Internet Psychologist
The latest articles from Internet Psychologist and Business Academic, Graham Jones
The popularity of the Internet seems obvious; after all, broadband suppliers can hardly keep up with the demand, Facebook membership is growing at the rate of 5m users a week and millions of people had their day disrupted yesterday because of a breakdown at GMail. However, two new reports on …
Here we go again, another article from the Daily Mail in its continuing “anti-Internet” campaign. According to today’s piece of nonsense, Facebook is “harming children’s brains”. They quote Baroness Greenfield – an eminent scientist to be sure – who is fearful that sites like Facebook will “re-wire” the brain of …
Simplicity is essential, we are told, especially online. People oftent cite the reason for Google’s success as being the simplicity of its plain white page with a single search box and no other distractions. Compared with the complications of the directory-based Yahoo! search page at the time of Google’s introduction, …
Here’s a major shock announcement for you – people visit social networking sites to be sociable. Gosh, hold the front page…! That’s the “revelation” in a study by JPMorgan and highlighted today by a report from eMarketer. Indeed, the principal reasons why so many people visit social networking sites are …
Oh dear, here we go again, another mass media “attack” on Facebook. The Daily Mail today publishes another story on their theme of “the Internet is dreadful”. According to today’s bit of nonsense, Facebook will increase your risk of cancer; I jest not…! Here’s the essence of the story. Our …
Executives in big business face a real issue in the coming months; they need to generate more business in these difficult times, yet the very tools they can use to do this will make their life much more difficult than ever before. Corporate business is a top-down, patriarchal system. Bosses …
Your company web site has no-doubt had several loving hours spent on it. If you have a blog, it’s pretty certain that there will be tens of thousands of words in it by now if you have been blogging for a a year. This web site, for instance, has over …
Loneliness is one of those subjects that has been difficult to study by psychologists. After all, you can’t easily find lonley people in the traditional places you might find volunteers for studies – bars, malls, college halls. After all, lonely people don’t often go to such places. So, it is …
Twitter could kill your business if you fall victim to the condition Enterotwittus. This is a “gut feeling” present in many business owners that spending hours each day using Twitter will actually help their business. Whilst it might help their business, taking time away from work it could actually lead …
With all the hullaballoo after Christmas telling us that online shopping was a huge success bringing in hundreds of millions, it hasn’t taken long for a dose of reality to hit us firmly between the eyes. A new survey by the electronic payments company, Cybersource, suggests that two thirds of …
People often don’t do what we think they do. Take search, for example. Just go into your local street and ask how people search for things on the Internet. There’s a fair chance you’d come back with some stats that showed most people use Google. The result is we think …
Email is such a fundamental part of business that any failure in the system would cause a loss of income for one in every five companies. That’s one of the stark findings of a new survey from Neverfail. In a study of over 200 companies, the business continuity firm found …
People love buying things – or so we are led to believe. Current psychological thinking suggests that as we spend ever more isolated lives, going shopping plugs an emotional gap in our lives. Depression is known to lead to increased spending, for instance. Shopping and buying things helps us so …
Eye tracking studies show a fairly constant pattern of where we look on a web page. Essentially, most of our attention is focused top left. Then we scan to the right and then zig-zag back and forth to roughly half-way down the screen before we give up. It’s almost …
People are affected by colour. For instance, traffic lights tell us to “stop” with red; we associate the colour red with danger (unless you have red-green colour blindness of course). Similarly, we associate green with positive things, action, “go”. Other colours also tell us things; on the Internet blue signals …