My first thought was, “Only 65%?” Who are these other 35% of people and what’s wrong with them? Don’t they know that much togetherness turns you into one of those couples that everyone thinks are pod people?
Remember, boys and girls, this:
Is an excellent prevention for this condition:
So I’m not seeing the downside. For those who feel the computer is eating into your couple time, I recommend the laptop computer. Since all it takes to make eye contact is a lifting up of the eyes off the screen for a second and peering over the top of the monitor, the laptop makes romantic bonding much less of a suck on time you would prefer to spend surfing the internet or playing video games.
In all seriousness, the amount of time people are spending on computers makes me really happy. TV has some good, interesting shows, but most of it is mindless pap and if people are reducing their TV watching time and actually playing games or surfing the internet. Even looking for videos on YouTube probably requires more neuron firing than surfing the channels on TV. And with neurons, if you don’t use ‘em, you lose ‘em.
In other words, for those about to blog, we salute you. You could very well be taking the steps required to reverse a half a century of steady brain atrophy in Americans that has led us to this point.
39 Responses to “They say that like it’s a bad thing”
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
My spouse and I do the laptop thing. We sit in the living room enjoying the internet and periodically talk to each other about it. She usually plays games and I read blogs. Its a perfect relationship. Too much togetherness leads to craziness…we start to go nuts after a few straight days hanging out together.
Hey, that couple is awesome. The guy is like what would happen if you spliced Pat Boone’s DNA with David Duchovny’s.
*chuckle* In all seriousness, as much as they’d like to make this an “OMG we have no family bonding!” crisis, I suspect that those numbers probably include the full day - so if you spend 8, 9, 10 hours at the office staring at a computer, you could never touch the thing at home and still spend more time in the company of a machine than your SO.
That said, I hugged my laptop — repeatedly — when it came back to me after three months of broken-ness. (It should have been less than 1, the first repair place sucked.)
I would die without my laptop. Seriously, and yeah me and my SO sit and do the nerdtop thing together. It’s awesomeness.
I met ny girlfriend writing porn on the internet. Now that we’re living together, we still write, though occasionally it does seem a little weird that we’re AIMing back and forth when we’re in the same bed.
You know, I never really thought about it before, but… “significant other”? What a funny term. Heh.
Can’t time spent at the keyboard also count as time spent with your significant other. I first fell in love with the person who is now my spouse while we were trading word-game messages on a creaky old unix system. And we still spend an hour or two each day conversing by IM (during time when we’d otherwise be apart anyway).
Consumers? I’m not just a mouth inhaling product and an anus shitting dollars, I’m a goddamn citizen.
Bah. That word just sets me off something fierce.
I agree with you about TV. I stopped watching it (more or less) about a year ago, not coincidentally about the time I got into blogs. I didn’t do it consciously or out of any ideological reason, it was just so. much. advertising. embedded in a lot of crappy stuff anyway, so I stopped. Reading — and occassionally participating in — blog discussions is much more interesting.
Consumers? I’m not just a mouth inhaling product and an anus shitting dollars, I’m a goddamn citizen.
Beautiful.
When my girlfriend and I started dating, I gave her my old Gateway 486 system with Windows 3.1 installed. I had just recently bought a new Pentium system running Windows 95.
She was afraid to turn it on. For the longest time she barely even looked at it.
Sometimes she would roll her eyes when I would get into the computer geek talk.
Years passed. She now designs web sites and works for Dell Canada doing tech support, of all things.
My how times have changed. Computers helped bring us closer together.
Grendelkhan, from the sofa where I sit beside my husband as we clickety clack away on our nerdtops, I salute you.
Maybe the concern was that those people could have been, for instance, reading a book, doing some exercise, indulging in a physical hobby or even having a conversation face to face with someone.
Yeah I know I’m coming off as an insufferable snob, but while I like going online for an hour or two at night or when I’m bored, I couldn’t imagine reaching the point where I’m chained to it for more hours than I’d spend with ‘a significant other’, and it’s not the first port of call when I’m looking for something to do. I mean it’s good and all, but it’s not a substitute for real life.
Well, Ken works at his computer in his ’study’ (read, the boxroom) upstairs and I work at mine (which is the main and most expensive machine to allow for the client website maintenance I do as a sideline) in ‘my’ room downstairs - but then, we’re both freelance writers working from home, so it’s almost an office environment… except much much freer. Which does tend to mean we both spend much more time at our desks than the average office worker (we have to, to make ends meet), but neither of us mind, because we’re doing what we love.
We bought a router so we could both be online at the same time, and have ICQ installed on both machines, and ‘chat’ while we’re working. It’s surprisingly intimate!
As for TV - well, apart from the odd film, Dr Who and the most excellent Torchwood, we tend to use it just for playing DVDs.
My husband and I have our computers in separate rooms. Sometimes we shout down the hall, but sometimes I’ll yell to get on AIM so I don’t have to shout.
I’d wager I met a fair amount of the 35% while I was doing my residency. They were all the people who were gobsmacked when I said my husband was living on the other side of the country, in our house, with our cats, since he couldn’t up and leave his job for a year. “Isn’t it hard?” was the most common thing. Well, aside from a bit of loneliness and missing him, since we’d lived together for 7 years before I went out there, there’s AIM, email, and cell phones, so, no, I wouldn’t say it was that hard on our relationship. We’re independent people, not codependent pod people. Sheesh.
I also want to agree with junkscience re grendelkhan’s statement. Awesome.
Oh, crap, I didn’t mean to take credit for that. I collect aphorisms and sayings, and that’s one of my favorites; it’s adapted from this one:
Huh. You know, I was sure that that had said “citizen” rather than “customer”. I guess I upgraded it.I’ve been collecting this sort of thing for, I think, more than eight years now. I recently put the whole thing up at Google Docs; old ones at the top and new ones at the bottom. Some of them are just pulled from other peoples’ quotefiles, but I’ve also pulled some from larger contexts. I’m exceedingly fond of it.
First, that really is a no-brainer study, for the reason LS said. Most of those hours are not in the house Next up, 90% of adults spend more time at work than with their significant others! Film at 11. (OK, I made 90% up, but still.)
However, I love what that website is selling (in that I can’t believe anyone would market tech support in that way). Tech support. It’s couple’s counseling for you and your computer.
I wonder if the computer ever gets to tell you how hurt it is when you spill crumbs in its keyboard.
I spend 9 hours a day with my computer. 8 hours at work, 1 or so hours in the evening.
Seriously, and yeah me and my SO sit and do the nerdtop thing together. It’s awesomeness
Us also w/ the laptops. but the whole IMing thing might also turn us into pod people. The other day we were IMing each other at at coffee shop. (while sitting oh, about 10 feet away at different tables.)
My friends are a tiny bit scared.
Around The Sphere January 27, 2007…
Our famous linkfest of posts offering many DIFFERENT viewpoints. Links do not necessarily reflect the opinion of TMV or its cobloggers.
What Do Middle East Journalism Students Think? You can find out what UAE journalism students think in two posts. Fir…
Am I the only one who found the top picture sexier than either of teh people in the bottom picture?
Oh. My. God.
I HAVE THAT SHIRT. I swear to God I do, I bought it at Boot Barn.
I fucking LOVE that shirt. Now I’ll always feel sheepish whenever I take it off the hanger.
Thanks for ruining my Saturday shirt, you friggin’ shirt grinch!
I often interact with my husband when we’re both using our own separate computers, on separate floors of the house. We send each other chat messages and e-mail each other links.
Computer-time and partner-time are not mutually exclusive, if you have the right partner.
The computer is HOW I spend most of the time I get with my SO as I am currently half way across the country from him (he in MA and me in AR) for work. The other main way is cell phone. We’ve been married for nearly 24 years, and yes, it is hard not to see him every day. However, I spend less time on the computer now than I did when I was working out of the office and coming home every night. Then my job required so much computer time I always had more time with the damn thing (little of it fun) than with him (unless you count sleeping).
As the icon just popped up saying he’s on line, I think I’ll go say good morning.
Jenny, I love the shirt, I have to admit. Worn correctly, the rose-bedecked western shirt can be very sexy. But wearing it to match your spouse is not correctly.
I am a total internet addict–the main reason I got a laptop is so that I could never be separated from it. My husband, although he works on a computer all day, is a total tech dummy and immune to the allure of teh intarwebs except to check bank balances. When he’s not working at his second job, he’s downstairs watching TV (he loves Keith Olbermann and Joe Scarsborough) while I’m up in the office reading blogs and e-mail and playing games and checking ESPN. It’s like having a cool roommate with benefits.
If you count work, and don’t count sleeping, it’s amazing that it wasn’t higher than 65% . . .
I often interact with my husband when we’re both using our own separate computers, on separate floors of the house. We send each other chat messages and e-mail each other links.
Could be worse (NOT work-safe)
Spending time online instead of watching TV with/without significant other? [raises hand]
BTW, what is the test of significance here? What is the alpha level?
Heeheehee — the Pod Person pic looks like my ex —
You always want to ask the guy why his mama dresses him funny.
It’s definately true in my house. The husband is about as political as a rock, so I spend time reading blogs so that I can have intelligent dicussions and lots of things to read and think about. It keeps me from going insane and saves him endless discussion on things he could care less about. We also email each other back and forth while I’m at work. I don’t think it’s at all a bad thing for a person to find something on the internet that they can’t get from their spouse.
Heh. Our computer desks are right next to each other - touching, in fact. Fortunately, we don’t feel the need to IM each other - we just turn our heads and talk.
What is cool is playing Starcraft together.
Jenny: I know what you mean. By coincidence, I happen to have the exact same blue jacket that Charley Murphy wears during the “Rick James” episode of the Chapelle Show. After I found that out, a part of me was constantly wondering if I was coming across as some sort of fanboy, of if its just 20 years out of date.
Something must be done immediately! Since my wife found the soduku site, she spends way too much time on the computer instead of doing the dishes. What about me? ME?
Who ARE those people in the matching shirts??
Heh. Our computer desks are right next to each other - touching, in fact. Fortunately, we don’t feel the need to IM each other - we just turn our heads and talk.
Our computers are like that too, but we sometimes have conversations in IRC or on our guild chat (whee, WoW and CoH) anyway. The other people there tease us for it, but sometimes I just get in that I am Chatting With People on the Internets mindset and hey, he’s people too.
Nos blogituri salutatus!
I don’t know - more computer still means less ‘actual reading’ — i.e reading more comments on blogs than reading actual books/news articles…
An interesting argument re this: http://adonismirror.com/05022005_leader_killyourblogs.htm
[…] Yes, Happy Sunday - I’m live blogging (LIVE!) from A’s house in Park Slope and it’s almost VDay. We were going to be decadent and do this. But instead, we decided to keep it real and hand out flowers to gay couples who are refused the right to marry at NYC City Hall. A planning meeting will be held at the LGBT Community Center on Wed. the 7th at 7pm and I assume Marriage Equality NY will have more info up at some point. It’ll be a ton of joy-spreading fun for the gays, straights, singles, and couples - so come on down and reprasent. […]