Study reports cell phones may be making us hypersocial, rather than antisocial
neurosciencenews.com
neurosciencenews.com
Social interaction is a requirement for being a fully healthy human. Just like food, many people develop unhealthy behaviors with social interactions. It's important to choose healthy relationships and healthy ways of nurturing those relationships. Cellphones are a tool, there are healthy and unhealthy ways of using it.
We should focus on educating people on self reflection, so they can notice when their own behaviors are not in the best interest. In this way we protect not only against Cellphone Addiction Disorder (or whatever the DSM ends up naming it), but other future technology use disorders as well.
Addicting partly because it's so easy. It's much harder than going into "impro" mode and striking up a conversation which will hold someone's interest around just about any topic.
Another angle is that I know people who have social anxiety who spend a lot of time chatting on FB. I suppose there are some pros and cons to this, but being hypersocial on a cell doesn't seem to ease face to face social anxiety. It's better than nothing though, I have also seen these people get involved in real activities through these interactions.
For me, hypersocial is hyperdistracted. I can't stand to chat more than a few minutes. Much prefer pricking the awkward bubble which surrounds people and breaking into a silly conversation. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but the Ycombinator community knows all about experimentation. ;)
In my experience, social anxiety is being hung-up on all the "what ifs". I want all the information up front, and time to think over the "right" response. That mentality is enabled online.
Like everything, balance is key. I do believe that having the ability to communicate so easily online has benefited me socially overall. However, I have the feeling that if we had been as connected as we are today back when I was kid, I wouldn't have been able to reach that balance at the point I did.
Seems like sentiments shared on here are often focused on the negatives.
I met the love of my life on social media.
I do business with people because of social media.
Being connected has let me speak with folks I never would have had the opportunity to speak with otherwise.
I have a friend who can't stay away from his phone. I hate meeting up with him and then having to share his attention with his other acquaintances that I don't know, and can't even see. We sometimes play ping-pong, and even that often gets interrupted by phone checks.
Thought experiment: if he was playing ping-pong with a celebrity
That's the problem though: it's not just that are people X and Y, and X is "by nature or nurture" not that important to Y.
It's also that modern technology encourages X being indifferent to Y (and e.g. maximising its eyeball capture).
Not everything is about conscious decisions -- or even subconscious but from someplace within us. There are tons of factors (like social norms, fashion, family, ads, etc) that influence us and shape us, and not all of them for the better. Mobile phones are one such factor.
Evolutionary, the human is totally susceptible to all kinds of BS tricks and influences.
No, there are some others too. Not me though.
I dislike how connected they make us to all kinds of harmful imperatives (spam, advertisement, surveillance, bosses, entitled people, etc.) and how disconnected they enable and encourage most of us to be from actual friends -- not just "here for you" friends, but also casual have a good time friends, with whom 20 years ago you would go out with or visit, as opposed to exchanging comments online.
"Hypersocial" has no meaningful definition. It doesn't speak to the quality of the interactions, nor to how they affect us in terms of happiness and quality of life. Those are the real measures that matter, not the number of micro-interactions we have through looking at text on a screen.
Although it would be nice if we were all a little better at putting them away while interacting face to face. Or maybe I’m just boring and take too long to say things. It’s hard to compete for attention with thousands of invisible people whose full time job it is to be entertaining
Perhaps we should have this in the real world too. Or perhaps we need a combination of tech + real world communication, e.g. where you can see the profile of the people in your vicinity, so you can start a real-life conversation.
I don't think that theory holds up when a lot of today's product design is not only acutely aware of those urges but actively tries to exploit them.
E.g., yes, today, we are able to produce almost arbitrary quantities of fat and sugar-rich food. We could also produce food with different nutritional composition. Yet design for fast-food skews heavily towards heavy on fat and sugar and not much else - because obviously this kind of food will sell best, thanks to the evolutionary urges mentioned in the article.
The same thing happens on the internet - social networks actively waggle the carrot of rewarding social interactions to maximize engagement with the network.
TLDW; hypersocial sounds like a rebranding of the idea of social media