A new survey about moms and tech reveals little beyond the obvious: tech has taken over at home and it's unfortunately invading dinnertime.
The press release came across the wire:
Mom Central surveyed more than 1,000 moms for their views on technology, their families' tech-usage patterns, and how these tools are changing their homes. Mom Central has a list of the top 5 ways technology impacts family life.
This was sent to promote some operation called Mom Central Consulting. I have never heard of them, but I'm always game to look at this sort of research to uncover an emerging trend or, more typically, find interesting flaws in the logic.
Let's see what generalities MCC came up with.
1. Living in the Digital Surround. Here they state the obvious. The house today is hot bed of multiple computers, phones, Wi-Fi, etc. The trend is that apparently 35% of families have disconnected the landlines to use only mobile phones. I'm always surprised by this and always annoyed by people who are always on a mobile phone in their home when chatting. The quality stinks. Bad quality is retro as far as I'm concerned and a bad trend.
2. Dinnertime Goes High-Tech. This is not good news for anyone as far as I am concerned, but these numbers are probably right: "The TV stays in the 'on' position for 75% of families for at least one meal during the week, and most families eat four meals a week in front of the TV. Similarly, 48% of Moms say they eat every meal with their cell phone nearby--and 44% answer it if it goes off." A bad trend all around. Get your priorities straight.
3. Home as the New Electronic Playground. This is essentially point #1 written to sound different. A non-point that says there is gear in the house thus people use the gear.
4. Gadgets Keep Boredom at Bay. This is kind of point number one and point number 3 combined to draw a new conclusion. Yes, some people use the gear to stay occupied. Yawn. Can we find a real point to make here?
5. Tech Triggers Parenting Challenges. I'll give the survey folks this one. Parents have had to adapt to the new scene. For example, kids like to text their parents to tell them what they are up to rather than call and talk. Also parents must be aware of pitfalls of social media overuse and the overall dangers of children putting out too much information about themselves. This needs to be monitored.
While this information can mostly be figured out by reading PCMag.com and staying abreast of the tech scene, I suppose it might be good material for some of the woman's magazines and outlets where there may be readers who are completely out of the tech loop. But to be honest, from my experience most people do indeed have a clue about all of this. Where they lack knowledge is the arena of security measures. They give up their privacy too easily. They allow Trojans onto their systems too often and seem clueless about how things actually work—the very mechanisms that run our tech. Unfortunately none of those are seriously addressed here. All this survey does is point out the obvious to most readers.
The good news: people are beginning to study the scene more than before with actual surveys. Keep it going!
You can Follow John C. Dvorak on Twitter @therealdvorak.
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Go off-topic with John C. Dvorak.
