The Internet is a wondrous place that some misuse in a way that can be especially devastating for us all.

I myself am more concerned over the attitudes that people use 0nline as opposed to the decrease in face-to-face social interactions. People have a nasty tendency to be overly rude, in-your-face and downright annoying, especially when it comes to posting on forums or making provacative vvebsites. Most things that would get you punched in the face if you were to say it in public just aren't cool. I suppose this is balanced somewhat by the ability to say that which isn't popular and express your opinion when you're not being a jerk. After all, there are times and locations where saying you're pro-A or con-B will make people get pissed off, if not attack you.

The good news for social interaction, I think, is that it's becoming easier than ever to talk to people who are farther away, or those who are close but not willing or able to stop by just to say "hi" briefly. Between vveb-based text, audio, and video conversations, you can talk to people who because of distance or being busy you wouldn't otherwise be able to converse with.

One thing that should be kept in mind when talking about 1nternet usage is the variety of things it's used for. My family loves to group "computer usage" as one activity and ignore the plethora of tasks I'm working on. Sure, I could read the newspaper or a magazine or a book. Or I could do it online. I could pick up the phone and call someone, or I could drop them an IM. I could watch the news on the TV or listen to a radi0, or see video clips and related articles on the internet. I could spend some time doing a crossword puzzle or Sudoku or another little mind/board game, or I could find some flash or shockwave based games. I could read up on something or browse around for news on it and search Wikipedia. Many activities that I do online could be done elsewhere, just not as conveniently. It doesn't make me any more removed from people, as I'd normally be doing the activities alone.

The other thing to keep in mind is that, whenever a new techn0logy comes out or becomes popular, everybody freaks out about it. As this article briefly mentioned, other things have been accused of changing social interactions before. I recently had a course on the history of information sciences, and that's putting it mildly. People thought that the telegraph would create world peace. And the radio. People also thought that the television would turn us into propaganda-sucking, mindless, overweight and apathetic drones. Half a century later and people still bitch about the governments and world around them; so much for that. People will also freak and say the internet is cannibalizing other things, including social interactions. If things go as they always have in the past, it will either not come to pass or it will become a social change that occurs, like it or not.

People used to sit around and watch gladiators fight to the death, and when that wasn't allowed anymore, they gathered to watch people being excecuted. So you see, not all social changes are bad

[Intentional use of numbers and symbols to keep the site form putting so many damn pop-up links on my post. Which, it would seem, had no effect at all... >_<]

It's too late! The Dark side has already taken over. Look around you at how many people are driving around with cell phones attached to the side of their heads or keying info into their blackberries or just sitting at Starbucks with their laptop for hours on end sipping double or triple shot hazelnut mochas... How many of us sit down to enjoy a 2 or 3 hour dinner with friends or family. It's very unfortunate but social interaction will become as rare as the hand written letter or those long Sunday morning talks in bed with your wife, husband, girlfriend or boyfriend.. Eventually we will all have a personal assistants in the form of a Sony Robot to talk with, who will send our email, order our food, postpone meetings with friends and relatives, tell us jokes or just play music for us.. Soon bionic parts will replace damage limbs and chips will be implanted in our brains that will be attached via wireless network to our laptops, blackberries or the new Vizatech 007 personal assistant which will directly communicate with our brains and for who knows what kind of self centered activity. We will probably be able to adjust our dopamine levels directly from the Vizatech 007 personal assistant. The future wireless device that we will have with us 24/7... What a wonderful life... we will become extinct without even knowing it... Once wireless remote sex becomes available followed fast by Sony's Replicant Pleasure Model, you know the end is near !!! And what an enjoyable end it will be!!!!!!!!
Testa

I think the internet has alot to offer people as far as communication, specially with people who live far away from relatives or friends and need a cheap easy way to keep in touch. I agree completely over the social downsides though, I took a break recently from my computer all together for about 3 months. I was suprised at how much I got done, spending time with family and painting the house and many other things. I was shocked to find out how much free time I had when I wasnt spending 5 or 6 hours a day sitting at my computer playing games and surfing the internet.

Yes definitely time is much more efficiently used then me sitting in front of the computer.

But time to me is not the true evil, the true evil is the change that i sometimes see in people once they stray to the "dark side" of going online. I would talk to these same people online and they would have excellent IM conversation skills but when time comes to talk in person, they are of a different breed...unsure of themselves and lacking a plethora of body language (they werent like that before).

It worries me sometimes and i hope the future interaction of people is not mainly through fiber optic means.

For some time now Barry Gerber has been regaling us with poorly-written articles that show an absolute dearth of analytical capacity. Need I remind everyone of the "Smart Phones vs. PDA Phones" or the iPod "Who Designed This Crap?" articles? I have been baffled as to why Toms Hardware has ever posted these articles as it has been painfully obvious that Barry has absolutely no clue what he is writing about, when it comes to technology.

Unfortunately, this latest attempt only serves to reinforce this notion, and to continue to degrade the image of Toms Hardware as a serious technology site. This 'article' is little more than a commentary regarding social engineering, and has little or nothing to do with the technology being 'written' about. If you want to write this article, then great, but why soil TH with it? It would be much better suited on any number of other sites, but this is supposed to be a serious technology site.

Additionally, while the thrust of the article may be correct, and even the vast majority of it may be decent; it is also peppered with such wonderful comments like this:
"For example, war and other kinds of violence become easier for these folks to accept because they don't have the empathy that comes with face-to-face interaction."

This could have just as easily been stated as follows:
"For example, supporting groups like the United Nations, which coddle 3rd world dictators that starve their citizens and treat them as little more than chattel becomes easier for these folks to accept because they don't have the empathy that comes with face-to-face interaction."

Or even:
"For example, standing by and negotiating or talking for 13 years while someone tortures and rapes their own citizens becomes easier for these folks to accept because they don't have the empathy that comes with face-to-face interaction."

But then again, either of those statements would be taking away from the thrust of the point, like the poorly-thought out statement that I am referring to. Regardless, however, none of them have any place in what is supposed to be a serious technology site. If I were coming here to read mindless drivel from some psychologist/political scientist, commenting on technology, then I could just as easily have gone to ZDNet or CNet, which write for a far less sophisticated audience.

In fact, as Toms Hardware continues to put out these articles, and other articles that are quite plainly not well researched, it seems to be the point, in that Toms Hardware appears to be trying to become a mainstream, and less sophisticated, hardware site. Why? Why would you ruin your site and reduce it to this?

How sad.

And here we all are...on the internet to read your garbage. Blah blah blah. The person who designed this crap we call the internet is the person who alowes YOU to have a job writing crap on the internet. If you hate the internet so much i hear McDonalds is hiring...all the face to face you can handle. "Can I take your order?"

Overall, yes there is a reduction in human interaction skills. Unfortunately there also seems to be a general lack of spelling and grammar skills(now watch as I make several mistakes in the lines to follow ;-)).

I will say however that there are many ways to make the internet and computer use in general a face to face interactive environment.

What I have done is convert my living room into a LAN room. I have 7 computers in there all hooked up to the cable modem. Friends come over constantly and we talk with eachother and play network/internet games, chat on forums, etc. For us it is largely a face to face interaction.

Also if you just chat like an adult rather than a teenager then you will avoid making a lot of the inflamatory idiotic statements that proliferate across forums on the internet. It really isn't hard to treat other people decently online. I think the majority of what you may be noticing is that adults are interacting with teenagers and finding that teenagers really do treat eachother pretty badly, they just don't know the ages of the other people involved so it feels like something new.

Now I do not mean to imply that all teenagers are this annoying, just that as teenagers they are less likely to have developed the social interaction skills of adults and so often resort to posturing, bragging, and insulting as a standard MO. There are some more mature teenagers online who do act a lot better, as well as a few adults that just really need to grow up.

Windaria, is it not in a organizations own best interest to perform internal "audits?" Is it not appropriate to point out to the readers, who some would agrue are the most at risk, the effects?

Regardless of your opinion, the article is actually glossing over the impact of the internet. The biggest difference between the internet and other forms of information disemination is that the internest as americans tend to use it, is a solo experiance. This tends to hinder a persons interpersonal skills on many levels. And not just "development." Not to play into the phrase, but "desensitization to social meta-data" is a real effect from internet usage.

Sigh. I just LOVE the brilliant people who post things like this. Just because you don't like something doesn't mean you need to do some bullshit whining about how it's a burden on you for it to exist. If you were at a store, and they were selling a product that you didn't particularly care for, you might have some grounds to complain in that it's taking up space for other things which might be better. This is an ELECTRONIC resource, not a physical one. Putting up mostly-text articles such as this one isn't going to take up valuable space and prevent you from enjoying other articles. If you don't like this guy's articles, then don't read them. It's as simple as that. It doesn't cost you a damn thing for him to make them.

I'd like to point out something else, too. Just because you include some "less sophisticated" stuff on your site doesn't drag it all down to hell. THG still puts up massive CPU and graphics card benchmarks and articles, enthusiast articles on computer building, modding, and other goodies. They've got graphs and stats all over. They made their own damn criteria and hardware for benchmarking monitors, which the average person wouldn't understand at all. This isn't some pissy website where they say "that monitor was way cool and felt good to use and was teh cheap too," they do quality work.

But oh no, some of the stuff that they put out isn't researched and fancy with pictures and shit. Cry me a river. Why don't you complain about the news stories, eh? They post little blurbs about rumors, they don't always find 50 sources to back up a claim, and they don't do a 75 page analysis of the possible implications of RFID tags spy on bartenders. Frankly I don't give a shit about bartenders, RFID tag spying or not, but I don't complain. I just glance over it for the 1 second it takes to decide not to click it, then move on to something that looks interesting. It seems you lack the self restraint to keep from clicking on something that looks like you might not like it.

How sad.

blancj, Twile...

I wasn't trying to say that I didn't like the article, or even that I don't agree with it overly much, at least the core of what the article was about. I was mostly commenting on the overall degradation of the kind of information that is found on Toms Hardware anymore.

And yes, you are right, there are still great technology articles here, such as the following:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/06/27/xxl_displays/
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/0 [...] n_opteron/
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/0 [...] ts_itself/

The problem is merely that they are being degraded with a constant barrage of fluff that you have to sift through, and even those technology articles that Toms still puts out are starting to become less detailed and more poorly researched, such as the following:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/0 [...] l_storage/

For example, had the writer of the previously listed article even gone to Thecus site, when writing the article, they would have seen that Thecus already had a NAS version, and that it didn't use the theorized method of implementation at all. All it would have taken was a simple visit to the manufacturer's site, but they didn't even bother to do that. Toms did eventually review the N2100, and it was a good write-up, but one of the few.

In fact, even this bit of writing could have been more in-depth, and could have covered different methods of people actually communicating on the Internet, and ways in which this limitation is being overcome, slowly but surely. That said, did the writer do that? No, instead this entire article was one large lump of fluff that was written out of thin air with little in the way of concrete references other than a mention of a study that was done in the '60s, and that should have been nothing more than an anecdote.

For quite some time I have had two hardware sites that I visit when I want serious information: Anandtech and Toms Hardware. During this time Anandtech has stayed true, however has been unable to write much in the way of serious content. It is as if the writers for that site do not have the time that they used to, and that is sad.

Toms Hardware, on the other hand, has increased the number of articles that they put out, however many of them are fluff and contribute nothing worth mentioning to the site, especially poorly researched pieces of drivel (such as the article to which this is a response to), where, even if they had a good point, they do little to back that up. Even those product reviews that Toms does have been starting to suffer as well (such as the previously mentioned N2100), in that they are not as well researched as they once were. Content has become king, and quality has gone out the door.

You don't think that takes away from a site? It most assuredly does. Just look at CNet or ZDNet. Every now and then they have a gem, but they put out so exceedingly much drivel that no one would ever look at them as a serious technology site. Toms isn't there yet, isn't even anywhere near the ballpark, but if they keep going in that direction then they will be, and I just don't want to see that happen, for I know of no other good SERIOUS technology site.

Windaria,

I guess all I can say to that is....

Even the hardest TV news magazine, 60 Minutes, does the occasional puff piece. Oh and so do Time and News Week.....

I will have to Word to Twile and say, Turn the page!

Well, Im one of those guys <gasp> that was about 3 class's away from a bach in Sociology right along with my computer science degree.

I really don’t see this as a problem. I have read all kinds of studies and such relating to this very thing with TV and you know, opinions are cheap on it. I believe there would be a direct coalition with behavior and any form of anonymity. For example, people feel relatively anonymous in their cars which leads to lots of road rage. I’m not worried about it.

I’m more worried about the people I see playing games like WOW for months on end, 20 hours a day. theres a real social dysfunction there. Escape from reality.

People use the internet to escape from reality. Americans in particular spend way to much time at work socializing all day long and many of us want to go home and escape what is mostly negative social reality in the extremely stressful corp America today on the internet.... in different worlds to take their minds off the real world until the next morning.

I would call that healthy in moderation, much better then drinking and drugging.

I would fix the real world first....