Hacker News Reader

Comment by cteague | Hacker News Reader

Many of you are speaking about the social aspects of smartphones and social media, but I think a big issue is also the cognitive impact of short-term gratification due to internet/tech addiction. Happiness often comes from feeling competent. If teens attention spans are dwindling due to this addiction, they are going to grow up without the grit to persist and develop skills.

View on HN

I agree with this. It's not about "jealousy" towards your friends on fb. It's about feeding the attention-monkey. And the more you feed that monkey the more it wants.

Healthy brains spend time (much time) prior to attention, just being. I like to go on long walks and practice breathing. Dissolving mind and attention leads to great clarity, when the thoughts are needed.

Society as a whole does not seem to recognize the attention-burden, for example, more and more advertising and television images are showing up everywhere. It is not possible to just relax and be, while commuting or getting around town. People seem to assume that this is the way to live. It is not.

>Healthy brains spend time (much time) prior to attention, just being. I like to go on long walks and practice breathing. Dissolving mind and attention leads to great clarity, when the thoughts are needed.

Yes, there is a reason practices like meditation, physical movements during prayer (yoga, Jewish and Islamic practices of prayer), etc. have lasted thousands of years. The screens are not the first attention-jackers to come around and they won't be the last.

I'm blocking social media on my phone now (LeechBlock), I mean I know how to disable it, but it reminds me of not doing it. When I activated it I started noticing how often I just habitually check my phone to get trapped in this hole. My rule is now to only use social media when I'm at home on my computer. That already precludes 95% of my social media use, because I'm rarely at home.

I have a smartphone only since I'm 24. I can't imagine what it's like for a teenager growing up this way.

I'm dabbling with mindfulness as well now, and I jog without electronics. Listening to music while jogging isn't really something that has to do with social media, but more about the meditative aspect of jogging.

Until September, I was teaching A-level at 2 schools in the UK, and had been since 2002. Over the last 3-4 years, the ability of students to apply themselves and concentrate (independent of their ability) seemed to drop away completely. Obviously purely anecdotal, but my teaching experience became much worse in that time period; I'm glad to not be doing it any more, which is sad because it's something I actually love doing when it goes well.

I see this in the students I mentor. Every single one of them cannot focus on a single task for longer than 60 seconds, which is severely hampering their ability to think deeply about abstract programming and data science problems. It's very frustrating, but they just cannot stop checking their phones for updates

What types students are you mentoring? I've observed that groups of the best-performing students look down on those "addicted" to their phones and some have switched to flip phones.

Comp-Sci/Electrical Engineers - I've never seen any of them without a smartphone, or even heard them talk about their friends switching.

Sounds like a good idea though :)

I would try switching to a flip phone but the problem is I want a cool modern flip phone not something that looks vintage.

It's not a flip phone, but I quite like the way the new Nokia 3310 looks. Simple but modern.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/nokia-3310-3g-cell-phone-unlock...

The best we could get my mom was LG Wine Smart a year ago, she is reasonably happy with it as she requires physical buttons.

There really is not much choice when it comes to flip phones today: https://www.gsmarena.com/results.php3?nCPUCoresMin=2&nRamMin...

Out of those only Gionee W909 has at least somewhat respectable specs.

I actually prefer vintage design (e.g. Nokia 8210, designed by Kenzo), but unfortunately these old phones aren't compatible enough, 2G networks are phased out and are already switched off in many places.

No it has to look vintage, but has to also be modern and cool.

im not sure you can have flip + modern in a phone. ive never seen it anyway

if the idea of having a flip phone is so that you will be less distracted then maybe a flip case might help to do something similar. preferably one that has really loud velcro so that people around you will get pissed if you keeping opening it every 2nd minute to look at facecheck

That's another problem in itself.

I had this issue. A combination of the pomodoro technique and forced daily reading made a massive difference in my short-term attention span.

> It's very frustrating, but they just cannot stop checking their phones for updates

I feel the same way about myself, sometimes, but instead I just open a browser window and start typing news.... (not always HN, but often)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com