Taiwanese college students spend about five hours each day surfing the Internet, with male students focusing on instant messaging (IM) software to make new friends online, while their female counterparts are more interested in reading and writing articles on blogs, a study released yesterday showed.
The research by professors of communication at National Chengchi University, National Chiao Tung University and Shih Hsin University on 8,733 undergraduates and graduate students of the three schools between Nov. 21 and Dec. 18 found that students tended to use different Internet media simultaneously.
They tended to use IM software, such as the MSN, check e-mails and log on to bulletin board systems (BBS) everyday, but they only surfed Web blogs, played online games or surfed dating Web sites from time to time, the survey said.
The poll also showed that male students would use IM software as a platform to develop relationships with their on-line friends, while female students would more likely use Web blogs to keep in touch with their peers.
Only 2.2 percent of the 5,340 female students in the survey would create personal entries on dating Web sites, while 5.3 percent of the 3,393 males would do so, the study found.
The students said they called friends and classmates on their mobile phones more often than they called their family.
More than 40 percent of the interviewees owned a 3G mobile phone, on which they tended to listen to MP3s and surf the Internet. Up to 73.3 percent of the students said they felt anxious if they didn’t have their mobile phones with them, the study said. Female students were more likely to be anxious about not having their mobile phone than males.
A total of 3,906 respondents said they owned a Web blog, with 88.8 percent of them maintaining their blog to keep a record of what was going on in their life, while 78.7 percent said they write in their blog to relieve the pressure of daily life, the survey showed.
The study found that the majority of the students were also interested in health information, with diet, nutrition, nutritional supplements, exercise and disease topping the list of topics they had researched, but only 2 percent of them had looked for information on safe sex.
The study also found that although a large percentage of the students would search for health information online, they did not necessarily believe the information they discovered.
A small number of Taiwanese this year lost their citizenship rights after traveling in China and obtaining a one-time Chinese passport to cross the border into Russia, a source said today. The people signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of neighboring Russia with companies claiming they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, the source said on condition of anonymity. The travelers were actually issued one-time-use Chinese passports, they said. Taiwanese are prohibited from holding a Chinese passport or household registration. If found to have a Chinese ID, they may lose their resident status under Article 9-1
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
PROBLEMATIC APP: Citing more than 1,000 fraud cases, the government is taking the app down for a year, but opposition voices are calling it censorship Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday decried a government plan to suspend access to Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (小紅書) for one year as censorship, while the Presidential Office backed the plan. The Ministry of the Interior on Thursday cited security risks and accusations that the Instagram-like app, known as Rednote in English, had figured in more than 1,700 fraud cases since last year. The company, which has about 3 million users in Taiwan, has not yet responded to requests for comment. “Many people online are already asking ‘How to climb over the firewall to access Xiaohongshu,’” Cheng posted on
A classified Pentagon-produced, multiyear assessment — the Overmatch brief — highlighted unreported Chinese capabilities to destroy US military assets and identified US supply chain choke points, painting a disturbing picture of waning US military might, a New York Times editorial published on Monday said. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comments in November last year that “we lose every time” in Pentagon-conducted war games pitting the US against China further highlighted the uncertainty about the US’ capability to intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically
RSS