So the person who spends all day online must be better informed than someone who doesn't, right? Wrong, according to psychology academics Dave and Greta Munger.
Writing in Cognitive Daily, Dave and Greta Munger wanted to see whether office drones who spent time at work surfing the net for personal use are any better informed when it comes to national (US) and international news. The answer is quite categorically no.
This could well be that bunking off work online is more likely to involve checking your Facebook profile, sending messages on Twitter and IM, downloading music or checking out You Tube videos, than looking at high brow news websites.
However, there's a flipside for any employer thinking of blocking staff Internet use at work. If you have two Internet restrictions at work (ie banned from Facebook and YouTube), the researchers found your workers will be half as likely to check work emails when at home. If they can't clear their personal chores they'll obviously spend their time doing so at home, and so the dividing line between work and personal lives becomes much more pronounced.
Why does that matter?
Because according to an earlier Ohio State University study, cyber slackers aren't bored call centre operators or admin staff - just the opposite. The higher up you are, the more opportunities you have to while away work time online, and research showed that middle and higher managers (ie the people you want to be on call out of hours) are more likely to do exactly that.
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