4 ms·
It's pretty clear that adoption of any technology nowadays follows a logistic curve. That is to say, giving the same amount of money gets less people onboard ev
by striking 11y ago
It's pretty clear that adoption of any technology nowadays follows a logistic curve. That is to say, giving the same amount of money gets less people onboard every time you do so. At some point, it is no longer economically worth paying to introduce more people to the technology (because moneyInvested > moneyEarnable as you get closer to the asymptote).
Clickbait title, 4/10. Article doesn't even tell me directly why I should care besides "poverty and inequality" while a couple of paragraphs before stating "34 percent said they didn't find the Internet relevant to them".
Also, it's worth considering: maybe people just don't want to use the Internet. Plenty of libraries carry access, and plenty more will soon. What else can you do, at that point?
- afarrell 11y agoThe name of the curve you are looking for is a "logistic curve"
- hodwik 11y agoCouldn't they just... not want to use the internet? I intentionally didn't use the internet for a few years after college. I found it too distracting, and just had too much I wanted to do in the real world to waste my time. I got a lot more done in my spare time, read real books, and had a lot more friends that I saw much more regularly than I do now.
- striking 11y agoOn that note, I think I'm going to go outside. Thanks for the reminder!
- matwood 11y agoThe internet is a tool like anything else. You can waste time on it or be productive. To assume the 'real' world is not a time waster and the internet is, is a false dichotomy. People wasted plenty of time before the internet. I'm also not sure what's the point of reading 'real' books. The internet and technology in general has allowed me to read more books than I ever thought I would. From book discovery to reading convenience, the internet has made books more accessible to more people than than any other invention since the library.
- hodwik 11y agoI think that Marshall McLuhan's "the medium is the message" gets across my position here. There is in Internet media something which engenders a short attention span, an addiction to novelty. Something which pushes breadth-thinking over depth-thinking, and which causes us to relate to other humans in inhumane ways. We have all the worlds information at our fingertips, but do we give any of it the time it deserves? Yes, it is merely a tool. But tools aren't really use-case neutral. Bombs and stethoscopes are obvious examples.