> I don't remember my parents having this problem with their newspaper. They did look at the newspaper before the sky every morning.
This seems to be a pretty common comparison, especially as a reply to older generations remarking on everyone always being on their phones. Kind of a meme at this point[1][2].
It really makes me think that not a lot of thought/concern is given to the major difference between print media and modern technology/social media: print media is a one-way relationship. There is no interaction between the reader and the newspaper - it's a passive information source.
Social media on the other hand is a two-way, highly interactive, highly curated information source/communication tool and that is where the comparison falls flat on it's face. To compare the two in the context of mental health/anti-social behavior/distraction etc. is missing the point.
And for anyone interested in some research on the subjects of technology and social media as it related to kids, I will always plug the non-profit I work for:
You're not wrong, but it seems to me the "addiction problem" of social media is not so much about the interactivity, but has more to do with the near infinite supply of entertainment.
it's a complicated issue and you're right that the the unending source of dopamine hits from entertainment would certainly play a role - although that's not really unique to social media. I personally think that a bigger factor may be the instant gratification and validation that comes from followers/likes/comments/whatever. I think young kids especially (but certainly not exclusively) crave validation from their peers and social media is a perfect place to turn to for that.
I was about to say much the same. I deleted my Twitter accounts years ago now, but I still find myself reading the tweets of Charlie Stross, amongst others, multiple times per day.
Especially considering, that the printed old-fashioned Newspaper (at least if you select the right one!!!) has a professional writers and a more calm perspective on the world than social media and everything what we consume as media nowadays.
the bar has certainly been lowered about as far as it can be in terms of who can share their ideas/beliefs. It's a double-edged sword of previously unheard of freedom of speech and an unending supply of lies/bullshit/deception/ignorance. It makes cultivating a strong level of discernment one of the most necessary skills for surviving (sometimes literally) in todays world.
Yet the national inquirer, the daily star etc. Have been purchasable in front of nearly every checkout stand for at least my entire life. Lies/bullshit/deception and ignorance are nothing new.
It’s just packaged differently. Instead of easily knowing it’s trash, it’s someone you trust on Facebook spouting crazy. I think that’s what gets people the most.
> Lies/bullshit/deception and ignorance are nothing new
You are definitely right there, but my point was the barrier for entry has been lowered. No need to have a printing press and to be accepted for sale at storefronts - if you have an internet connection, you have a voice.
In a number of countries, yellow journalism was a feature of the evening newspapers, not the morning ones which represented more reasoned, respectable journalism. So, people at least didn’t start their day with yellow journalism.
This is a great point; I've noticed the lack of regard for the qualitative difference between print media and social media for a while now - whenever somebody will raise a point about social media, it is almost immediately pointed out in a reply that before social media there was print media, as if the difference between them is abolished by the mere comparison. XKCD has unfortunately done this too[0]. There are several differences between new media and old media which have very real effects:
* The quantity
* Ease of access to more marginal opinions
* "Dark patterns" such as infinite scrolling
* Internet "debates" traded in 140 or 280-character blows, to be endlessly liked and retweeted
* Anybody, anywhere can make a good-sounding point which is still logically flawed
* Centralization, not of opinions but of specific publishing platforms that have the final say in the control of content, despite being practically public spaces[1]
[1] While it's true that newspapers and publishers had a lot of control over public opinion, Twitter has more control over public opinion than any newspaper in history.
> It really makes me think that not a lot of thought/concern is given to the major difference between print media and modern technology/social media: print media is a one-way relationship. There is no interaction between the reader and the newspaper - it's a passive information source.
> There is no interaction between the reader and the newspaper - it's a passive information source.
On the other hand, people are using smartphones primarily to talk to other people. With IMs, not voice calls, but they talk with each other nonetheless. That's about as opposite of antisocial as you can have.
> On the other hand, people are using smartphones primarily to talk to other people.
I don't believe that's true. I thinnk most smartphone time for most users is spent passively consuming broadcast social media: scrolling through Instagram photos and Facebook posts.
They also didn't carry their newspapers around and constantly read them all day. I know the article proposes looking at the sky before you look at your phone first thing after waking, but the article probably wouldn't have been written if we checked our phones first thing, and then left them home the rest of the day.
The key difference is that you could finish the newspaper.
Imagine how different Instagram would if after ten minutes of scrolling you reached a point where it said "That's it. No more photos until tomorrow!"
(You may remember that Facebook used to work that way with their chronological feed. As soon as you saw a familiar post, you knew you were done. There's a reason they killed that feature.)
Look at the sky especially now during the lockdown. It's beautiful. I couldn't have imagined how distracting planes were until now that I have seen the sky without them.
Two nights ago a series of 40-50 satellites flew over. It was genuinely disturbing to see. I live where the night sky is dark, and full of stars. It was already pretty out here, but the lockdown, with less air travel, has really helped the sky.
And then this line of SUPER bright satellites came over. I think they were part of the Spacex system of satellites. I'm hoping there aren't more coming. They were brighter than the moon, really, just smaller.
I saw the first batch of Starlink satellites a few days after the launch when they were still close together. First to last satellite were no more than maybe 30° apart from my point of view. Seeing these bright spots moving silently [0] and in unison was absolutely captivating.
SpaceX seems to be working with astronomers to minimize impact of their satellites on the night sky. While satellites visible to the naked eye are annoying, they are a real problem for astronomical observations where they can saturate the sensors and cause all sorts of artifacts.
[0] Well, that's saying more about my environment than the satellites themselves.
You won't see that often; the reason you saw that many at once was due to a satellite deployment a little under a week ago. For the first few days they orbit very close together before separating into their own orbits.
My understanding is that SpaceX is working with astronomers to minimize the impact to the night sky, but there are hiccups like just after a launch.
Is there a reason they’ve been brighter and more noticeable lately? I feel like tons of people are spotting them all of a sudden and they went fairly unnoticed before.
Elon Musk @elonmusk Replying to @Erdayastronaut
Solar panel angle during orbit raise / park. We’re fixing it now.
Definitely a "living in the future" moment: you can just ask the satellite owner and get a personal response immediately. (Also, the satellite owner then rolls out bug fixes to the satellite constellation.)
All fine. I had so much religious stuff shoved in my direction lately because of COVID - my tolerance massively decreased because of that in the last weeks.
Or you could just give people the benefit of the doubt, read it that way to begin with, and save us all a lot of grief. Regardless...
I believe it is offensive to people...
If you have a personal beef, say it clearly. The rest of us don't need you to run interference for us. I'm of a "different religion" and I think it is an outstanding idea.
Doesn't really matter. The progression of the seasons is slow enough that I can get used to the apparent movement of the morning sun and always know more of less if it's about 6am, 7am, 8am, or 9am. Don't really use alarms. It's great, until the time changes (DST) and throws my sleep schedule completely off the window ugh.
Or light. One of the most striking parts about driving to northern Canada (well, central BC) in the summer a few years ago was how bright it was at night. I was driving through the night, and for the longest time I was trying to figure out what that light in the sky ahead was. I was sure there must be a big city ahead or something (there wasn't), because I had no idea you could still see light in the sky at midnight.
I used to have anxiety about getting enough sleep at night. I found that eliminating clocks from my surroundings really helped me get over that. Something about measuring yourself against the clock can really mess with your mind. These days I don't have that problem anymore, but it's a thing I've repeatedly told my wife when she has trouble sleeping. Don't look at the clock.
Lately I’ve been wondering if an upcoming generation is going to be more anti-technology, or at least anti-smartphone. I’ve got a 2.5 year old who will occasionally say, “put your phone down, daddy”, or even swipe it from my hand (though we of course try to discourage that, hah) when I’m not paying enough attention to him. As he has grown up and started doing this, it has made me much more aware of my phone time and generally decreased my usage. He clearly notices when I do use it and doesn’t like it if he’s expecting me to engage more with him. I’m curious if this will lead to him seeing smartphone use as some sort of uncool adult thing.
I don't think smartphones will stay with us for very long. They'll probably be replaced by future technologies less clunky (and yes, I am calling smarthphones clunky) in favor of things like glasses, contacts and implants.
I think our children won't be "anti-smartphone" in the same vain as we are not "anti-mainframe"
I don't think we'll jump straight to mind-controlled (that sounds weird) devices, but I'm pretty confident we'll be there by 2040.
As VR and AR progresses there are great new features like hand tracking, which allows for even higher precision than swiping on your phone. I agree with you, interacting with things through your hands is really intuitive, but I don't think we have unlocked it's full potential.
I remain dubious about VR/AR, because the use cases have remained incredibly narrow. VR has remained a more or less video gaming only niche, and AR is something I interact with once a year or so, mostly to see if furniture would fit.
It’s possible that future technology will make it more useful, but on the current trend it doesn’t seem likely that AR/VR would surpass even my Apple Watch usage, let alone iPhone.
Me too. People forget that the technology they're supposedly replacing is something we use in public. So any replacement technology needs to not erase the context of being in public around other humans, and it also needs to be discrete. VR and AR are not particularly discrete, and they also erase a lot of context so they're non-starters outside of very specific technological environments like CAD.
I think it will be the opposite. I see an oblong, handheld, glass-ish-surfaced slab as our QWERTY keyboard (an interface ideology that has now plagued us for 147 years). Solutions to particular engineering problems in particular times and places tend to stick around far longer than technically necessary. (Most of the mechanical limitations that made QWERTY necessary were solved barely a decade after the Sholes and Glidden came about, yet even now the layout appears on our phone screens.)
Qwerty is great for phone keyboards because it puts all the letters for one word nearby one thumb. And I can swipe words without leaving one or the other half of the keyboard. For all that it was about physical limitations of typewriters it's actually a good design for swipable keyboards too because it limits the size of the stroke, reducing the number of characters that could be part of the path.
Mainframes didn’t go away; we just renamed them to “the cloud.”
Smartphones won’t go away. Yes, wearables will replace some use cases – just as personal computers replaced some mainframe use cases and smartphones replaced some personal computer use cases. But smartphones will continue to evolve, just as one can draw a line from time sharing on an IBM 709 to spinning up a Kubernetes cluster.
Even without any particularly futuristic hardware, I'm of the belief that someone could design a smartwatch which does 80% of what I use a smartphone for. We primarily need better voice recognition (where better = basically flawless), and more power-efficient CPUs and radios.
A smartwatch can give directions, read and reply to messages, look up information, display schedules, and take pictures—all without taking my attention too far away from the real world. Anything longer I may as well do on a computer or tablet. I wouldn't be able to read the news or random forums, but the inability to do that 24/7 would be healthy IMO.
I don't forsee a future where smartwatches could replace smartphones for everyone, but I do think they could replace them for a lot of people, me included.
In my company's open office, I can whisper into my Pebble and it'll still pick it up†. On e.g. the subway there would be way too much background noise, but I can imagine a future where AI filters that out.
And, society can adapt. People used to talk on the phone in public constantly (and still do to a large extent, just less). This would be far less intrusive.
† For what it's worth, this is Google's AI. Rebble, the community-run service that lets Pebble's operate post-shutdown, chose Google for voice dictation, and as a result its more accurate now than it was originally.
How would you get any privacy? I don't think other people on the train are going to be happy with me dictating "eggplant emoji smirk emoji" to a wearable.
smartphones' fate will be similar to television, television provided a new cool way to access content than newspapers/magazines, then came the smartphones which provided even better content which was easily accessible. My point being unless they(upcoming generation) get something that provides better content and ways to access it or they realize that instant access to information is bad, they wont be anti-smartphone.
Aanecdata I know, but I have a couple of young nieces (7 and 11) and they are definitely as addicted to smartphones (/iPad) as you can reasonably get.
Edit: Observing their behaviour, and my own (and other adults), I'd speculate that they are inherently addictive rather than simply new and shiny (I don't view them that way any more). To be honest, I find this pretty self evident.
Additional Anecdata: I was actually kind of disturbed by how addicted by little brother (18) was to his phone when he came to visit. We had to make a house rule that you put down the phone when watching a movie. We then laughed at how he seemed to be actually twitching and jonesing for the thing.
At one point, we paused the movie due to an ambulance outside, and the boy lept from the couch to his phone to get his little fix.
Based on how incredibly obsessed some children I know under 10 are with smartphones, tablets and even using my phone, no. Definitely not.
People don't use phones to look cool or generally don't think about the style of using a device. It's not a trend people are following. They want the entertainment, function or stimulation from the device. So if electronics somehow become unstimulating, boring or useless to children, maybe then.
Without context, it's hard to say... But I don't think you should feel guilty for looking at your phone while playing with your child.
Children will always want all of your attention, and their play is frankly mind-numbing. Due to the COVID situation, I am entertaining my toddler 14 hours a day 5 days a week and I find it impossible to stay engaged for more than a few minutes playing a child's game.
I think (hope) that future generations will look at how we consume media on smartphones today the way we look at cigarette smoking now. An unhealthy stimulant that many of us are addicted to and struggle to escape.
I think my generation (millenial) and the generation after (zoomer?) is explicitly anti-television on average, compared to at least the 2 generations that came before us. Sure, Netflix, but I have no friends that engage in the act of coming home from work, sitting down, and letting Comcast and Fox/ABC/whoever decide what they'll be watching in 5 minute slices between 8 minute commercial breaks (or that's how it felt the last time I tried watching TV). I think that's an important development in increasing user freedom, the simple act of choosing what content we fill our leisure time with, and moving away from a barrage of consumerist propaganda.
On the other hand, I have fond memories of watching TV with my family - all of us in the same room having conversations about what has happening on the screen. That is valuable family time and it gets lost a bit with current consumption patterns.
Netflix/streaming also encourages large stretches of being glued to the screen, which isn't always great.
Or not look at the sky, instead make sure to ask for your rights so that looking at the sky is something that just happens. No need to blame and shame people.
Even before the lockdown I made a habit of going out and looking at the sky and the farthest/highest thing I could find every morning right after I wake up.
Before it was just nice, now I feel like it’s keeping me sane.
This is a suggestion made to ease the habit of deferring to our phones for everything, starting with the first action. I welcome this initiative for decreasing how often I reach for my phone by at least one, and digging up my old alarm clock.
I did this last night. It was awesome. I’m in the city, so I can’t see much, but did see the beautiful crescent Moon (and the dark, barely-visible Earthshine-illuminated portion), very bright Venus nearby, Orion (with a red Betelgeuse whose brightness has now recovered after waning for months), and then I saw a spectacular stream of just-launched, orbit-raising Starlink satellites emit from the North Star and fly past the handle of the Big Dipper. (Plus a couple other non-Starlink satellites earlier.)
(On a side note, it seems that SpaceX has made really good progress on solving the in-service brightness problem of Starlink, and hopes to launch all their satellites—starting with two launches from now—with low enough in-service brightness to be invisible to the naked eye once on-station.) https://spacenews.com/spacex-to-test-starlink-sun-visor-to-r...
My family just finally learned where Venus is a month or two ago. It's so obvious once you know, but I always assumed it was just another star or something. I get an unreasonable amount of joy out of seeing it up there each night.
My two cents, I don't care about your addiction don't assume it is mine too. I wake up at 4:30 am and hit the "gym". So yes my first screens are an alarm, then the ipad to keep my mind distracted. around 7 I enjoy watching the sun come up while I have a cup of coffee to make the most of SIP. When life was normal I would walk to work and enjoyed that a lot.
I also make it a point to go outside for 1-2 sort walks each day.
I don't see much difference between my use of tv,cpu compared to my parents tv/paper/magazine or grand parents tv/radio/paper and magazines.
Every generation has new socialization norms and every one has to fight for attention.
One of the best small changes I made was sleeping in a different room to my phone. We now have a charging station in the study where all our phones and other devices charge. When I wake up I often go through breakfast etc. before going to get my phone.
If you're stil sleeping near your phone, stop it. Alarm clocks are very cheap. You don't need any of the fancy features of your phone's alarm - you'll adapt.
I like the idea in theory but I always use my phone to actually fall asleep by listening to some monotonous audio. Before doing this I had extremely hard time falling asleep.
That sounds great if it works for you. Obviously don't change your habits if they're not problematic!
For me before I made the change the last thing I'd do at night was look at my phone, the first thing I'd do in the morning was look at my phone, and if I woke in the night I'd look at my phone. Bed is now a mentally distinct place for me, which helps my sleep a lot.
One option if you really want to sleep in a separate room from your phone is to get a dedicated audio player for your bedroom. Depending on the features you need (Bluetooth, streaming support from Spotify, etc.) you can get one for around $70 to $300. You could also get a Raspberry Pi and automate playing your monotonous audio at your bedtime each night. That would be cheap and a neat quarantine project.
This can help. I use my old phone that I otherwise use for dev. It does not have games and social networks on it so it's harder to just spend time on something.
Who, in 2020, grabs their phone first thing before hitting a drink, or bathroom, or wash your face or whatever you do when you wake up?
I (37M) find it weird. In 2010, sure, it was all new and I was younger maybe. Nowadays I just don't even have to refrain myself, it could be 10, 20 minutes before I look at any screen. It would usually be my laptop actually.
Am I the exception? I'd think a technologically mature crowd to be much less... dependent, less hooked to their phone. I would think of this being an actual challenge for the mainstream Facebooking / Instagramming / Twittering, but not people like us...
[work notwithstanding, evidently, sometimes we need to grab the phone but that's irrelevant to my observations]
21-year-old here, I do that pretty often. Most days when I wake up I feel super groggy and/or have very little motivation to get out of bed, so mindlessly scrolling Reddit/Facebook or reading the news gives me a slow start to gather some energy to get out of bed.
However, recently I _have_ been wondering whether being on my phone all the time contributes to those symptoms.
That's a very good question. I used to be you. As I said above, my 'secret' was to dissociate 'me' (the body, with an inner child inside) from 'my thinking brain', the overarching parent/boss up there who makes decisions.
So parent takes care of the child and is able to say "nope, don't do that". Developing this approach is what made me an adult I think (I was in my 30s already, it didn't come naturally to me).
A great trick was audiobooks. You just listen and that wakes the brain up, but a book is really, really so much better than random posts. 30 minutes as you wake up, then get up, have breakfast etc. is sure mind opener.
It becomes a habit, maybe a need even, but it's a good need. Books and exercises is the winning combination for success and happiness (seriously, just these two things put you in the top 5%, or so I hear).
Places like librivox have tons of free content. A well thought-out podcast is good too I think (long-form content). It's the idea of a passive but mind-opening activity.
Then when I'm working during the day I put the phone away silent for ~30 minutes, then take a break and chill for 5-10 minutes, then back at it, rinse and repeat. That's what got me off the dopamine hook I think.
Same. I keep my phone face down and on do not disturb, on my nightstand, and only pick it up once I'm ready to start the work day.
I find even seeing the app icons for notifications on my lock screen can lead me down a nonstop work path where you end up in you PJ's at 11h30 with zero caffeine in you and a feeling of a day already passed.
> even seeing the app icons for notifications on my lock screen can lead me down a nonstop work path
I totally know the feeling! I think it's really biological, low-level:
- dopamine! It's like a shot, the brain gets triggered.
- familiarity: "feels like home", habits take us to our comfort zone.
> you end up in you PJ's at 11h30 with zero caffeine in you and a feeling of a day already passed.
Haha, yeah... I've been there so often in my teens / twenties.
I think it was self-love + discipline that let me exit that loop. Treating myself like a (inner) child and their parent all-in-one person: forces one to think about well-being first, it gives a feeling it's the "right thing to do" to let yourself chill and avoid that kind of time vortex.
I wake up and the first thing I do is check my phone and I don't think that's unhealthy. Quite the contrary I believe.
It is a slow start to the day and I feel connected to friends and family. I am living abroad, a few hours behind my native country where most of my friends live. So when I wake up, there is already a lot of activity in the WhatsApp groups I am part of. I don't use WhatsApp professionally, so it's just personal stuff. I love to read trivial chatting from my friends and family first thing in the morning. Specially living abroad. Specially these days of Covid.
I also check Twitter and HN, but just a quick look, not the reason I pick up my phone. I spend about 20min on WhatsApp, 5min elsewhere.
It also wakes me up, so I don't oversleep. Then I am ready to go the bathroom, prepare my breakfast and when I get to work, I am ready and sharp.
I believe people use the idea of picking your phone first thing in the morning as an image and a proxy for phone addiction, I don't think it is. I believe I would be less healthy if I had my phone locked away from me in the morning.
The first thing I do when I wake up is send a good morning to people and check the stuff they wanted me to see as I was sleeping. It refuse to believe this is "unhealthy". It's communication.
Sure, communication by itself is not unhealthy. The question is should it be done right after waking up. The brain has no time to gather thoughts, plan the day, etc. It's anything but a graceful boot up. By reaching for the phone first thing in the morning you're telling your brain "you're nothing but a social media content processor." Not only that, but with news being mostly negative (a major reason of why people reach for their phones first thing in the morning), it's not a good recipe for mental health.
but in quarantine my days are sliding into a featureless wash of playing online games, reading HN and articles about Covid, watching Netflix. ostensibly there is development work I should be doing, but I just can't seem to get engaged.
really finding that if I spend an hour or two directly upon waking doing things like cleaning and sewing and food prep...maybe a little computerless whiteboard work..I'm feeling quite a bit more engaged and human. I'm a lot less prone to just faffing about on the internet.
Same here. Thanks to modern social networks and aggregators like HN, I stay connected to a lot of people who would otherwise drift out of my life, and stay in the loop about many different topics.
There's a lot of digital junk food fighting for your attention, that's for sure. But there's a lot of other options, and, unlike real-life balanced diet and fine dining, it's either free or cheap.
Please understand that what I'm about to say isn't to be taken personally. I don't know you, and I'm taking your word for it that you have a healthy relationship with your phone.
Something functional alcoholics will often say is "I don't have a problem, I just like a beer with dinner, nothing wrong with that", and a usual response is "okay, then how about you take a week off? If it's just something you like, then that should be no problem".
Of course, that's where the excuses start!
This May challenge is conceptually similar. Nothing in your morning routine would be disrupted by more than 120 seconds, if you took the time to look at the sky and appreciate it before starting in with the phone.
Again, I'm mentioning this on behalf of other people who might be a bit in denial about how they start their day.
My personal routine starts with plugging the laptop into the monitor and brewing coffee, and browsing Twitter and HN while my brain wakes up. I'm not big on my phone in general, especially not lately.
But I'm intending to add looking at the sky for the month of May (although not joining a Facebook group, yuck!).
Makes sense. I've been considering letting to check the phone in the living room (currently my office too) just because sometimes there are videos/audios that I want to check, but my wife is still sleeping.
The watching the sky thing is more of a marketing device that I might skip though.
i believe that the main audience of this campaign are hardcore fb users, it's easier to target them there.
but any suggestions are welcome, how to reach people nowadays?
For everyone concerned about your alarm, try existing without one!
I gave up alarms over a decade ago, and I never wake up late. You have a great internal clock in your own head and the subtle stress of knowing an alarm is pending is horrible for actually getting restful sleep.
Don’t believe me? Try it on a weekend or two, or if you have a week with few early events, set a resolve to do some task by a specific time and remind yourself to wake for it before going to bed. It’s amazingly simple once you get used to it.
My experience is that if I have an event that I need to be ready for and don't set an alarm my brain switches into panic "Oh shit, I overslept mode!" and I wake up way too early, repeatedly, and end up with a terrible night's sleep. In fact, I get that whenever I travel for work even though I do set an alarm because the disruption to my routine makes me afraid I failed to set it correctly.
What I find helps the most for getting restful sleep is to do this at night:
1. Set an alarm for when I want to wake up.
2. Go to bed at a time that makes my sleep duration an integer multiple of my sleep cycle. For me, that's around 3.5 hours. I'll feel more rested with 7 hours of sleep than 9 because at 9 hours I'm woken from deep sleep.
3. When I get in bed, mentally how much time between there is between now and my alarm going off. Deliberately tell myself, "My alarm is going off in X hours."
Setting an alarm cures my "I overslept!" anxiety. The other two points help align my alarm to my sleep cycle so I'm in shallow sleep when it goes off.
144 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 206 ms ] threadI don't remember my parents having this problem with their newspaper. They did look at the newspaper before the sky every morning.
This seems to be a pretty common comparison, especially as a reply to older generations remarking on everyone always being on their phones. Kind of a meme at this point[1][2].
It really makes me think that not a lot of thought/concern is given to the major difference between print media and modern technology/social media: print media is a one-way relationship. There is no interaction between the reader and the newspaper - it's a passive information source.
Social media on the other hand is a two-way, highly interactive, highly curated information source/communication tool and that is where the comparison falls flat on it's face. To compare the two in the context of mental health/anti-social behavior/distraction etc. is missing the point.
And for anyone interested in some research on the subjects of technology and social media as it related to kids, I will always plug the non-profit I work for:
https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research
1. https://memeworld.funnyjunk.com/pictures/Kids+these+days+alw...
2. https://miro.medium.com/max/1080/1*U36hBj8i-C7JJJxS4MP2HQ.jp...
I have no mouth, yet I must stream.
You are definitely right there, but my point was the barrier for entry has been lowered. No need to have a printing press and to be accepted for sale at storefronts - if you have an internet connection, you have a voice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
* The quantity
* Ease of access to more marginal opinions
* "Dark patterns" such as infinite scrolling
* Internet "debates" traded in 140 or 280-character blows, to be endlessly liked and retweeted
* Anybody, anywhere can make a good-sounding point which is still logically flawed
* Centralization, not of opinions but of specific publishing platforms that have the final say in the control of content, despite being practically public spaces[1]
[0] https://xkcd.com/1601/
[1] While it's true that newspapers and publishers had a lot of control over public opinion, Twitter has more control over public opinion than any newspaper in history.
Yeah, newspapers don't scream at you.
On the other hand, people are using smartphones primarily to talk to other people. With IMs, not voice calls, but they talk with each other nonetheless. That's about as opposite of antisocial as you can have.
I don't believe that's true. I thinnk most smartphone time for most users is spent passively consuming broadcast social media: scrolling through Instagram photos and Facebook posts.
Imagine how different Instagram would if after ten minutes of scrolling you reached a point where it said "That's it. No more photos until tomorrow!"
(You may remember that Facebook used to work that way with their chronological feed. As soon as you saw a familiar post, you knew you were done. There's a reason they killed that feature.)
And then this line of SUPER bright satellites came over. I think they were part of the Spacex system of satellites. I'm hoping there aren't more coming. They were brighter than the moon, really, just smaller.
SpaceX seems to be working with astronomers to minimize impact of their satellites on the night sky. While satellites visible to the naked eye are annoying, they are a real problem for astronomical observations where they can saturate the sensors and cause all sorts of artifacts.
[0] Well, that's saying more about my environment than the satellites themselves.
My understanding is that SpaceX is working with astronomers to minimize the impact to the night sky, but there are hiccups like just after a launch.
1. Lots of lights are moving all over the night sky.
2. There are only stars visible in the night sky.
Considering the implications, which of those two futures sounds preferable?
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1252986968058802177
The important bits:
Everyday Astronaut @Erdayastronaut Apr 23
Is there a reason they’ve been brighter and more noticeable lately? I feel like tons of people are spotting them all of a sudden and they went fairly unnoticed before.
Elon Musk @elonmusk Replying to @Erdayastronaut
Solar panel angle during orbit raise / park. We’re fixing it now.
What is it with pushing religious stuff into peoples faces? I believe it is offensive to people who either have a different religion or none at all.
One could just say: "You should do a day of digital detox every week. Like for example people do on Shabbat. Or in other ways."
Or you could just give people the benefit of the doubt, read it that way to begin with, and save us all a lot of grief. Regardless...
I believe it is offensive to people...
If you have a personal beef, say it clearly. The rest of us don't need you to run interference for us. I'm of a "different religion" and I think it is an outstanding idea.
I have no beef. I just stated my personal opinion. And I even stated a way how it could be framed with religious content in the text.
I still feel I did a reasonable critique with an idea of how to communicate in a less offensive way towards others.
I think our children won't be "anti-smartphone" in the same vain as we are not "anti-mainframe"
And the idea that we will jump to having our devices being able to read our mind seems like a stretch.
As VR and AR progresses there are great new features like hand tracking, which allows for even higher precision than swiping on your phone. I agree with you, interacting with things through your hands is really intuitive, but I don't think we have unlocked it's full potential.
It’s possible that future technology will make it more useful, but on the current trend it doesn’t seem likely that AR/VR would surpass even my Apple Watch usage, let alone iPhone.
Smartphones won’t go away. Yes, wearables will replace some use cases – just as personal computers replaced some mainframe use cases and smartphones replaced some personal computer use cases. But smartphones will continue to evolve, just as one can draw a line from time sharing on an IBM 709 to spinning up a Kubernetes cluster.
A smartwatch can give directions, read and reply to messages, look up information, display schedules, and take pictures—all without taking my attention too far away from the real world. Anything longer I may as well do on a computer or tablet. I wouldn't be able to read the news or random forums, but the inability to do that 24/7 would be healthy IMO.
I don't forsee a future where smartwatches could replace smartphones for everyone, but I do think they could replace them for a lot of people, me included.
And, society can adapt. People used to talk on the phone in public constantly (and still do to a large extent, just less). This would be far less intrusive.
† For what it's worth, this is Google's AI. Rebble, the community-run service that lets Pebble's operate post-shutdown, chose Google for voice dictation, and as a result its more accurate now than it was originally.
Children born with smartphones around see them as ordinary and probably less addicting, it's what comes next we need to worry about for them.
Edit: Observing their behaviour, and my own (and other adults), I'd speculate that they are inherently addictive rather than simply new and shiny (I don't view them that way any more). To be honest, I find this pretty self evident.
At one point, we paused the movie due to an ambulance outside, and the boy lept from the couch to his phone to get his little fix.
People don't use phones to look cool or generally don't think about the style of using a device. It's not a trend people are following. They want the entertainment, function or stimulation from the device. So if electronics somehow become unstimulating, boring or useless to children, maybe then.
Children will always want all of your attention, and their play is frankly mind-numbing. Due to the COVID situation, I am entertaining my toddler 14 hours a day 5 days a week and I find it impossible to stay engaged for more than a few minutes playing a child's game.
Netflix/streaming also encourages large stretches of being glued to the screen, which isn't always great.
Personally, I like to combine both modes by using moon tracking apps to watch my favorite sky object.
;)
Before it was just nice, now I feel like it’s keeping me sane.
"You can join the event on facebook, so we can keep in touch, and see how popular this gets! Invite your friends, spread the word!"
The reason people look at their screens first thing in the morning is to see what everybody else is doing.
Seriously.
I can look at the phone and the sky in one day. I enjoy both of those things.
(On a side note, it seems that SpaceX has made really good progress on solving the in-service brightness problem of Starlink, and hopes to launch all their satellites—starting with two launches from now—with low enough in-service brightness to be invisible to the naked eye once on-station.) https://spacenews.com/spacex-to-test-starlink-sun-visor-to-r...
https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/?special=starlink
This is literal boomer newspaper comic type stuff at 75 upvotes.
I don't see much difference between my use of tv,cpu compared to my parents tv/paper/magazine or grand parents tv/radio/paper and magazines. Every generation has new socialization norms and every one has to fight for attention.
If you're stil sleeping near your phone, stop it. Alarm clocks are very cheap. You don't need any of the fancy features of your phone's alarm - you'll adapt.
For me before I made the change the last thing I'd do at night was look at my phone, the first thing I'd do in the morning was look at my phone, and if I woke in the night I'd look at my phone. Bed is now a mentally distinct place for me, which helps my sleep a lot.
No but seriously.
Who, in 2020, grabs their phone first thing before hitting a drink, or bathroom, or wash your face or whatever you do when you wake up?
I (37M) find it weird. In 2010, sure, it was all new and I was younger maybe. Nowadays I just don't even have to refrain myself, it could be 10, 20 minutes before I look at any screen. It would usually be my laptop actually.
Am I the exception? I'd think a technologically mature crowd to be much less... dependent, less hooked to their phone. I would think of this being an actual challenge for the mainstream Facebooking / Instagramming / Twittering, but not people like us...
[work notwithstanding, evidently, sometimes we need to grab the phone but that's irrelevant to my observations]
However, recently I _have_ been wondering whether being on my phone all the time contributes to those symptoms.
So parent takes care of the child and is able to say "nope, don't do that". Developing this approach is what made me an adult I think (I was in my 30s already, it didn't come naturally to me).
A great trick was audiobooks. You just listen and that wakes the brain up, but a book is really, really so much better than random posts. 30 minutes as you wake up, then get up, have breakfast etc. is sure mind opener.
It becomes a habit, maybe a need even, but it's a good need. Books and exercises is the winning combination for success and happiness (seriously, just these two things put you in the top 5%, or so I hear).
Places like librivox have tons of free content. A well thought-out podcast is good too I think (long-form content). It's the idea of a passive but mind-opening activity.
Then when I'm working during the day I put the phone away silent for ~30 minutes, then take a break and chill for 5-10 minutes, then back at it, rinse and repeat. That's what got me off the dopamine hook I think.
I find even seeing the app icons for notifications on my lock screen can lead me down a nonstop work path where you end up in you PJ's at 11h30 with zero caffeine in you and a feeling of a day already passed.
I totally know the feeling! I think it's really biological, low-level:
- dopamine! It's like a shot, the brain gets triggered.
- familiarity: "feels like home", habits take us to our comfort zone.
> you end up in you PJ's at 11h30 with zero caffeine in you and a feeling of a day already passed.
Haha, yeah... I've been there so often in my teens / twenties.
I think it was self-love + discipline that let me exit that loop. Treating myself like a (inner) child and their parent all-in-one person: forces one to think about well-being first, it gives a feeling it's the "right thing to do" to let yourself chill and avoid that kind of time vortex.
It is a slow start to the day and I feel connected to friends and family. I am living abroad, a few hours behind my native country where most of my friends live. So when I wake up, there is already a lot of activity in the WhatsApp groups I am part of. I don't use WhatsApp professionally, so it's just personal stuff. I love to read trivial chatting from my friends and family first thing in the morning. Specially living abroad. Specially these days of Covid.
I also check Twitter and HN, but just a quick look, not the reason I pick up my phone. I spend about 20min on WhatsApp, 5min elsewhere.
It also wakes me up, so I don't oversleep. Then I am ready to go the bathroom, prepare my breakfast and when I get to work, I am ready and sharp.
I believe people use the idea of picking your phone first thing in the morning as an image and a proxy for phone addiction, I don't think it is. I believe I would be less healthy if I had my phone locked away from me in the morning.
but in quarantine my days are sliding into a featureless wash of playing online games, reading HN and articles about Covid, watching Netflix. ostensibly there is development work I should be doing, but I just can't seem to get engaged.
really finding that if I spend an hour or two directly upon waking doing things like cleaning and sewing and food prep...maybe a little computerless whiteboard work..I'm feeling quite a bit more engaged and human. I'm a lot less prone to just faffing about on the internet.
There's a lot of digital junk food fighting for your attention, that's for sure. But there's a lot of other options, and, unlike real-life balanced diet and fine dining, it's either free or cheap.
Something functional alcoholics will often say is "I don't have a problem, I just like a beer with dinner, nothing wrong with that", and a usual response is "okay, then how about you take a week off? If it's just something you like, then that should be no problem".
Of course, that's where the excuses start!
This May challenge is conceptually similar. Nothing in your morning routine would be disrupted by more than 120 seconds, if you took the time to look at the sky and appreciate it before starting in with the phone.
Again, I'm mentioning this on behalf of other people who might be a bit in denial about how they start their day.
My personal routine starts with plugging the laptop into the monitor and brewing coffee, and browsing Twitter and HN while my brain wakes up. I'm not big on my phone in general, especially not lately.
But I'm intending to add looking at the sky for the month of May (although not joining a Facebook group, yuck!).
It sounds nice.
The watching the sky thing is more of a marketing device that I might skip though.
Fail.
I gave up alarms over a decade ago, and I never wake up late. You have a great internal clock in your own head and the subtle stress of knowing an alarm is pending is horrible for actually getting restful sleep.
Don’t believe me? Try it on a weekend or two, or if you have a week with few early events, set a resolve to do some task by a specific time and remind yourself to wake for it before going to bed. It’s amazingly simple once you get used to it.
What I find helps the most for getting restful sleep is to do this at night:
1. Set an alarm for when I want to wake up.
2. Go to bed at a time that makes my sleep duration an integer multiple of my sleep cycle. For me, that's around 3.5 hours. I'll feel more rested with 7 hours of sleep than 9 because at 9 hours I'm woken from deep sleep.
3. When I get in bed, mentally how much time between there is between now and my alarm going off. Deliberately tell myself, "My alarm is going off in X hours."
Setting an alarm cures my "I overslept!" anxiety. The other two points help align my alarm to my sleep cycle so I'm in shallow sleep when it goes off.