It's interesting how this contrasts with the style of The Slow Web movement, which was also recently on the front page of Hacker News.
How Depressives Surf the Web
91–100 of 119 posts
Re: How Depressives Surf the Web
#92Fascinating stuff. Just today I was looking at the 30-40 tabs I bring up each time I start Chrome and I was wondering: doest having all this data in front of me help me remember to do various internet chores? Or does it get in the way? Better still, is it a sign I'm actually experiencing some other condition that shows itself in my context-switching? I think there's something to this. Having said that, I found this w…
What is in those 30-40 tabs? I am genuinely curious!
Here are my tabs:
Window 1:
1. Episode guide for Babylon 5, which I'm currently watching my way through on days that I'm not watching Euro 2012 matches.
2. Strategy guide for a game I play.
3. Scott Chacon's "Pro Git" book, which I've been meaning to read.
4. A reddit/r/metal thread recommending doom metal bands, since I've liked a few doom metal songs on that subreddit and are meaning to get into the genre more.
5, 6. More reddit/r/metal threads for similar reference.
7. A blog post on Pry, the Ruby REPL/debugger
8. A web caching tutorial, which I found on Hacker News
9. A blog post about "Real World Clojure", which I found on Hacker News
10. A listing of 2 minute tutorials about R, which I found on Hacker News
11. A European seedbox provider's front page
12. This, which I've been meaning to share with my girlfriend, and which I found on Hacker News: http://amasci.com/amateur/whygnd.html
13. A wiki page about a comedian, as a reminder to check out his work later, since he's purportedly similar to two other comedians I like
14, 15. Youtube links to metal songs from /r/metal
16. Hacker News itself
17. A reddit/r/soccer thread with a video I've been meaning to watch
18. My monthly budget in a Google Docs spreadsheet
19. An interesting looking article about Copland, Apple's project to replace the Mac OS before they bought NeXT.
20. An old Ars Technica post about Mac OS X memory management that mentions Copland; a false positive in a recent Google search about the topic.
21. Bus directions from home to work on Google Maps
22. The purported homepage of "Balance of Power: 21st Century", which is down.
23. The Wikipedia article about the original Balance of Power game.
24. Similar to 22--this is actually the homepage, 22 is the top-level domain.
25, 26: This article and thread from HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4114295
27, 28: Other HN threads
29: My threads
30: Reddit
31, 32: Various Reddit threads
33: An installment of Dinosaur Comics
34, 35: An HN thread--the same one, since I open "reply" links in a new tab.
36: This HN thread.
37: The tab I am typing this comment in.
38: This HN thread again.
39: My HN threads again.
Window 2: 1. The homepage for orgmode, which I've been meaning to look into.
2. A Trello board for a personal project.
3, 4: A page about "GTD for hackers", which I found on HN awhile back
5, 6: Other random self-improvement links
Window 3: 5 tabs of Coursera and other online course pages
Window 4: 16 tabs of technical subjects I've been meaning to look into
Probably less a sign of depression and more a sign of a surfeit of RAM and whatever mentality lies behind a cluttered desk....
Re: How Depressives Surf the Web
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
in many cases, depression is a mental disorder, not just the opposite of happiness. It's often caused by easily correctable physiological problems. In these cases, it makes sense to correct the underlying factors. In addition, a huge percentage of college students report being depressed. I still disagree with monitoring peoples internet activity, but for privacy reasons, not the reasons you mentioned.
Huh? Any chance you could supply me with some citations for the easily correctable physiological problems that cause depression? This is not snarky, I am genuinely interested, if a little unbelieving.
Sure, just look at the selectively published research that drug companies use to market antidepressants.
Re: How Depressives Surf the Web
#94I was surprised not to find a discussion of correlation vs causation here. If you accept the correlation, I think there are different plausible ways to interpret it.
It could be that the way we interact with the computer is a symptom of our depression, or it could well be that the way we use computers is causing depression (or both).
I have heard of other work associating things that split our attention, e.g. listening to podcasts while working, reading with the the television on, etc, with mood disorders. From the other side, the practice of mindfulness, which seems antithetical to these activities in that it advocates simply paying attention to one thing at a time, appears to be a path to happiness for many.
Re: How Depressives Surf the Web
#95Hey, I attend Missouri S&T.
I was offered the opportunity to participate in this survey.
At the time I thought it was offered by the IST (Information Science and Technology) department which does some human computer interaction stuff. As a result I decided I wasn't interested because the IST department has a really really bad reputation on campus (rightly so - I'm an IST undergrad and have witnessed gross incompetence first hand).
Turns out it was done by the Comp Sci department, which has a good reputation, but not so much for its research. Still, they are competent people which is more than I can say about the IST department.
Anyways, I find these results interesting. I don't know how they got p2p statistics, as it is painfully difficult to get IT to let me download linux ISOs.
I also share the concerns about the parent monitoring thing.
Re: How Depressives Surf the Web
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's a pdf of the paper: http://web.mst.edu/~chellaps/papers/12_tech-soc_kcmwl.pdf It's interesting seeing my alma mater show up here. I wouldn't be surprised if Rolla students exhibited a higher rate of depression than the norm. Having spent 4 years there, I knew a lot of people that were bitter about being there. It's a small state engineering school in the middle of nowhere, without any particular pedigree or no…
I wonder if engineering school students are more depressed on average. It was certainly my impression while attending one that the students were more stressed than they average college student at other schools.
Missouri S&T was voted the most depressed school (or something to that effect) at one point. I don't recall the details, so don't quote me on that one.
Our university has about as high a percentage of Engineering and Science students as any university does. Again, don't quote me, but it has gotta be pretty darn close to the top.
Re: How Depressives Surf the Web
#97Admittedly this article a high-level overview, but I see a lot of hand-waving use of statistical terms. For example, how is “30 percent of the participants met the criteria for depressive symptoms” in line with “10 to 40 percent of college students at some point experience such symptoms”. It’s not: 30% have depressive symptoms now vs 10% having symptoms at some point? One of those two numbers is way off, or they are…
Here's a pdf of the paper: http://web.mst.edu/~chellaps/papers/12_tech-soc_kcmwl.pdf It's interesting seeing my alma mater show up here. I wouldn't be surprised if Rolla students exhibited a higher rate of depression than the norm. Having spent 4 years there, I knew a lot of people that were bitter about being there. It's a small state engineering school in the middle of nowhere, without any particular pedigree or no…
As a current student, I can verify that this is accurate.
Re: How Depressives Surf the Web
#98> we recruited 216 undergraduate volunteers
> we had the participants fill out a questionnaire (~15 questions that LITERALLY ask you if you feel depressed. so, the survey asks you "hey, are you depressed?" about fifteen times, with various wordings.)
> 30 percent of the participants met the criteria for depressive symptoms
Okay. Sounds reliably conclusive.
> Next, we had the university’s information technology department provide us with campus Internet usage data for our participants for February. This didn’t mean snooping on what the students were looking at or whom they were e-mailing; it merely meant monitoring how they were using the Internet.
...how "they" were using the internet. During February. In Missouri.
> the more a participant’s score on the survey indicated depression, the more his or her Internet usage included ... “p2p packets”
O RLY
> By Sriram Chellappan (professor of computer science) and Raghavenra Kotikalapudi (software development engineer), IEEE
Pretty striking that they correlate fear mongering with file sharing, and then draw a line connecting to eavesdropping and traffic analysis. Is this article MPAA/RIAA propaganda? I can't tell.
Re: How Depressives Surf the Web
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bingo. Or the news in general. If you're not depressed to some degree you're probably oblivious to what's going on in the world at large, or (possibly worse) don't care.
Or you just accept you alone can't solve the world problems and take the small steps you can. For the record, I get angry at the world problems, not depressed.
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Re: How Depressives Surf the Web
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for catching that oversight, I didn't intend to imply that people with currently acknowledged mental disorders are unhappy. Hey, I'm an aspie and I'm not terribly unhappy about it, either. But I sure am dissatisfied (i.e. unhappy) with the way the world around me is. The kind of happiness that "higher ups" want to propagate, on the other hand, often involves accepting the status quo and just trying to fit in.
I think you accidentally highlighted a problem our society, at least our media, tries to portray in that "depression is a mental disorder". You only have to see the commercials for anti-depressants to see this. The world becomes very easy for government when you can lump every unhappy or disgruntled citizen as having a mental disorder, so you can medicate and silence them. Governments are in the very uneasy position…
Exactly. Given some of the things that happen in our world depression is a perfectly normal human state. Get meds if you want them, but don't feel like you're not normal just because you're not smiling.