How the pursuit of leisure drives internet use

https://www.economist.com/briefing/2019/06/08/how-the-pursuit-of-leisure-drives-internet-use

by pseudolus • 7 years ago

106 60 7 years ago

volent• 7 years ago

By looking at their map of mobile data cost [0] across the world I understood something that I find annoying in many apps.

Whenever there's a big file to download/upload the app will not download it unless I'm connected to a WiFi network. There's often a hidden settings that can disable this but I never understood why WiFi was considered a better choice for big file downloads.

Very often my 4G network is faster than the WiFi I have access to and with 100Go of data (for 20€) each month it's basically unlimited.

But from the map 100Go would be $1237 in the US ?

[0] https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/640...

NikolaNovak• 7 years ago

Oh yes; in North America the data pricing is far inferior - and in Canada it's particularly atrocious.

It's partially the population distribution; we have a paltry 35mil people in the 2nd geographically largest land area in the world. Now, much of the population is clustered, but still - infrastructure is spread out, expensive, and the cost gets passed down. Plus the competition is sparse and companies like their profit if they can get it.

In short, none of us would historically dream of downloading large stuff through mobile data. My data roaming is permanently off, and I only download through wifi. Some people even have phones with no data plans, or a paltry 50MB. 1GB was considered extra large data plan until recently.

(As a tangent, it's also been a historically painful process just to get started here too; in Europe, I'd land, go to the nearest shop, get a SIM card for $20, and I'm off to the races. In Canada, you need to sign a long term contract with 3 years of obligations, go through a credit check, give ethem all sorts of personal info, and pretty much blood and DNA samples... ;-( )

It's a discrepancy people have been waking up to last couple of years and starting to exert pressure, so it's getting better - but very very very slowly.

skohan2• 7 years ago

As an American traveling abroad for the first time was eye-opening. Even in the developing world (heck especially in the developing world) it is easy and inexpensive to get a sim card plus data. North Americans should be in the streets demanding regulation of telecoms.

Scoundreller2• 7 years ago

infrastructure is spread, expensive, and the cost gets passed down.

The overwhelming profitability of Canadian télécoms suggests some other factors are at play.

The initial infrastructure build may be expensive, but it is in other countries too. Canada at least allows telcos to throw up a big ugly tower wherever they please. Try finding one in Paris. The marginal costs of bandwidth are practically zero. Yet we still see vast portions of the population on 1 or 2gb plans.

There’s massive amounts of excess OTA capacity, but enabling it may cause grandma to cancel their home internet, and we can’t be having that.

My beef is how app developers just assume I have massive amounts of data to spare.

The NPR app decided to pre-fetch 500mb over data when I turned it on for a 30 minute car ride while trying to preserve data.

The economist apps just plain fail to background download over wifi.

VBprogrammer• 7 years ago

I spent 3 hours of our 3 week trip around Canada trying to work out why the data, and even phone, plans where so bloody expensive. I was sure I was missing something until about the 4th phone shop where someone understood the background of why I thought I should be able to pick up a couple of gigs of data and some phone calls for about £20.

Turns out it would have been a waste of money anyway. Turns out 90% we went with the motorhome you couldn't even get an FM radio signal :)

irrational• 7 years ago

My coworker was just telling me about some of his Canadian relatives. Their is a very fast fiber optic cable that was installed along the road in front of their driveway. Unfortunately their driveway is many miles long (which is apparently very common in the rural part of Canada they live in) and they would have to pay to run a line from the street to their house. So, they make do without.

dgjrhgi• 7 years ago

Lack of competition and excessive lobbying by cellular companies is major reason behind the high mobile data cost in US. Lobbying by corporations have screwed up people of US in many areas and is no where near being challenged or controlled.

spinach• 7 years ago

It's possible to easily get a sim card and make calls - you just need to get a pay as you go one. I have a tablet with apps, and then my phone is a 'dumb phone' which I bought at a 7-11. I didn't have to sign anything, I just bought the phone, the sim card and then some time. And you top up the money every so often.

Qwertystop• 7 years ago

Data costs in the US tend to vary quite a lot from place to place - it's a big country with pretty bad infrastructure across most of its area, especially the less-populated places - but yes, that's the reason.

Cthulhu_• 7 years ago

You sound like you're very young and only joined mobile internet in the past year, but I'll bite: not long ago pretty much all mobile internet was metered, that is, you had for example a 1 GB / month rate limit, after which every 100MB would cost you additional money on your already expensive monthly subscription.

So people were careful with using mobile internet, there were stories about people who forgot to turn off mobile internet and had to pay hundreds extra, or people who used a lot of mobile internet by accident abroad, racking up bills in the thousands. Apps that had bigger downloads would often be on the arse end of complaints about high data rates, so it became a UX pattern to warn or disallow big downloads over mobile internet.

4G / higher bandwidth and government legislation (the latter notably in the EU) finally put a stop on that, only two odd years ago (if that). But, there's still plenty of countries without 4G, good internet backbones, and who still do metered connections. Even wired connections, notably in the US which seems years behind in terms of internet infrastructure in some areas.

ghaff6• 7 years ago

It's still the case under some circumstances. When traveling on an international data plan in Europe, I've been burned a couple of times by a map download or a background sync operation that burned through my whole allowance--leading to another $60 or so charge. I try to remember to turn off cellular data when not actively using it when on such a plan but I sometimes forget.

It's gotten better. The plan I usually get for a couple weeks of travel gives me 1GB these days. But not that long ago it was 200MB or so.

You can argue that the user should be able to choose but any of those settings, per my example, can then be configured incorrectly by accident (or you just forget to change them).

msh• 7 years ago

Depends a lot on where you are from.

Practically I have always had all the mobile internet I could use from at least 2010 onwards. There have always been a cap but it have been way above even my somewhat heave mobile use (my current cap is 1 terabyte a month).

It would hit the cap if I was using it as my only internet but for use on my phone I dont reach it, even with occasional tethering.

bytematic• 7 years ago

I'm still afraid of falling asleep with a youtube video playing (autoplay) or some live stream and waking up to ~10gb of data usage. My plan is still metered after 1gb, I was under the assumption this was normal as well

nerdponx• 7 years ago

Metered mobile Internet is cheaper, and I don't need anything like 2GB / month, so I still use it.

mikepurvis• 7 years ago

Windows 10 has some really nice built in features for managing your connections— you can flag a particular connection as being metred, and it will monitor it for you, offer to block apps from using it, avoid downloading through Windows Update over it, etc.

ryandrake• 7 years ago

I don’t use cellular data unless I have to. After 1GB (shared between two phones) per month, I start paying by the MB and it is enormously expensive.

shrimp_emoji2• 7 years ago

I thought it still was metered on Verizon in the U.S.

A few years ago, I switched to T-Mobile partly motivated by their unlimited plan, which felt like some kind of luxury.

(And, of course, "unlimited" is a lie. Downloading my ~200 GB music library through a hotspot, and I got throttled and charged extra per GB over some cap.)

usmannk• 7 years ago

Seems like their HN account has been around since 2011 so probably not that young. Perhaps just not from North America.

maccard• 7 years ago

You sound like you're very young and only joined mobile internet in the past year

There's no reason to make this a personal comment.

Regarding your actual point, I've had a 100GB limit for the past 5 years (since I got an iPhone 6), with a 4G connection.

Meanwhile Google Amp has existed for less than 3 years and already has massively widespread adoption. Technological change happens so rapidly that it's rarely a technical issue when something like this exists.

howard941• 7 years ago

It's nuts, isn't it? But while many of us have "unlimited" data as a practical matter after the first single digit GB in the month the data are heavily throttled.

It'll take video-capable unmetered cellular data to the NA market to reign in the out-of-control pay TV/CATV industry. Can't happen fast enough.

Nursie• 7 years ago

Yeah that really annoys me.

I have (really) unlimited 4g data. But I can't download a system update until I'm on wifi?

Thanks Motorola...

astura• 7 years ago

My first mobile data plan (which was over a decade ago) had a monthly allotment of 1GB. One big file could wipe out a quarter of my mobile data usage for the month. So it's polite not to download large files over mobile data without asking.

milankragujevic• 7 years ago

It's funny, my (only) WiFi is actually 4G on a router. It just has a better antenna for mobile signal, so it's faster than 4G on the phone.

natrik2• 7 years ago

Non paywalled/mirror: https://outline.com/pCXq5J

Also anyone else find this article annoying to read?

The poor do not see it that way. Years of fieldwork across the globe have led Ms Arora to conclude that when it comes to getting online, “play dominates work, and leisure overtakes labour.” Where people planning development strategies imagined, metaphorically at least, Blackberries providing new efficiencies and productivity, consumers wanted the chat, apps and games of the iPhone. Worthier uses tend to follow. But they are the cart not the horse.

gumby2• 7 years ago

Also anyone else find this article annoying to read?

Annoying in what way?

natrik2• 7 years ago

The writing is sometimes hard to parse, sentence structure etc.

ehnto2• 7 years ago

Surely that hasn't surprised these planners all that much? My first thought when I got a bicycle as a teenager wasn't "Gosh, I'm going to get to school so efficiently!" it was "Weee!"

ptah• 7 years ago

distinctive calvinist "work ethic" bias in this article. play is more important than work to the average person.

zcid2• 7 years ago

Leisure is one thing but mindless consumption is another. I worry about the future of the world's societies as they venture further and further into a state where consumption of media becomes the ultimate goal of life.

ehnto2• 7 years ago

I can definitely recognize in friends and family, the "deep end" of consumption. Hours upon hours on Facebook or YouTube, consumed entirely in the most mind-numbing scroll fests until they snap out of it and do something else. Hours are lost. But I also notice that they have all, on their own account, decided that it's an issue and then worked to stop it once they figured it out.

It's not clear to a new user that something as simple as a website could become addictive and begin to take huge amounts of time, concentration and patience away from you. Or even that it could be a bad thing. It seems to catch even disciplined people off guard. But I have noticed that they often self-regulate eventually anyway.

There does seem to be a certain desire to be productive in many people, and so I'm not particularly worried about an entire society totally consumed by social media/entertainment.

nindalf• 7 years ago

Smartphones and social media are, for many in the second half, arenas with a semblance of privacy. While Western internet users fret about the privacy implications of big tech companies hoarding their data, young internet users in the towns and villages of the developing world are delighted to have, for the first time, a way to communicate and express themselves away from the prying eyes of family, neighbours and other busybodies. In Asia and the Middle East smartphones open up a world of romance, enabling people to flirt and date despite social constraints.

Couldn't agree more. Privacy is defined by each person based on what they'd like to do but can't.

OJFord• 7 years ago

The other, crucial aspect of understanding the second half is that seemingly unlikely things can have value. When you call an Indian mobile phone, it is not uncommon to hear a song instead of the traditional ringing tone. That song, a “caller ring back tone” in the jargon, is chosen by the user you are calling, who pays for the privilege. Until the rise of smartphones and social networks, caller tunes were a big money-spinner for Indian mobile operators, contributing 82bn rupees in revenue in the three years to March 2012. All this for music only others would hear.
The urge driving people to pay a monthly fee for something they do not themselves consume is self-expression, which may be a key to coming up with new sustainable business models for the low-income internet.

So interesting how seemingly the same technology evolves or gets used differently around the world.

heshiebee• 7 years ago

Can’t read the article without subscribing, I guess the economist just got a whole bunch of new users :)

zcid2• 7 years ago

It loaded without issue for me with js and cookies blocked.

blueyes• 7 years ago

You could argue that the pursuit of leisure created Silicon Valley as we know it. Atari was a gaming company. Apple's founders cut their teeth there. And the Apple II was largely bought because it supported games. I think this is one sense of Paul Graham's saying that toy problems are at the origins of great companies. Creativity driven by the sense of fun.

jpmoyn• 7 years ago

I think about the technical feat accomplished by Blizzard when they created World Of Warcraft. So much time, effort, money, and great minds working so that you could walk around in a virtual world with your friends.

Namrog84• 7 years ago

No criticism but just curious why you chose blizzard and wow here?

Compared to other virtual worlds you could walk around with friends?

amelius• 7 years ago

Pursuit of leisure ... And we still have 5-day workweeks (although with the modern equivalent of a TV on our office desks).

davidivadavid• 7 years ago

You could argue that the pursuit of leisure created pretty much every business that ever existed. We create businesses to either deliver leisure, or automate things that aren't leisure.

elindbe2• 7 years ago

And yet here we are millenia later with people still working full time jobs...

granshaw• 7 years ago

Don’t forget earning the financial freedom so the founders themselves can leisure at will

How the pursuit of leisure drives internet use

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