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Americans Give Up Friends For Net
A recent survey of 1,011 American adults seemed to show that we are slowly retreating into Web life. When asked how long they would feel OK without going to the Internet, fifteen percent said just a day or less.
Twenty-eight percent of respondents said they spent less time socializing face to face because of the time they spent online.
In The Machine Stops, an eerily futuristic story written in 1909 by E.M. Forster, people have stopped socializing entirely, living in small one-room cubicles from which they never emerge. Their sole source of information and companionship is the cinematophote.
Via IT News.
"People told us how anxious, isolated and bored they felt when they are forced off line," said Ann Mack, director of trend spotting at JWT."They felt disconnected from the world, from their friends and family."
Advanced thinkers, like Vashti, had always held it foolish to visit the surface of the earth. Air-ships might be necessary, but what was the good of going out for mere curiosity and crawling along for a mile or two in a terrestrial motor? The habit was vulgar and perhaps faintly improper: it was unproductive of ideas, and had no connection with the habits that really mattered... Those who still wanted to know what the earth was like had after all only to listen to some gramophone, or to look into some cinematophote. And even the lecturers acquiesced when they found that a lecture on the sea was none the less stimulating when compiled out of other lectures that had already been delivered on the same subject.
(Read more about the cinematophote)
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 9/20/2007)
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