We'll forever be addicted to the shared global (or interplanetary at some point) information network, but the phone itself won't be needed forever. I don't think there's a way to get a human to not want to know what other people think about stuff or to more generally get information for free in real time. This plus access to computational power is a pretty good combo.
If the interface is a brain chip or a phone or whatever, it doesn't matter.
People complain all the time about "being addicted to our phones" but my memory of the world pre-smartphone was that newspapers and magazines were everywhere and frankly...I'm not really seeing the difference - in quality or content.
Because while "the newspaper" was always considered respectable...that's ignoring the endless mounds of gossip magazines, fashion magazines, lifestyle...basically every category which has now moved to Instagram and YouTube. People went somewhere and it was expected that there'd be magazines and newspapers to read.
People didn't pull out a magazine while in a group and read an article for 5 minutes. a bus wouldn't be literally filled with nothing but people reading magazines and books, nobody punished their children by taking their magazines away.
We did have, say, "portable entertainment". music players were kinda similar to this too, but yeah there is a massive difference.
>I just wanted to share the above photo of a subway car from 1947 where every single person, even though they’re in a confined space together, aren’t paying any attention to each other because they’re reading media on a newspaper. The recent version of this is, of course, cellphones and iPads, yet the same people out there who hate change continue to cry foul.
1) everybody read pretty much the same content. And not highly curated personalized content. So if you did strike a conversation with someone you’d have some common ground.
2) When starting said conversation the newspaper didn’t keep vibrating in your fingers or making sounds begging your attention back to it and you didn’t experience the FOMO of not giving said attention to it.
In other words. Sense of community was easier to establish and the artificial attention grabbers weren’t there for the social aspect of our beings to come between us as we try to do that social thing our species is known for.
Also, it was when much content was meaningful. Scientific American was interesting. Popular mechanics had actual mechanical projects. Computer magazines were all adds but even the adds were showing amazing things full of real potential. Now corprat curated content is much cheaper empty calories.
There is great content but you have to dig and sometimes I am just to tired from real life.
When paperback books came out they too were looked at with disdain. Too inexpensive to produce, therefore not trustworthy. Too easy for anyone to read, anytime. They were designed to fit into pockets. Then, even cheaper and disposable comics were created. They were taken away by parents for being junk, a waste of time. Then they got rebranded as graphic novels in order to give them more legitimatcy.
Other people have shown pictures of people reading in the bus, but here's the other thing: it was (and still is!) common to read a magazine or newspaper when you're out in a group for casual outings like a casual coffee, breakfast or even dinner with the family, lunch or coffee break with co-workers in a restaurant. It was often the only time you had to read the newspaper (unless you're were commuting by bus, hah!).
Kids would have coloring books or comics. Disinterested teens would have a book. I remember my grandmother carrying a crosswords puzzle, Stanley-style.
Sure it's not something you would do in an occasion where you're expected to keep conversation, like a social living room visit, a fancier diner, a sales call, a date or a birthday party. But even in special occasions with the extended family would be totally normal to excuse yourself to go read a newspaper or something if the rest of the people were engaged in conversation you're not interested in.
I'm sorry but I don't care about some specific photo somewhere at some point. I don't even think this site leans young enough to ignore the fact that what is displayed on that photo was simply not the norm at all.
I used to carry a book with me everywhere. If I was standing in line at the store, I read my book, doctor’s office? read my book. And yes, when I was younger my parents would punish me by taking my book away. The phone has just made it more convenient to carry books around with me.
Too many books in ones pocket is for many a curse, ending up reading none. For a minority of with very much self control and determination tough, it probably is a super power to have a library in the pocket.
You are mistaken. I distinctly remember attending gatherings with friends of my parents’ when I was a kid (1980s). At some point in the night, usually after dinner, someone would pull out the latest issue of “People” or “Cosmopolitan” and narrate their favorite article(s) to the rest of the group.
Now, this is much more communal than you posited but if that was happening I have no doubt people were sneaking an article or two while out with friends.
I think push notifications and dark patterns would be better examples. A bus in any year could be filled with people reading, writing, playing solitary games, and conversing with people they knew. Parents punished children by taking reading material they disapproved. And denying music, games, and social activities.
> People didn't pull out a magazine while in a group and read an article for 5 minutes
Are you being sarcastic? I'm 57 and I recall they absolutely DID do those things in the 70's and 80's. Trains and station platforms? Google some photos!
I recall it was perfectly common for a group of us to be sat around a table, or on a sofa or somewhere and somebody might drop out of the conversation and take out a magazine or a book, crossword or whatever (in fact Game&Watch and others were a thing back then too) while the rest of us chatted. They might say "I'm still listening", or one of us might bat it out of their hands or something too.
People might listen to a radio while driving, or have a TV show on while eating dinner or chatting with friends, magazines/newspapers might be expected at doctor's offices.
We didn't dip in and out of personalized media feeds throughout the day, getting bombarded with what's happening right this minute with our family, friends, city, state, nation, celebrities, industries, hobbies, etc... everything was slower, people seemed more methodical and present.
I recently subscribed to a newspaper as in printed on paper and delivered to my mailbox once a week. It's pretty interesting experience. Main thing about it is it's finitness. There is only so much information in the weekly issue. It's deliberately slow. It's local and it's more than 140 symbols too.
While it's true that there were always ways to entertain oneself, I'd argue that the the ease of consumption (or alternatively, "effort required to consume") and potency of the effect on dopaminergic networks in the brain have increased _dramatically_. And unfortunately, it turns out that this kind of entertainment is directly related to the biggest money firehose that humanity has ever invented: targeted advertising.
Which means that the world's most powerful algorithms have a strong incentive to optimize both of those variables. Great for the people in control of the algorithms and content networks, not so good for the people who are suddenly exposed to a very powerful "drug" that they were not prepared to keep at bay.
> And unfortunately, it turns out that this kind of entertainment consumption is directly related to the biggest money firehose that humanity has ever invented: targeted advertising
I'm not convinced they target any better than the newspapers. I'm British and FB's targeting showed me an ad for how to renounce "Your US Citizenship for tax purposes", local news for a city I've never been to in Florida, and my response to the Brexit referendum result was to move to Berlin yet FB is showing me UK-specific ads. YouTube is no better, showing me an ad fronted by Nigel Farage, and a lot of obvious scams that couldn't (at the time) be reported. Twitter, back when it was that, classified me as being interested in three languages I can't speak and spectator sports I've never once watched.
It is of course possible that I'm merely weird enough that the optimisers can't figure me out. Anecdotes don't make for good datasets.
There is a difference in scale - smartphones give access to a much wider array of content, even if you were to carry around a television and 20 newspapers.
There is also an important difference in kind - internet connected devices are bidirectional, which allows bad actors to implement addictive patterns that aren’t possible with one-directional media.
A big part of McLuhan’s idea of “the medium is the message” is that consuming the same content via two different mediums is not the same.
In my experience the older styles media were consumed in "down time" even if it was for a minute or two at work. People (in my memory, I'm 50+yo) did more real life things. There were malls, movie theaters, skating rings, box stores. These were a herald of things to come on the internet.
This was also the last days of interesting Popular Mechanics and Scientific American.
>People complain all the time about "being addicted to our phones" but my memory of the world pre-smartphone was that newspapers and magazines were everywhere and frankly...I'm not really seeing the difference - in quality or content.
I have to vehemently disagree with this one. Since the advent of Twitter, news has become "who is first" over "who is most accurate", and it has become a cancer on all of mankind. The quality was so much better it's almost difficult to describe to someone who is under the age of 30.
I can't even imagine something like Watergate happening today, and if it did it would have had nowhere near the impact because half the US population would've been seeing Russian misinformation on Twitter convincing them it was all a "deep state conspiracy" and they'd believe it.
There was always a "who is first" element to the news, but it seems categorically different when "first" was a full day rather than minutes. And it meant you were roundly shamed if you got it wrong, because everyone else had a chance to refute it during the publication cycle.
There were more real world options. Roller skating rinks, malls (a sign of the online world to come but still real world), water skiing. Also, there was real content in a lot of the older media (Scientific American,Popular Mechanics pre 90s for example) even television news showed some actual news. It just all went from some actual content, expensive, fraught with difficulties to get right (what is truth anyway), to empty calories, cheap, easy to produce, and just more profitable.
Although it's nice to hear an optimistic perspective, I can't help but think it's overly optimistic.
1. I don't think moderation works for most people who struggle with addiction. I think this is fairly incontroversial. AA doesn't give out "only-one-drink-a-day" chips.
2. The reason we got smoking under control, I suspect at least, is because the downsides are so obvious. And even then it took a long time. I feel like the negative effects of technology usage are so much more varied and subtle that it's going to be hard for society to rally around an opposition movement the way it's done for smoking.
I hope the article is right and I'm wrong, but it feels a little bit like another "the solution to tech's problems is more tech"-argument
As long as phone screens continue to be perfect for handheld entertainment and phone apps continue to be designed for infinite thoughtless consumption, then the answer will remain "yes".
I 1000% blame social media companies for intentionally designing their apps and the content presented on them to drive engagement and taking advantage of psychology that makes people want to scroll while they are driving, for example.
> I 1000% blame social media companies for intentionally designing their apps
I'm not a smartphone user, so I ask out of curiosity:
Do people really have no agency anymore? No self-discipline?
I've read this statement that it's "the machine's fault" in numerous versions but I'm puzzled by it. If you don't like the screen, why don't you just turn it off, or toss it in the bin?
Luddites and neoludites and similar Amish type will expand their foothold into different cultures. I personally am going to be adjusting my usage as it is impacting my life and negative ways. I've already added timers and limits and will soon be going to grayscale only.
What I do hope for which does not yet exist is the ability to use voice GPT at selective moments with a finger tap of an ear bud.
I have noticed a growing divide between those who have phones in their hands and those who have phones by proximity. I have some friends who take a day or two to text me back because I simply don't use their phone.
I'm curious - why would an earbud-activated LLM be preferable to just the normal interface with typing in the request? And why GPT specifically?
I can see the point with technologies that integrate directly into the surrounding environment, like using Google Lens to look up information about a real object, or translate printed text, and so on. But the LLM will still be a text generator either way - is it just about being able to dictate a request out loud and have the reply be read back?
As for the type of interface, having a screen requires eyeball attention that I rather have on the task at hand. This would remove the "device in hand" that a commpad/smartphone/tablet requires.
Me @ Kitchen: tap earbud & speak "read my favorite apple pie recipe list of ingredients" as I inventory the pantry.
It's setting your phone/screen to stop displaying color, instead just showing everything in greyscale. I believe that on Android you can currently set something like a bedtime for your phone that will stop displaying colors at a certain time, and if you have any time limits for apps then during the last minute before you run out of time it will turn grey too.
Interesting! I'll have to give this a try and see what effect it has on my social media usage. My new years resolution is to use it only 30 minutes a day at max
I feel the trouble with comparing social media to cigarettes is that cigarettes are kind of their own self-contained "thing". For instance, while you can smoke a cigarette on your own and focus your entire attention towards it, it's kind of technically impossible to use social media alone, even if there's no one else in the room with you. The "content" isn't pre-packaged and finite, it's constant and living, fueled by other people. That's the big trouble with leaving social media for a lot of people. It's a kind of prisoner's dillemma where the only meaningful way to stop it is to organize with your friends to quit it/explore alternatives as well. More than just insecure feelings of FOMO, the trouble with quitting social media is that you become really out of the loop with your friends' activities, since its benefit has always been being able to efficiently update your friends. It seems like unless you have some way of staying in contact with them, you may as well be invisible.
I do love the analogy of a donut which becomes heavier as you reach closer to overconsumption, though. A while back I got tired of all the noise on youtube and installed an extension called "unhook tube" which makes all the recommended videos in the sidebar just disappear. I wonder if there'd be a way to impliment an extension for instagram/facebook and the other 'scrollers', where the longer you use it, the more difficult it becomes to scroll, and the longer it takes for posts to load. It'd be like the benefit of having a fickle water heater, in that it keeps you from staying in the shower too long once the water gets too cold. In terms of facilitating moderation, this seems like the easiest solution.
The more casually social media is used the more packaged it is. That is why you use a tool to mute the youtube content. I think youtube is amazing. There are incredible gems entertaining, practical, etc. The trouble is you have to wade through lots less amazing content to get to the gems. The trouble is real life is just as packaged by corporations. Entertainment is Disney/Hollywood. Practical things Homedepot (I have a very dim view of homedepot). Sports, buy fancy shiny equipment and join expensive gyms. Pro sports, gamble (online). Real life is often just as empty. Why abandon your phone? Tech companies have hit on a real moneymaker. Provide cheap entertainment without the brick and mortar.
I am lucky that I have mostly made a living doing things in the real world and in "virtual spaces". I have the resources to do the things I enjoy without much commercial involvement. It is getting harder to do this in real life. When I need some bolts to build something Homedepot (I have a very dim view of homedepot) prices are insane. The nearest good fastener store is over and hour away. Online sources are amazing but now I have to wade through online empty calories to deal with real life shit.
More options in every area would be helpful but we cannot expect corporations or government to help. They make money making real life difficult and selling us online content when we are to tired to do anything else. I despair sometimes but the real world is incredible and ... well whatever. Maybe one day ...
It's relatively expensive and a little janky but it's insane how much more time I feel I have in my day. My work has improved (if my commit-calendars are any indication), and I no longer spend time in bed scrolling when I sleep / wake up.
Many people try "Sober October" - I've just completed "Dumbphone December" and I don't think I'll be going back.
So, I know I am a little late to the party here but I think party of the problem is not the smartphone screens. As a society we are doing dismal job of making reality an interesting place to live.
As an example education (at least for me, I'm 54yo) we are told to study something interesting, follow dreams, get good at something academic. Then access to every tool and resource taken away and we are told to go make a living. No fancy tools or studios, the time and environment to do something interesting is taken away. It is replaced with drudgery and cheap entertainment. Think Disney, Hollywood movies, pro sports/gambling, other prepackaged activities, and cellphones.
Government, large/medium corporations, startups have zero incentive to help. Enough people get through the education system to fill what jobs are needed and the rest can [modern equivalent to flipping burgers] and look at their phones.
Excuse my writing. The education system did not work out for me and my family works with our hands. I enjoy working with my hands. I am one of the lucky ones. I tried mainstream and it is miserable. I am glad for the tech industry and the internet and the like. We need to do better for those that are not working for management in what is essentially the company town. It will be a better more enjoyable world if we can.
Makespaces?
More funding and expanded mandates for public libraries.
Extending what education means and how long people can be involved.
I don't know what.
I think we are going to see a time when social media progresses through the same celebrated to acceptance to tolerance that cigarette smoking has gone through.
We will be walking arround with ar glasses containing so much info that you would literally not able to survive without turning them on 24 hours a day. My doom scenario
I don't really use my phone as a software developer, mostly because I have my pc with me all the time and pretty much all software is better on pc than on phones (thanks Apple/Google).
I don't really know what people are doing to be addicted to their phones? maybe you're just addicted to social media? find other hobbies...
It's a term I just coined and wasn't meant literally. I was referring to interactions that make you feel good and unintentionally become a habit. Myself, I come here to feel clever and learn by engaging in subject matter that interests me. I don't always hit the mark, but I try. I also realize others use social media such as Facebook for the same reason. In my younger days I may have done the same by conversing with strangers in coffee shops or bars.
"Phone" is a shorthand, because a ton of people seem to be using phones as their primary computing devices. They're streamlined and they have everything the average Joe could ever want - mostly a few social media apps and similar.
But also, the wording is definitely deliberate - the post is published by a company that's developed an iPhone app to combat this "addiction". So there's definitely some marketing angle involved here.
Well yeah, they will - if anything, because it's likely we'll have some brand new method of ingesting information available in the near future - just like smartphones replaced desktop computers that replaced physical media as the "mainstream" information sources, something will eventually replace what we have now.
Kind of funny how for decades people were wishing for some sort of Star Trek device that put the world's knowledge literally in your pocket. Now that we have it...
During my ventures into public space it is impossible not to notice this "knowledge", and that so much as to even note the character of it.
I would personally use another word. Perhaps "pastime", "mindless entertainment", that sort of thing. What I observe is generally people browsing through photo stacks, video stacks, audio tracks, or comment stacks. Always browsing, never resting, as if even the concept of reflection is non-existant. So how, I must ask rhetorically, should any "knowledge" enter into the scene?
I never, ever see anything resembling "knowledge work" except for those fellow commuters who use their laptops. Or the extreme minority who read non-fiction books (those are not observed every week -- not even every month -- as students who are the only class of people who are both numerous and have to read non-fiction now read this stuff off-screen on their laptop in stead).
We have a substantial portion of the worlds knowledge available via smartphones, but it's obscured by a bunch of dishonesty, misinfo, attempts at manipulation, etc. In aggregate it's more like a battleground of thought than a utopian collection of knowledge. I'd say that's pretty far off from what Roddenberry imagined.
AR replaces phones easily, but technically AR is just an evolution from phones. Instead of holding the phone the the face, it’s held there for you + AR
If the interface is a brain chip or a phone or whatever, it doesn't matter.