It's important for people to remember that humans are still intelligent creatures that are capable of recognizing, eventually, what's good for them and what isn't. How many of you guys remember the 70s and 80s, when TV and video games were supposed to turn us all into zombies? What happened? We eventually learned how to see these things as the tools that they are. Humans get fascinated by the new and shiny. This fascination may become unhealthy and provide grist for scam artists. Then they wise up. It's the way of the world.
I'd be flat out surprised if books didn't have their detractors back in the day.
> I'd be flat out surprised if books didn't have their detractors back in the day.
They most certainly did have. This reminds me about Socrates' take on books:
"for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."
"And so it happens that the person who reads a great deal — that is to say, almost the whole day, and recreates himself by spending the intervals in thoughtless diversion, gradually loses the ability to think for himself; just as a man who is always riding at last forgets how to walk."
Reading is a balance - not reading in childhood is missing out. Reading too much as an adult is running away from life, much like TV and video games. On the other hand, I am reading the Three Body Problem now, and I am learning some history and being forced to remember scientific principles I didn't review since high school. So I guess the lesson is quality and not doing too much of it. I stopped reading sci-fi that didn't win the Nebula (or whatever it's called) award. Just not worth the time.
Kids today miss out if they're not online (which largely takes place on phones) and on social media. They miss out in social interaction, which is arguably even more vital to their development than reading books. Even when I was younger, so many interactions outside of school took place on AIM-- whole friendships and relationships were built off of these online interactions.
Nowadays kids have to be on top of the latest viral trends and YouTube videos and Twitch streams in order to keep up with what their friends are talking about. Like it or not, the digital world is pretty much essential for kids these days.
They miss out the dogma way of life. What an opportunity. Yes, they will cry if you don't offer them the last Supreme apparel. The latest American-made-in-china smartphone. But you're not forced to educate your kids like most american does. In France we have a word for that "enfant roi" (king kid). Books offer you tools to think. TV, latest trends and twitch give you tools to boost your never-ending growth ego, self-esteem, self-approval, instant flood of dopamine gratification, and all this bullshit american psycho concepts.
critical review is important, you shouldnt feel cowed against a rational argument, if we all agreed with each other then the first idea that occured would be accompanied by mutual consensus then we would snap to a halt and go nowhere with no variation or innovation
You could probably make a better case for social media being much worse for your own mental health than video games. Everything's about instant gratification, creating and maintaining persona for the outside world to see and then hoping for approval thereof from your peers.
The video game world is disconnected from reality, involves long story lines, planning, strategy, skills that you can learn.
Maybe I'm wrong. If I had to chose, I hope my kid gets really in to video games instead of social media.
The games are geared towards mixed levels of instant gratification and longer gratification, creating and maintaining an online character/persona, getting approval from peers as you climb the hierarchy of loot (character skins, rare items, etc.)
We limit their time and they are in other activities like sports which take time to develop skills.
Just be careful because some video games hire psychologists to help engineer a game to hit those neural pathways at the right intervals to get players to keep wanting to come back.
Getting really into video games can involve helping build a PC or maybe letting them create their own games.
> The video game world is disconnected from reality, involves long story lines, planning, strategy, skills that you can learn.
Maybe your video game world. The vast majority of games sold out there, across the years, were games like PacMan, Super Mario, FPS shooters and flash games similar to Candy Crush.
To be fair, I think 'binging' on TV shows started the minute videos became a thing. It wasn't as instant as it is now, but people were marathoning TV box sets from the very first time they were introduced.
And it wasn't exactly exclusive to that either. Oh sure, TV often had a mix of shows which stopped you watching the same thing all day long, but:
1. There were still many, many people who watched TV nearly non stop, as their main form of entertainment every day.
2. Many TV shows ran marathons of a particular series for hours/days/weeks at various points of years.
> And we "binge" on TV shows now which didn't really exist in the 70s.
Isn't that an improvement overall? You decide you want to watch something and you watch until it's finished. Media consumption habits in the TV era were much more passive and a lot of people would watch a show just because it was on. "There's nothing good on TV" used to be a common lamentation, I wouldn't be surprised if this generation is better at switching off entirely if there isn't content they want.
> A third of teens haven't read a book in the last year
I doubt it makes up the short fall, but does anyone know how well the audio book industry is doing since sites like Audible cropped up? I haven't read a book in some time now but I've listened to several because they have several advantages over reading and the only disadvantage I can think of would by for someone trying to improve their reading ability.
There's a lot more to take away from books than just reading ability and story. You have to imagine/visualise the world the author is painting so it's a creative effort. You're inside the characters, hearing their experiences, thoughts and motivations which teaches empathy. The latter especially is typically missing from other mediums or done in a much more shallow way through flashbacks or exposition and is usually the reason "the book was better than the movie".
All that does come across in audio books though, you just miss the actual reading and imagining the voices.
Exactly. I've gone through 12 audio books this year while I drive to and from work. I can't say I retain as much as I would if I had read them, but I also wouldn't have read any of them due to time constraints.
I don't think of a book as delayed gratification because books don't take that long. Consider, you click on a link and get a video your first thought is "do I have time for this?"
Watching a MOOK's is a huge commitment where reading a book covering the same material is fast. Video brings great value and can be more relaxing, but reading is generally just faster.
I'm in the early stages of writing a book now. Looking at my notes I'm thinking this will be a short but information dense book. At first it demotivated me slightly but then I realised I'm mostly writing the book as a reference for myself so now I'm actively trying to further condense. Thinking back most of the good business books I've read have been exceptionally short and to the point.
I agree. It seems we are just constantly moving from one moral panic to the next. It doesn't mean that there are no valid concerns, just that we need to stop and realize that overdramatizing everything isn't actually solving any problems.
I would argue its just another problem caused by our inability as a nation to rise above a childish level of discussion on just about any subject.
News media dramatize situations for views. There is, in life and in business, always a current problem(s) of one sort or another... it's when existential emergencies are vigilantly remediated and replaced by trivial "first-world" annoyances that life or business is good.
Books, of course have been thought of as subversive in earlier times. Even not that long ago. Book burnings, calls to ban particular books, all have occurred in living memory. Literacy itself has been seen as a threat.
Were not detractors of books usually unlearned people; people who didn't base their opinions on studies of the effects, but rather based on their feels? On the other hand studies can be flawed and can be purposefully biased, so we have to watch for that. But if we have credible studies indicating harm from all the ways content producers and other want to retain eyeballs, then that's different, I think.
Usually, perhaps, but learned people had their objections to reading & writing as well.
This one’s pretty well known, although couched in a few layers of rhetoric that mean it’s usually presented without context (and misattributed to Socrates). In Phaedrus, written by Plato around 370 BC, the character of Socrates tells how when the Egyptian god Theuth gave the gift of writing to King Thamus, Thamus replied:
“…this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”
Dude did have a point. Moving a large part of our memories outside of our skulls did change things quite a bit, just as leveraging the indexing and retrieval capabilities of computers (and systems of computers) has done more recently. We remember different things, and the way in which we remember those things is also different.
It's not that we've lost the abilities of our ancestors; it's more that we've gotten out of the habit of using them. How many hundreds of songs do you have stored in your head? Imagine living in a world where your "textbooks" and "user manuals" are written to have similar rhyme, alliteration and rhythm, and are only passed orally. People did live in that world (many still do), and when that world ends, and none of the kids today can recite, for instance, Inside Macintosh - they have to use some sort of grimoire or codex instead - it's easy to see that as a loss. It's harder to see it as a lever.
Not only girls. They were thought as "unmanly" for a while. Men were supposed to read technical and historical books, not "girly" novels. There's even a quip from Napoleon about it.
I'd be flat out surprised if books didn't have their detractors back in the day.
Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. ~~ Albert Einstein
Children watching too much television was a hot topic at the time. I remember reading about a "psychic" working for the government who made predictions for 2015. Curiously grounded in his contemporary time, he predicted a backlash against overuse of television.
Which has all been said before, what really interests me is what can be done to break this cycle for myself, to keep looking at new things as good and beneficial.
Headline: A majority of U.S. teens are taking steps to limit smartphone and social media use
The study: 52% – said they are trying to limit their phone use in various ways.
Addicts will often lie about trying to get clean. "Trying to do" something is also not the same as "doing" something something.
I'm not saying that teens aren't taking concrete steps to reduce smartphone and social media use, and after all, the first step to getting clean is admitting you have a problem, something their parents can't do. I'm just saying it's irresponsible for TechCrunch to jump to this conclusion, and this headline is amounts to clickbait.
A first step is acknowledging the problem or being aware that there is room for improvement. Even if they just think about it, that's how trends start.
Headline: 'taking steps'
Study: 'said they are trying'
A majority, 54% of teens, said they spend too much time on their phone, and nearly that many – 52% – said they are trying to limit their phone use in various ways.
Knowing is one thing and actually getting rid of it is a completely different ball game.
There's a gulf between the planner and the doer. The far-sighted "planner" in us knows that social media/Netflix/cigarettes are bad for us. When you conduct a survey, we are conscious and reasonable people who know what is good from what is bad and hence 54% of use agrees that we spend too much time on useless stuff.
But when it actually comes to doing, the myopic "doer" part of us keeps on snoozing that alarm clock in the morning and goes to Facebook to check the number of likes & comments received every five minutes.
- An app that you can use to block facebook and other sites from your phone: https://freedom.to/
There are people who claim that this sort of thing is 'a crutch'. These same people probably would not encourage a dieter to keep a packet of cookies on their desk though. Regardless, crutches are useful whether you've broken your ankle or your mindfulness.
You can and should build more active mindfulness practices on top of this.
As someone who's pretty pathetically addicted to the internet at times, having Freedom on my laptop and phone has been a huge plus.
I'm sure I could work around it very easily (I know I can on the laptop) but the shame factor involved is enough to stop me generally and I'm surprised there isn't a huge market for this kind of thing. Been gradually limiting my usage of certain sites down to tiny windows of the day and it's left me with so much more time. Along with that, it's largely removed those sites from my reflex routine of checking for updates... several of them I've just dropped entirely.
Used a few free ones beforehand and the risk of it messing up my hosts file or w/e was always too high to actively recommend to anyone.
> Along with that, it's largely removed those sites from my reflex routine of checking for updates... several of them I've just dropped entirely.
Removing the Facebook app from my phone and logging out when I was done with a session on the computer was a great improvement in my life. Even the barrier of typing the password in was enough for me to avoid mindlessly browsing through stuff whenever I finished a small task.
It's been about 6 years since I took these steps, and I don't regret them. Since the Cambridge Analytica stuff came out, I've been dabbling with dropping FB entirely, but there are some people who I like receiving updates from, but they are only on FB.
I use "Space" which is a fantastic app that shows you how often you use apps and the like. You can set limits where it asks you if you are sure you want to use your phone. It also suggests taking a break from your phone at set times. https://findyourphonelifebalance.com/
Maybe, maybe no longer so. The social media experiment is quite old now - old enough to make quite a few people disillusioned about what it actually does to you in a deeper way, and not to feel the urge anymore.
The bigger problem is that FB actually replaced not only discussion forums but also mailing lists for non-technical people, so very often you have no option other than to join a particular FB group if you want to participate in offline events. But even this might change with time.
I'm 27 and never signed up for Facebook, something about it did not really appeal to me. Mainly because I hate taking / posting pictures and don't really care for posting status updates to friends. I also like to keep my real life social networks disconnected from each other. I like having "work friends" and "friends from school" and don't care for them to intersect.
Out of the social networks I've tried I liked Twitter the most. I did not post often but it was great to peek into the conversations of interesting people.
I think today's generation is open to social networks but maybe the photo posting / status update nature of today's networks just don't appeal. Maybe a more creative social network where more users are creating content than consuming it would appeal.
I am not surprised. One thing that I have noticed about myself is I ask myself after a session on Instagram, "What did I get from that?" and the answer is usually nothing. Did it help my career? No. Did it make me smarter? No. Did it help me make friends? No.
It didn't improve my life in any way.
The instant I asked and answered that a few times, I started cutting down my usage dramatically.
> "What did I get from that?" and the answer is usually nothing. Did it help my career? No. Did it make me smarter? No. Did it help me make friends? No.
By no means I want to defend current social media fads (never had instagram/snapchat, removed facebook from phone 2 years ago), but that's not how humans work.
You don't go for a beer with a friend to gain something, you go to enjoy it/him/her, have a social interaction and overall great time, and level of friendship usually just stays the same. Nothing learned and no career progress is still a perfectly fine result. Same can be said about going for movies or billions of other activities that don't move you anywhere else in life, they just help you wind down.
The problem is, these social media with all of their unrealistic perspectives of real life don't help us, they frustrate us. Sad thing is, they are somehow mentally addictive and too easy to reach.
> Nothing learned and no career progress is still a perfectly fine result.
This is a hard lesson to learn, especially if you were good at school growing up. I find it helpful to, after/while hanging out with friends or walking in the park, make a conscious effort to reflect on and appreciate the feeling of fulfillment that comes from it. There's something healthiness-reenforcing for me about looking around, breathing deeply, and saying 'this is nice'
Just tacking on to this, I'd also be careful to attempt to quantify what we gained by an experience, just because of the limitations of our words or thoughts.
Just because there is 'nothing learned' or something doesn't seem beneficial, does not mean it did not have benefits that often can't be labeled.
Also there's no goal to life, just a reminder. There's no like progress bar you fill up to 100% and then you win. You don't have to stay 'productive'.
Especially when game theory or whatnot is involved. Being the first person in your group of friends to get off Facebook might just make you the one person that never gets invited to anything anymore. Even the thought of that is probably a deterrent to discontinue playing.
This reminds me a little of obesity. A lot of people have recognized the problem and are doing something but in the end the average still gets fatter and fatter.
That's not correct however. Recognition can and often does lead to correction.
In the US, the percentage of children five years of age and under that were obese, dropped from 14% to 10% over ten years (2004-2014). That's due to first recognizing a terrible problem and then acting against it.
US obesity rates have stabilized. [1] I think we can be fairly certain that's in no small part due to increased knowledge and awareness of the problem over the last decade. The next step is to begin moving the needle the other direction, even if it's a slow process.
People think obesity in the US is a very old problem, when in fact it started just 30 years ago and wasn't a serious issue until the late 1990s. In 1985 no state had an obesity level over 15%. Today, 46 states exceed 25% obesity. I doubt the US will ever go back to 1985 obesity levels, however if it can change negatively that much in less than two decades, then you can plainly see meaningful improvements in a similar amount of time.
Very true, this can be often seen in older photos or videos, ie 60s hippies, or any odd-fashion-70s or most 80s. Very slim people everywhere, like whole nation went to gym or for a run every single day.
And building self-discipline and self-control is one of those skills that many don't know the first steps to. I know that I spent many years thinking that self-discipline meant mentally punishing myself for wasting time. It isn't.
discipline is saying to yourself something like "This is worth it, but this is uncomfortable. I'm going to do it anyway because I'm stronger than I think" and following through on that.
That was the most annoying part of the movie for me.
The whole movie(and a book) was about using this amazing virtual world as the only escape from the shitty horrible reality. It wasn't just entertainment - people go to school there, people have friends there, for many it's the only source of happiness.
And that's what it was for the protagonist, he understands this better than anyone.
But the moment he becomes a billionaire and gets a hot girlfriend, he goes "reality is awesome guys, you should go out more!" While nothing has changed for most people. Fuck you, Wade!
It's like the dumbest cheapest way to add a "moral" to the movie, completely out of character, he'd never do something like this.
Iain M. Banks had a much more nuanced take on this in A Few Notes on the Culture [http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm] (free to read online), where his general point was that things like the Culture's drug glands should be taken as contraindicators by the government that they're messing up in reality and need to do better.
Ready Player One's problem as a movie/book is really that its not interested in exploring too much detail about how this world came to be, so you get fairly trite morals like that.
Like you could imagine a much longer epilogue where the protagonist uses his wealth to improve society, reduce poverty, advocate for governmental change, provide refuge for domestic abuse victims, and uses individual participation rates in the Oasis as a barometer for his success. Which wold be a real interesting moral for a mainstream movie to include.
Haven't read the book, but the movie was disappointing for me, even as a Spielberg and overall shallow popcorn fun lover. It felt like a typical family movie which is for everybody who doesn't look for any cinematic quality, cheap moral statements forcefully inserted here & there.
Maybe I was not in a mood for it back then and should re-watch it, but the story really felt cheap and characters shallow.
Agree - the entire movie made no sense. "The Oasis" would be one of many competing worlds, if it's worth trillions of dollars why wouldn't someone make a competitor? The challenges would have been solved in a day, the characters act like they see, feel and hear everything in VR but really the experience would never be the same as RL. Why would you wear a haptic suit if it can hurt you when you get punched?
None of it made any sense. But it had some references to back to the future and other "geek" stuff, so everyone loved it.
I just bought a Nokia 3310 3G and plan to curb my smartphone use completely. I'm sick to death of looking at my phone being the only thing I do. I used to do things at night, projects, hobbies, meeting people, and going places. I drive places now via GPS and have no recollection of how I got there. Driving without GPS makes you actually look at your surroundings and enjoy them and start making mental maps again. That all stopped as smartphones took over my life. It almost feels like schizophrenia being connected at all times to all things, all people, and all information. It reminds me of the Black Shakes (Nerve Attenuation Syndrome) disorder from Johnny Mnemonic.
I have received the phone but can't use it yet because my sim hasn't come in the mail. It's tantalizing to not be able to turn off my smartphone just yet. But I can feel the freedom when I hold that dumbphone Nokia.
I would LOVE to go back to a dumb phone like this, but three use cases really prevent me from doing so at the moment:
1) GPS / Maps for navigation: I agree with your sentiment, but I find that I"m _more_ likely to travel or take adventures when I know I can fall back to Google / Apple Maps as a safeguard for getting me from A-to-B, or finding new places around me.
2) Uber / Lyft / Ride Sharing: I can already use Siri on Apple Watch to say "Hey Siri, get me an Uber," so why can't I text a service like that? Or maybe a dumb phone with Google Assistant installed that could aid with those types of tasks? [Disclaimer: a service or phone like that _might_ exist, but in my limited time searching I haven't found one I like nor trust just yet.]
3) Photography: I'm no pro, but I do enjoy taking very good quality pictures at the fraction of the cost of a bulky thousand dollar camera, alongside the auto-backups and location-data stored alongside.
I had similar worries but I want to use a paper map again and I want to use my excellent Pentax ME Super 35mm camera again to take quality photos. The 3310 has a 2 mp camera for emergency photos. It can hold 7 (!) pics in the internal memory unless you add an SD card, haha.
I don't use Uber, so I don't have that issue. I can see where that may be troublesome and I agree a text service would be nice for that.
I bought this exact phone a few months back, works great. The only issue I'm having with migrating off of a smartphone is app-based MFA and email.
I thought it would be super easy to just use my iPhone for MFA and email, but I wound up needing to carry two devices wherever I went instead of just one. I tried hard not to use mobile email altogether anymore, until something came up and it was just easier to pull out the smartphone to reply to it instead of pulling out the laptop.
I'm still hopeful that I can get entirely off of a smartphone, but it's a massive challenge when work demands certain apps that just aren't dumbphone compatible.
I agree with everything but the GPS. I've always been shit at directions and spending more time driving lost in an unfamiliar area is something I do not want to do.
Man, when did TC decide to go full-on yellow journalism?
Today’s internet can be a toxic place, and not one where people should spend large amounts of time.
But many of these networks were built by young men who couldn’t conceive of all the ways things could go wrong.
... and even dopamine drug dealers like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube have begun to ...
Thankfully, as this study shows, there’s growing awareness of this among younger users, and maybe, some of them will even do something about it in the future – when they’re the bosses, the parents, and the engineers, they can craft new work/life policies, make new house rules, and write better code.
Yep, every group of teenagers thinks exactly the same thing. "Our parents fucked things up, but when we're in charge, we'll fix it all". Sadly the real world does not make it easy to effect such change on a large scale. But hey, now that my generation (Gen-X) occupies many key positions of influence, maybe we can finally get it right...
Most social networks are bad for you. They’re deliberately designed to be addictive in pointless ways.
I’d prefer teenagers to be tech savvy individuals who have plenty of face to face skills like conversational skills, curiosity, travel, ability to think, work, play, and plenty of other practical skills such as woodworking etc.
Technology as tool but not as a bubble to live in.
Is today the "Submarine Ad" day for "Kids aren't using social media"? If so, who makes money from us knowing that young people don't use social media? What are they trying to sell to us?
This underscores why I'm almost inherently biased against most regulations. In a lot (not saying all) of cases, we figure out what's bad for us and make decisions to help solve it. Social, legal, and economic issues in our society often appear to work themselves out when left to their own devices.
Yet, so many have the opposite gut reaction: Teens using too much social media? Regulate the industry! Tax them! Take away their phones!
I'm glad to see things working themselves out with social media usage and hope its successes help increase our ability to avoid expensive and fruitless regulations in the future.
I genuinely don't think I've ever heard anyone suggest teenage phone use should be regulated. Generally regulations are suggested when bad actors are blatantly unwilling or unable to regulate themselves.
Yeah, I believe that the key point here is that regulations should prevent "harm" to others, not "self-harm". And as far as I know, that's how it goes most of the time.
I understand your general point, but I have never heard of a suggestion to regulate teenage phone use. Have you ever heard someone actually suggest this?
As a US citizen, "regulations" has the connotation of federal- or state-level; that's what I meant to ask about. I realize now it's not clear what the commenter I responded to meant, but that was my assumption.
This particular survey featured interviews with 1,058 parents who belong to the panel and have a teen ages 13 to 17, as well as interviews with 743 teens
300 is kind of a paltry number. One high school’s population, for a medium sized town.
Look at one high school, then another. Take each high school from opposite ends of the country. Same results? Not sure about that. But hey, magic number says we’re all good. Run the article, right?
You've just illustrated in your own comment that it really isn't as much about the number of participants as it is about the random distribution of participants.
Would you think it was any better if it was 3000 people from the same area rather than 300? Probably not a lot.
If you pick 300 or more random people throughout the country, you've going to get a pretty accurate representation of the average person.
I'd be flat out surprised if books didn't have their detractors back in the day.