Social Ism
Posted by Ron Coleman on March 18, 2009
It’s a transformational moment, all right — this item keeps popping up:
According to Nielsen Online, more people in the US and other leading digital countries worldwide are using social networks and blogs than e-mail.
While search and destination sites remain the most popular online activities, social network and blog use exceeded that of e-mail, increasing their reach by 5.4 percentage points.
This is astonishing when you consider all that email.
The only thing is, I can’t figure out what they’re measuring. Is this literally what they mean: “More people” are “using” social networks than email?
That is categorically impossible, because you can’t sign up for a blog or a social networking site without having an email address. Nor is it conceivable to me that there are people who blog and use social networking but don’t send and read emails.
I wasn’t able to figure this out at the Nielson link. Anyone?
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This entry was posted on March 18, 2009 at 4:44 pm and is filed under Nuvo-Techno, Social networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
jaymaster said
A couple places there, they say it’s based on “time spent”, which kind of makes sense.
Ron Coleman said
That’s what I thought, too, but it reads to me as if this is a separate statistic:
jaymaster said
Well, I agree that first sentence is a bit misleading. “According to Nielson Online more people in the US and other leading digital countries worldwide are using social networks and blogs than e-mail”. That just can’t be.
But I can’t find that quote on the Nielson site. Did you get that there, or somewhere else?
And I don’t see anything about the second snippet you just mentioned that necessarily points to two different statistics. It’s entirely possible that social networks and blogs increased their share by 5.4% and also did that by growing at a rate 3 times faster than the internet in general. Or maybe I’m missing your point there?
Ron Coleman said
I got it from the first link, which in turn cites to Nielson.
Well, we can agree it’s unclear, and somewhat misleading. And getting close to bedtime.
jaymaster said
Oh wow, I completely missed the first link. I think those folks just got it wrong. If you click through to the actual pdf report at the Nielson site, they’re pretty clear that it’s a time based survey.
And I should note that since your most recent redesign, it’s really hard for me to pick out the hyperlinks with my browser. I’ve been meaning to comment on that sooner or later, but “real life” has kept me kind of distracted lately….
Ron Coleman said
Well I hope real life does ok by you.
I can change the color of links to make them easier to see. Maybe that’s a good idea. I mean to do it on the other blog too, which may finally not be broken any more.
jaymaster said
That color works MUCH better!
Thanks!
Jack said
That article reminds me of an old story.
Once I went to lunch with a guy whose degree in the field of psychology at that time exceeded my own. (Not that I’m impressed by degrees, I’m not, I can’t tell ya how many I’ve met that don’t know the difference shooting the sun and six degrees of separation. I won’t even discuss with a guy his “qualifications.” Rather I talk with him long enough to get some idea of whether he knows what he is doing and saying, or not. I would never be so pretentious, arrogant, or stupid as to predetermine the range of a man’s intelligence or the limits of his capabilities based upon as artificial and unreliable a measure as how many degrees he possesses, or fails to possess.)
Anywho, at that time though I was still young enough and naive enough to think that a degree of a certain rank would at least transmit a “degree” of exposure to certain salient points, or at least would declare a familiarity with certain basic concepts common to the discipline under discussion.
One of my patients had told me, and shown me, drawings of his that I was sure related to his schizophrenic state and which I thought would make a useful avenue of investigation regarding how his illness had first manifested. Would give a clue, if not to cause, at least to progression.
I told the guy with the degree, my boss at the time, about the drawings of our patient. He told me he thought that was interesting, and my postulate was also interesting. I began to discuss some work of Jung I thought relevant to the issue. He asked me who Jung was. I kid you not.
Now in college I developed my own educational system. I scrapped all of my textbooks, sold em, gave em away, and burned a couple, and instead took to reading only original sources. That’s still my modus operandi concerning anything I study or master. I ended up reading every volume Jung wrote. Jung was as fundamental to the early development of the field of psychology as Freud, and far more so regarding schizophrenia. My boss had not only never read him, he didn’t know who he was.
Now I had seen plenty of heavily degreed idiots (lot of decoration these fellas had, little by way of demonstrated mastery in the same man) by that time, and far more since, but I never forgot that particular incident. It was a good lesson in the differences between the knowing of appearance, and the appearance of knowing. (Truth be told I’m also not the kind of fella who thinks “knowing more” necessarily makes you better at anything, but knowing next to nothing makes it very hard to be good at most things.)
Years later I became a writer.
Started hobnobbing with quite a few, including many non-fiction writers.I wasn’t impressed much of the time.
Not to say that many writers are heavily degreed, that’s not my point. At all. But like a formal degree you would sort of expect that a certain amount of research exposure would naturally engender a corresponding degree of (at least) informal understanding of what you intend to describe by writing about it. But it don’t. Not by itself.
Never assume that just because any person is in any position of public prominence they know anything at all about what they are doing. It’s like assuming that just because a guy gets thrown from a horse a lot he must be on the professional rodeo circuit. Maybe he just don’t know how to sit a saddle worth a damn.
Exposure doesn’t naturally create expertise, or even the understanding in the individual of how little he does know about everything he doesn’t. Men don’t become good at a thing just because they become good enough to make a living at it. It’s just not the way the real world works.
Jack’s last blog post..A New Era: Foreign Affairs