarkham
http://bedfordtechgroup.wufoo.com/forms/an-honest-conversation-about-your-technology-use/

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Pinckney
Sampling bias. The respondents will be disproportionately the sort of people
who waste time online.

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elihu
The poll seems to be based on the premise that whatever time we spend not
earning money is time wasted. I recommend reading "Momo" by Michael Ende for a
different perspective. Time we spend learning new things is valuable. Time we
spend communicating ideas is valuable. This isn't to say that all the time
everyone spends on the Internet is worthwhile, or that many of us wouldn't be
better off spending less time in front of a screen, but it isn't always easy
to know beforehand what time is going to be well-spent and what isn't.

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sajithw
Am I the only one that hates having to answer on a spectrum from "Strongly
Disagree" to "Strongly Agree"? I don't need 7 choices, just give me Yes/No
options.

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nhebb
Yeah, that stopped me in my tracks. I'm really bad at answering shades of gray
questions. _Don't make me think!_

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mahmud
Daniel, this comes off as an official Wufoo poll. Maybe I am different, but I
thought the Wufoo guys were taking this poll.

Would have been to put your name on it in the intro.

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DanielBMarkham
There's anecdotes, there's opinions, and then there is data. I spent a couple
of hours this morning creating a WuFoo survey about "how addictive is
technology?"

I would appreciate it if you guys could take the time to complete and spread
the word. I will share whatever I learn back on HN, of course :) I think if we
can get enough folks participating, it should make for very interesting
reading.

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sprout
Asking for zip code, age, gender, and earnings is a little much for an
anonymous survey. That is pretty specific.

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DanielBMarkham
Yeah, sorry about that.

I was torn about what to put in there. No right answer, really. At the end of
the day I decided I would rather have fewer answers with more data than more
answers with fewer data.

Things like gender, income, and zip are pretty important, actually. (I should
have asked eduction level! doh!) The thing is, without _any_ kind of specific
tags, it's just a random opinion survey, whereas with the data it's possible
to say something like "yeah, but that's only true for rich people living on
the east coast", or "sure it shows a lot of internet usage, but the average
age is 17, so probably you grow out of it" -- I think those kinds of
observations are very important, and I wouldn't have wanted to do the survey
without them. The goal here is to try to have a detailed conversation -- as
anonymously as possible -- so that then I can post results back here and then
we're talking data and not opinions so much.

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carbocation
"I get out more now than I did five years ago"

I mean, 5 years ago I was in college...

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joelmichael
Not everyone has an identical college or post-college experience.

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carbocation
Of course not; that's half the point. It's an interesting interaction effect
that could only be assessed by asking. And with only 2-3 additional questions,
you could cover a wide range of educational and post-educational experiences
(where education refers to an institute of learning; not meant to imply that
learning stops after you leave school).

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Yaggo
I was shocked by my answers.

