When Does Technolust Become An Addiction? 281
An anonymous reader writes "According to a CNet article, an incredible one in three people aged 16 to 24 in the UK would not give up their mobile phone for a million pounds. 'The phone-centric survey, called Mobile Life, was carried out across the UK and questioned 1,256 people aged 16 to 64 on a variety of topics ... So young people really like having a mobile phone and we all love buying gadgets. But before you dismiss this research as stating the bleeding obvious, think about this -- if someone had told you even ten years ago that people would be taking out second mortgages to buy flat screen TVs, would you have believed it?' Is this just the result of deliberately skewed marketing dressed up as research, or is this another indication of western culture's obsession with communication and technology? How much is too much tech?"
second mortgage? (Score:5, Interesting)
That sounds like a really bad deal (for the closing costs alone). Why wouldn't you just take out a personal line of credit from the bank?
(Obviously, the best solution is: don't buy it if you can't pay for it that month, but we're talking about the lesser of evils)
It's just a CPH press release (Score:4, Interesting)
Other stories under this heading mostly include "Dixons announces that will no longer be stocked in their group stores".
How many of the people mugged for this "survey" actually thought that the herbert with the clipboard was actually going to give them a million quid?
I believe the 2nd mortgage line... (Score:3, Interesting)
I worked at a cable company (our company was doing a trial of Internet over Cable-TV before cable modems), and people would have their phone turned off before their cable. As a side benefit, this made it difficult for the CSRs to reach them about paying their cable bills once they couldn't pay those either.
Interesting. (Score:3, Interesting)
For most people, this is relatively mild - by overusing one and only one solution, a person can lose touch with the reality that other solutions exist. This creates a psychologically-maintained monopoly which is not subject to market forces or anything else. A certain Redmond-based corporation is often connected with this issue, but it's really only one of many companies that have an unhealthy mindshare, and any company that makes use of advertising is - in some way - exploiting this particular human sickness.
Note, however, that the problem is one of psychology and NOT one of technology. The technology merely happens to be the instrument used in some cases. It gets more press because tech companies are rather more prominent than breakfast cereal manufacturers, but the problem is universal. Kellogs didn't change their marketing strategy out of kindness, and the UK egg board didn't pull plans to reuse 1950s adverts for reasons of cost. Tech is easy to blame, but in this type of case it is not the subject that is the issue at all.
In a few, very few, cases there is a much more serious problem. These people have an actual biochemical or neurological disorder that creates disproportionate and dysfunctional cravings. As before, these attach to something external for a whole host of reasons, but what they attach to is generally unimportant. If something is addictive, it worsens that disorder, but it is still the disorder that is the issue and not the subject. Tech is not addictive, so although it can be the target of such cravings, it is merely the innocent victim. If it wasn't tech, it would be something else. Those with such disorders are guaranteed to latch onto something.
So, am I saying that tech isn't a problem? Yes and no. It is NOT a problem in the way that is talked about in the article or the summary. It is a problem in that there is so little innovation and true invention that we get into solution monocultures. This is a danger, if something goes wrong (see: Day of the Triffids for details, or indeed any of the mass power or phone blackouts that have occurred over the years). I would much prefer people to be aware of multiple ways to get the same result, because that is far more resilient to the inevitable problems in life. It is also a problem in the special case where the throw-away mentality produces steadily inferior products (see: Hitchhiker's Guide, shoe event horizon).
In neither of these cases, though, is tech the real culprit. It merely enables society to make very bad decisions, but ultimately society itself is at fault for making the decisions, the tech didn't force them to do so.
Wealth? (Score:3, Interesting)
You mean the problem is people don't know how to think for themselves?
Perhaps part of the reason for this is that we have become (well, the middle class, anyway) much wealthier in the last 10 - 15 years... buying crap they don't need, with money they don't have
Wait, you lost me - are we gaining wealth or debt? Those are opposites.
Re:Hardly surprising (Score:4, Interesting)
Disclaimer: I used to work in market research as an analyst, so I know what I am talking about.
The surveys cost a lot of money to generate. So they have a value from that perspective.
The surveys are paid for by major corporations and governments and health organisations.
Governments determine policies, and corporations design products and price points based on the data within the surveys. They are referred to constantly within parliament if government owned, and taken as gospel. Health surveys are used to allocate funding and tackle major medical issues affecting the population.
Based on those facts, I cannot support your theory that the surveys are worthless.
Now, as for the reliability of the data, that is another question entirely. Sample sizes are often small enough that you'll see "bad" figures like the million-dollars-for-a-phone factoid this article is about. So what does that mean? That the survey, even if bad, is worthless? No. Quite the opposite. Even if the data is bad, we can see the data is being used to generate articles and who knows what else within the corporations churning over the data.
I'd say this is a pretty clear example as to why it's important to be honest in a survey, and why participating in a survey gives you (a very small) influence over government and corporation. Would you be so quick to dismiss this?
Re:second mortgage? (Score:3, Interesting)
Tsk tsk tsk. My family financed our trip to Disneyland (well, Disney World) the old fashioned way: We sold off our beanie babies.
(Seriously. We hit it right at the peak, sold some for $200 apiece and many for $50. What was that about people spending far too much money on frivolous things?)
Re:Hardly surprising (Score:4, Interesting)
I do that frequently when websites force the user to fill out a profile for whatever lame reason. I am usually an 70+ year old female CEO or CFO of a fortune 1000 company who makes purchasing decisions for 100,000+ person departments, my hobbies are usually woodworking, knitting, and fly fishing, and my annual income is always stated (for the purposes of maximum database poisoning) to be less than 15,000 per year or more than 250,000. Does anybody answer such surveys honestly anymore? Do the advertisers actually believe that this information is accurate? They should just save their money and dump the survey companies.
Gadget Deprication (Score:4, Interesting)
While I myself love gadgets too and always have the newest computers/phone/ipod/laptop etc me & my fellow geeks have to accept the cold hard truth: it is money thrown down the drain.
Not technology - people (Score:5, Interesting)
And the cell phone means that I can take a walk in the city when I don't have work and not miss a job offer from my customers. God, how I hated sitting next to that landline phone, waiting for work!
So I'm not addicted to technology, but the people it brings me. You simply cannot compare a cell phone to a flat screen TV - the latter is a dead one way channel.
Rene Kita
Artist, noise musician, freelance translator
Re:My current phone is so crap (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:second mortgage? (Score:3, Interesting)
For context, I'm in the UK.
Credit is debt until you pay the bill. If you buy a nice TV using a loan or mortgage, you are in debt until you have repaid that money.
Home prices have shown absurd growth here in the UK in recent years. We have had a situation where people who would have been average first-time buyers a few years ago simply can't afford to buy a home now. Something like 1 in every 3 first homes is now bought using heavy financial support from a previous generation, itself funded by housing market debt. Repayments on mortgages represent a much more significant proportion of total household expenditure than they used to. Because many people took out mortgages at absurdly high multipliers of their income a couple of years ago, when interest rates were relatively low, they are now in financial difficulties as their fixed rates run out and they discover that the base rate have soared since then. The market is being sustained to some extent by various factors that weren't around at the time of the last big crash a few years ago, but these will not support it forever, and even if they would, there is increasing political will to go after people like buy-to-let investors who are distorting the market. While none of this makes a crash inevitable, it certainly isn't impossible, which (coming back to the matter at hand) makes using home-secured loans to buy things other than the home itself rather a dangerous proposition for many people. Clearly that hasn't stopped them, perhaps because of the "it won't happen to me" mindset.
High house prices don't really help anyone other than the industry (mortgage lenders, estate agents, etc.), the tax man, those playing around with multiple homes, and perhaps those "trading down" to smaller homes later in life. For the average household, who just want to buy a place to live, and who trade up a lot more often than down as their families grow, higher prices just mean paying out more money every time they move.
And for what it's worth, my home would be untouched by a crash. Like many others of my generation, I have chosen not to buy a home at an inflated price because I don't want to pay a stupidly large deposit and then inflated mortgage payments for many years to come. So, like all those others, I choose (or am forced to) rent, until the market doesn't look like a liability.