[pstack]

I spent almost all of my waking time, every day, on the computer. The way I avoid wasting hours on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, HN, etc is that I don't use the first two, I don't randomly wander on the third one, and I use RSS and only stop in for the interesting things on the final one.

I don't consider time I spend at my computer "wasted". What would be a better use of it? Gardening? Edging my lawn? Detailing my car? Golfing?

[dominotw]

Yes people automatically assume that reading a book is automatically better than spending time on the internet.

[Haul4ss]

I'm a bit of a bookworm, so there's my bias. But... reading a book is almost certainly a better use of time than, say, farting around on Imgur, or looking at celebrity gossip web sites, or playing Minecraft.

Is it better than, say, learning differential equations on a MOOC web site? Probably not. I expect the number of people "wasting time" on the Internet far exceeds the number learning DiffEq, though.

[shocks]

I'd say that reading a book is absolutely no better than screwing around on reddit or playing a computer game. Apart from both both being leisure activities, they are entirely different things. Reading a book is not in any way a 'better' activity.

[jordsmi]

This is pretty much how I am too.

Everyone that I know who says that sitting on the computer is bad just sits around watching TV. At least I am usually learning/doing something interesting vs watching the latest reality TV.