2) Availability. Your phone is with you all the time. Because it is portable and it is personal. A TV was usually shared and rarely portable like the phone. Same is true of other major time killers.
3) Variety. Phones have a much greater variety of addicting behaviors. It’s like taking a super charger TV, arcade games, and a whole host of other new addicting features (e.g. social media which in addition to the dopamine hits has built in fun peer pressure aspects necessitating their use amongst kids), throwing them in the same device, making it extremely portable and available, and then throwing in some essential features (messaging/phones) so parents have to make them available to kids, and until recently providing no decent ways of limiting the usage. 4) Data and dopamine hits. Almost every other “time killer” until now has had to target a fairly broad demographic but today’s apps and social media sites, etc have the smartest brains in the world sitting around plotting how to get adults and teenagers hooked onto their service based on their individual usage. I’ve quit FB but noticed that the app spent the next month spamming me with a variety of notifications trying to figure out what would get me to open it (a birthday reminder did the trick) and then spammed me with birthday notifications until that stopped working and went back to a variety of notifications again. TV never had the ability to target individuals to this degree.
- Documentation of mistakes
Further, they are idle consumption far and beyond books. I’d question anyone who sees someone sitting on a phone/TV/game all day and think it’s doing anything good for them.
They aren’t exclusively solitary activities. A lot of usage has a social component (it’s communicating with friends). I don’t think you can seriously suggest that relationships forged across a distance are somehow not real or necessarily worse than social relationships you tend to in person.
You can’t just equivocate phones, games and TV – and with phones it‘s really all about the particular usage.
In particular this important social component (uses which allow for communication with other people are some of the most popular) leads me to always be baffled when people automatically connect phone use to being lonely or alone. It can be, but it not necessarily is.