Ballett's words are descriptive. But when you describe things you are making an assessment of something and alluding to some sort of truth, no?

Forget about the face of the study for a moment. There are plenty of cute faces to gawk at in this world and to feel drawn to and to find familiarity with and to be contented by. I'm hanging on to the passages that I'm referring to because to me they show a glimpse into the soul of the study.

| On its face, browsing like a hunter is something
| i do when i do performative searches, for my
| memoire or something, and browsing like a busybody
| is what i do by idleness, just because i like to read
| interesting stuff randomly, it should be logic
| that in countries with high level of social control,
| the first one is rewarded and the second one
| viewed as useless, thus performed

On what grounds do you view this as logical? I'll ask you again, have you checked out the full study? Is it at all apparent that what you aver is plausible within reason past the allure of the sharp and swirly graphs and squiggly-symbol-bearing equations the authors employ to support the claims that I've clung to?

Is the inverse that in "less oppressive" countries, the first method is deemed useless and the second is rewarded? If so, maybe you're on to something similar to our colleague throaway54:

| You could easily speculate the opposite;
| that countries with more structures
| of oppression or I patriarchal forces
| have greater levels of focus!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42668540

I can get down with that too. Where are you from by the way?

If we want to address the topic at the surface (there's different ways to browse the Web depending on the need and interest) then that's cool. But if we are going to...ahem...critically theorize* the societal implications that one method draws in relation to the other and posit them as "logical", then in a world that is wanting for focus, I am on the side of focus. And if that puts me on the side of the supposed "structures of oppression", then I'm forced to challenge what you mean by that, because I'd go as far as to say that in the present age, your oppressors would much rather you dillydallying, busy-bodying, meddling* online, from pillar to post, instead of hunting for truths indigenous to the nature of you existence.

I'd go even further to say that the fact that "hunting" is nominally positive and "busybody" is negative is not a matter of miscomprehension, it's a subversion of their intending meaning, it's a performative posture of "resistance" and "rebellion" to authority as desired by the authors (namely, Bassett and her brother).

Or, I'd withdraw all the way and revert back to the study at it's face value: People use the internet in different ways and to pass one way off as more virtuous than the other and to posit societal implications in association to these virtues as contrived by the ideals of the author only makes for an interesting argument in theory, it's science fiction and when scrutinized against reality (for those that feel and believe that there is indeed A Reality®), it amounts to nonsense as far as the argument in association to pedigree of the arguers is concerned and If the study isn't going to do us the service of outlining what countries are more inclined to a given method of browsing in a sensible manner, all that's left is to speculate, so it becomes less about the "science" than it is about signaling to and affirming the beliefs of those who would already submit to the "Woo" or a "speculative fiction" masked as noble inquisition.

I have a hunch that when people associate postmodernism as an ideology with critical theory as a practice, this is the type of stuff that they're referring to. They both share a focus and apprehension toward power, authority and "oppression", although I reckon that the traditional ontology of the Frankfurt School was perhaps pegged to more traditional conceptions of truth and reality and postmodernists, well, appear to be ambivalent, if not outright antagonistic toward tradition, truth and reality...