One of the interesting things about Blog entry #1 is how many of you felt that your results were at odds with how you thought you used technology, or that you fit into multiple groups. One related issue to this is that how we self-report our own technology use (and any behavior, really), is often flawed. It’s just hard to accurately keep track of how much time we spend doing a given activity, unless we have some kind of external monitoring system.
Case in point: this article* talks about a recent study that found that undergraduates significantly OVER-report how much time they spend with Facebook.
Food for thought as we go through the semester: It can be tempting to say that “nobody talks face-to-face anymore” (which all the research says isn’t true). Maybe one reason people think that is because we notice our technology use more? An interesting experiment this semester would be to try to pay attention to how much you do actually communicate face-to-face with people. I’ll bet you find the results interesting!
I agree with the article that people over report how much time they spend with Facebook. People that Facebook is the norms and you have to have so many friends and spend so much time on it to be considered important or normal. I would have to say that I actually communicate most of the time face-to-face so I will challenge myself to pay attention to how much I communicate with technology. However, I will not take into account my online class since I have no choice.
I find this idea so fascinating! I feel like I am constantly being sucked into Facebook, and I actually deleted it from my toolbar so it is less of a reminder (which completely worked!). I really appreciate talking face-to-face, probably because I can get so drained by online communication. This does fit into my Ambivalent Networker personality.