Next step: "dumb" phone.
Next step: no phone.
Next step: no phone.
I didn't have a cell phone until the summer of 2011, and I only bought it because I was moving to another city. I've had a smartphone for less than one year (with the minimal amount of apps; basically whatsapp, telegram and very little more), and very reluctantly so.
In theory it's a nice idea to let go of the phone and move into a different style of social and personal life. In practice, this makes you the odd one who still refuses to use the medium everyone else uses (and right now, I'm the odd one who only looks at their phone 4 or 5 times a day, so people can't expect me to read a message within an hour of it being sent). The pressure to stay connected is very real even if it's not intentional, and this pisses me off.
A common answer to all of this is that if people refuse to contact you using other means, they are not really your friends. While I see the point, the sad truth is that by avoiding the most common means of communications, you're just putting hurdles between you and your friends, and mildly incentivizing them to stop talking to you.
At least I have successfully removed facebook from my life. That was far easier than I could have imagined, and I didn't even do it on purpose.
People who make this claim ought to stop speaking out loud to their friends, and insist on communicating in sign language only, or by writing things down on paper. They might realize that their friends aren't really their friends, either, when you start insisting on making them jump through arbitrary hoops.
Maybe, except I didn't pick my friends based on the way I want to communicate with them. I dislike Facebook as much as the next person who dislikes it, but I would never expect my friends to change their ways for me or the way I want to communicate with the world. Thinking specifically of one of my friends, we will regularly switch between Google Hangouts, iMessage and Slack, depending on the context. If he pinged me tomorrow and said he was cutting Slack from his life (heaven forbid), we'd have backups, but if not, I'd probably follow to whatever means he prefers, because the alternative - losing one of my best friends - just isn't worth it. So, yeah, I check Facebook once a week for events and general life updates, and I move on. Seems better than the alternative.
But how often does this happen, and how often, instead, does a smartphone distract from better tasks? How often I choose not to pick a book when leaving, because I've got the smartphone "just in case" ? Of course I have ebooks on it, but many times I waste time on facebook/HN/twitter/surfing. It's TOO EASY to get distracted.
Last week I was in London as a tourist visitor, and being able to pull up the local public transit planner (https://tfl.gov.uk) and OpenStreetMap were just conveniences that a mobile computer seems particularly well suited for.
Effectively it's a pull-only smartphone. Nothing is being pushed to me, so nothing takes me out of the moment.
Slack has this annoying habit on my work computer to not make an audible noise when I get a message even though that setting is turned on and I never check my Mac's dock when I'm working on something so I had to unhide the dock so I could see the notification come in.
Then again at one point in time I had alarms set on my phone telling me it was time to eat or time to go to bed because I will focus in on something so much that everything else disappears for hours at a time. Notifications help break me out of that to get back to the real world.
The problem I see (and have yet to get a good answer for) with all of these extreme productivity tactics like shutting off all internet access is that carry a value judgment that older > newer, for all values of information absorption. It reminds me of how some of the financial advice for people in debt is to eschew all forms of credit and live on cash only. Which is fine until you need to buy a house...
If the problem is being distracted from the real world, and that's truly a negative, rather than filling dead time that couldn't really be used for anything else (waiting in line, etc), being absorbed in a book is functionally no different from being absorbed in a newsreader app. With that in mind, where and why is this value judgment coming from?
I see a poster upthread mentioning we've "forgotten how to be bored".
I don't know about people here, but I saw boredom as an awful state of mind even before the proliferation of smartphones. Could someone help me understand what the bigger picture here is?
Books, meanwhile, are of a form to encourage deeper immersion in a single input. Generally speaking, the obvious mode of interaction is to read a single book from start to finish, taking at least hours during which you remain focused on that topic. This kind of long-term focus is required to actually accomplish anything; therefore, a mode of information absorption that trains long-term focus is more effective of personal cultivation than one which encourages mayfly attention-hopping.
Nothing about this necessarily disparages the Internet; it's quite possible to focus on long-form pieces that are Internet-published, or to hop from topic to topic using offline media. But because friction costs encourage longer-term focus when offline, going offline is one effective way to incentivize it.
Most individual links on HN and FB don't have a few hundred pages long of organized material delving into a topic, and most collections of links won't have the same cohesive nature that a good book does. Some do, but it's atypical. If you put any belief into the idea that other senses contribute to learning, then a book covers more senses than an electronic reference does. And it's easier to go sit in a corner with, without worrying about how much you're draining the battery in some device, or being distracted by other things on the internet. Books don't receive push notifications, and that's a wonderful thing!
> I see a poster upthread mentioning we've "forgotten how to be bored".
> I don't know about people here, but I saw boredom as an awful state of mind even before the proliferation of smartphones.
I see it as a statement that we've forgotten how to drift a bit, contemplate, and allow ourselves to be alone with our thoughts; most people grab for a quick bit of entertainment or information when they've got a few otherwise unoccupied seconds.
> It reminds me of how some of the financial advice for people in debt is to eschew all forms of credit and live on cash only.
Look at it from the perspective of an addict. Sometimes being forced to rent is a smaller negative than crippling piles of credit card debt. And sometimes inaccessibility of your accustomed distractions is a smaller negative than being able to focus on something important for as long as it takes to get it done.
While I do understand the point you're trying to make, I think it's a bit unfair to insinuate that their only advantage is as a way to pass the time.
I use a smartphone without a mobile data plan. Not because of addictiveness, I just don't think it's worth the cost, but it does avoid that problem. I keep it stocked with ebooks and audiobooks.
No, you just need to move to a place where nobody has a phone. It's great to spend every day outside having adventures, face to face with people!
I have explored 15 countries in about as many months, never seen a single Child soldier.
Please, please don't just parrot things out when you clearly don't know what you are talking about.
1. Cut all ties and move to either an Amish settlement or a country with no or little access to electricity.
2. Locate the local stand-up of disillusioned 10x'ers.
3. Romp and play among the trees and hills 24/7.
I wish I had a way to toggle selective-airplane-mode. That is, only the current app gets to know that I'm connected - Slack, Twitter, Google Maps all get to quietly run in the background and do nothing.
If you have yours rooted, the Disable Service app can help reduce the problem. I have a bunch disabled with no (visible?) ill effects.
Also within the settings, you can select what to do with apps that are pushed to the background. It'll be under the developer settings.
> Next step: "dumb" phone.
> Next step: no phone.
Next step: no nothing
Next step: achieve zen