A majority of US teens are taking steps to limit smartphone and social media use
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I'd be flat out surprised if books didn't have their detractors back in the day.
This one’s pretty well known, although couched in a few layers of rhetoric that mean it’s usually presented without context (and misattributed to Socrates). In Phaedrus, written by Plato around 370 BC, the character of Socrates tells how when the Egyptian god Theuth gave the gift of writing to King Thamus, Thamus replied:
“…this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”
It's not that we've lost the abilities of our ancestors; it's more that we've gotten out of the habit of using them. How many hundreds of songs do you have stored in your head? Imagine living in a world where your "textbooks" and "user manuals" are written to have similar rhyme, alliteration and rhythm, and are only passed orally. People did live in that world (many still do), and when that world ends, and none of the kids today can recite, for instance, Inside Macintosh - they have to use some sort of grimoire or codex instead - it's easy to see that as a loss. It's harder to see it as a lever.
Did we? A third of teens haven't read a book in the last year. And we "binge" on TV shows now which didn't really exist in the 70s.
Isn't that an improvement overall? You decide you want to watch something and you watch until it's finished. Media consumption habits in the TV era were much more passive and a lot of people would watch a show just because it was on. "There's nothing good on TV" used to be a common lamentation, I wouldn't be surprised if this generation is better at switching off entirely if there isn't content they want.
> A third of teens haven't read a book in the last year
I doubt it makes up the short fall, but does anyone know how well the audio book industry is doing since sites like Audible cropped up? I haven't read a book in some time now but I've listened to several because they have several advantages over reading and the only disadvantage I can think of would by for someone trying to improve their reading ability.
All that does come across in audio books though, you just miss the actual reading and imagining the voices.
Especially a lot of the "entrepreneur" or "productivity" books, where you have 80% padding because nobody wants to buy a 40 page book.
Strongly disagree. Reading a book requires patience and comfort with delayed gratification. Not only does it require it; I think it also develops it.
Watching a MOOK's is a huge commitment where reading a book covering the same material is fast. Video brings great value and can be more relaxing, but reading is generally just faster.
*No stats on this. They really don't have any features in their apps, so pretty confident here.
And it wasn't exactly exclusive to that either. Oh sure, TV often had a mix of shows which stopped you watching the same thing all day long, but:
1. There were still many, many people who watched TV nearly non stop, as their main form of entertainment every day.
2. Many TV shows ran marathons of a particular series for hours/days/weeks at various points of years.
So they turned TV to Netflix.
The video game world is disconnected from reality, involves long story lines, planning, strategy, skills that you can learn.
Maybe I'm wrong. If I had to chose, I hope my kid gets really in to video games instead of social media.
Maybe your video game world. The vast majority of games sold out there, across the years, were games like PacMan, Super Mario, FPS shooters and flash games similar to Candy Crush.
The games are geared towards mixed levels of instant gratification and longer gratification, creating and maintaining an online character/persona, getting approval from peers as you climb the hierarchy of loot (character skins, rare items, etc.)
We limit their time and they are in other activities like sports which take time to develop skills.
Just be careful because some video games hire psychologists to help engineer a game to hit those neural pathways at the right intervals to get players to keep wanting to come back.
Getting really into video games can involve helping build a PC or maybe letting them create their own games.
There are quite some of video games, where exactly this is the encouraged behaviour. Just think about the controversy over loot boxes or mmorpgs.
They most certainly did have. This reminds me about Socrates' take on books:
"for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."
Source: http://www.units.miamioh.edu/technologyandhumanities/plato.h...
Source: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/...
Nowadays kids have to be on top of the latest viral trends and YouTube videos and Twitch streams in order to keep up with what their friends are talking about. Like it or not, the digital world is pretty much essential for kids these days.
"I never commit to memory anything that can easily be looked up in a book" - Albert Einstein
I would argue its just another problem caused by our inability as a nation to rise above a childish level of discussion on just about any subject.
Which has all been said before, what really interests me is what can be done to break this cycle for myself, to keep looking at new things as good and beneficial.
Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. ~~ Albert Einstein
The study: 52% – said they are trying to limit their phone use in various ways.
Addicts will often lie about trying to get clean. "Trying to do" something is also not the same as "doing" something something.
I'm not saying that teens aren't taking concrete steps to reduce smartphone and social media use, and after all, the first step to getting clean is admitting you have a problem, something their parents can't do. I'm just saying it's irresponsible for TechCrunch to jump to this conclusion, and this headline is amounts to clickbait.
So, succinctly, it’s a start. Industry should take note and steps to de-“gamify” the whole industry before the gov comes down or people rebel.
Headline: 'taking steps' Study: 'said they are trying'
Knowing is one thing and actually getting rid of it is a completely different ball game.
There's a gulf between the planner and the doer. The far-sighted "planner" in us knows that social media/Netflix/cigarettes are bad for us. When you conduct a survey, we are conscious and reasonable people who know what is good from what is bad and hence 54% of use agrees that we spend too much time on useless stuff.
But when it actually comes to doing, the myopic "doer" part of us keeps on snoozing that alarm clock in the morning and goes to Facebook to check the number of likes & comments received every five minutes.
The bigger problem is that FB actually replaced not only discussion forums but also mailing lists for non-technical people, so very often you have no option other than to join a particular FB group if you want to participate in offline events. But even this might change with time.
- An alarm clock without a snooze button: https://www.amazon.com/Travelwey-Clock-Outlet-Powered-Operat...
- An app that you can use to block facebook and other sites from your phone: https://freedom.to/
There are people who claim that this sort of thing is 'a crutch'. These same people probably would not encourage a dieter to keep a packet of cookies on their desk though. Regardless, crutches are useful whether you've broken your ankle or your mindfulness.
You can and should build more active mindfulness practices on top of this.
I'm sure I could work around it very easily (I know I can on the laptop) but the shame factor involved is enough to stop me generally and I'm surprised there isn't a huge market for this kind of thing. Been gradually limiting my usage of certain sites down to tiny windows of the day and it's left me with so much more time. Along with that, it's largely removed those sites from my reflex routine of checking for updates... several of them I've just dropped entirely.
Used a few free ones beforehand and the risk of it messing up my hosts file or w/e was always too high to actively recommend to anyone.
Removing the Facebook app from my phone and logging out when I was done with a session on the computer was a great improvement in my life. Even the barrier of typing the password in was enough for me to avoid mindlessly browsing through stuff whenever I finished a small task.
It's been about 6 years since I took these steps, and I don't regret them. Since the Cambridge Analytica stuff came out, I've been dabbling with dropping FB entirely, but there are some people who I like receiving updates from, but they are only on FB.
We need to stop demonizing crutches.
'cept that one DOES have a snooze button?
Continuing to use the phone when you know it’s harming you seems like it fits.
Out of the social networks I've tried I liked Twitter the most. I did not post often but it was great to peek into the conversations of interesting people.
I think today's generation is open to social networks but maybe the photo posting / status update nature of today's networks just don't appeal. Maybe a more creative social network where more users are creating content than consuming it would appeal.
It didn't improve my life in any way.
The instant I asked and answered that a few times, I started cutting down my usage dramatically.
By no means I want to defend current social media fads (never had instagram/snapchat, removed facebook from phone 2 years ago), but that's not how humans work.
You don't go for a beer with a friend to gain something, you go to enjoy it/him/her, have a social interaction and overall great time, and level of friendship usually just stays the same. Nothing learned and no career progress is still a perfectly fine result. Same can be said about going for movies or billions of other activities that don't move you anywhere else in life, they just help you wind down.
The problem is, these social media with all of their unrealistic perspectives of real life don't help us, they frustrate us. Sad thing is, they are somehow mentally addictive and too easy to reach.
This is a hard lesson to learn, especially if you were good at school growing up. I find it helpful to, after/while hanging out with friends or walking in the park, make a conscious effort to reflect on and appreciate the feeling of fulfillment that comes from it. There's something healthiness-reenforcing for me about looking around, breathing deeply, and saying 'this is nice'
Just because there is 'nothing learned' or something doesn't seem beneficial, does not mean it did not have benefits that often can't be labeled.
Also there's no goal to life, just a reminder. There's no like progress bar you fill up to 100% and then you win. You don't have to stay 'productive'.
In the US, the percentage of children five years of age and under that were obese, dropped from 14% to 10% over ten years (2004-2014). That's due to first recognizing a terrible problem and then acting against it.
US obesity rates have stabilized. [1] I think we can be fairly certain that's in no small part due to increased knowledge and awareness of the problem over the last decade. The next step is to begin moving the needle the other direction, even if it's a slow process.
People think obesity in the US is a very old problem, when in fact it started just 30 years ago and wasn't a serious issue until the late 1990s. In 1985 no state had an obesity level over 15%. Today, 46 states exceed 25% obesity. I doubt the US will ever go back to 1985 obesity levels, however if it can change negatively that much in less than two decades, then you can plainly see meaningful improvements in a similar amount of time.
[1] https://www.rwjf.org/en/library/articles-and-news/2017/08/ne...
discipline is saying to yourself something like "This is worth it, but this is uncomfortable. I'm going to do it anyway because I'm stronger than I think" and following through on that.
False. They knew exactly what they were doing. I know because Jaron Lanier and Sean Parker were there.
-->Because reality is real.
As executed, it is irritating. And broken in ways several mentioned here up thread.
The whole movie(and a book) was about using this amazing virtual world as the only escape from the shitty horrible reality. It wasn't just entertainment - people go to school there, people have friends there, for many it's the only source of happiness.
And that's what it was for the protagonist, he understands this better than anyone.
But the moment he becomes a billionaire and gets a hot girlfriend, he goes "reality is awesome guys, you should go out more!" While nothing has changed for most people. Fuck you, Wade!
It's like the dumbest cheapest way to add a "moral" to the movie, completely out of character, he'd never do something like this.
Ready Player One's problem as a movie/book is really that its not interested in exploring too much detail about how this world came to be, so you get fairly trite morals like that.
Like you could imagine a much longer epilogue where the protagonist uses his wealth to improve society, reduce poverty, advocate for governmental change, provide refuge for domestic abuse victims, and uses individual participation rates in the Oasis as a barometer for his success. Which wold be a real interesting moral for a mainstream movie to include.
Thanks. Great, thought provoking read.
Maybe I was not in a mood for it back then and should re-watch it, but the story really felt cheap and characters shallow.
I consider it a quick romp, and a bit forward looking, in terms of what rip, mix, burn sourced from more recent culture might look like.
Definitely need the right mood.
None of it made any sense. But it had some references to back to the future and other "geek" stuff, so everyone loved it.
Just the idea of the escape not really being one when the real suck so hard is all I was getting at. Two, odd day closures would prove to be no salve.
The link up thread, on "the culture" is new to me. Great read, and thought provoking. Worth the effort of this brief chat for sure.
I have received the phone but can't use it yet because my sim hasn't come in the mail. It's tantalizing to not be able to turn off my smartphone just yet. But I can feel the freedom when I hold that dumbphone Nokia.
1) GPS / Maps for navigation: I agree with your sentiment, but I find that I"m _more_ likely to travel or take adventures when I know I can fall back to Google / Apple Maps as a safeguard for getting me from A-to-B, or finding new places around me.
2) Uber / Lyft / Ride Sharing: I can already use Siri on Apple Watch to say "Hey Siri, get me an Uber," so why can't I text a service like that? Or maybe a dumb phone with Google Assistant installed that could aid with those types of tasks? [Disclaimer: a service or phone like that _might_ exist, but in my limited time searching I haven't found one I like nor trust just yet.]
3) Photography: I'm no pro, but I do enjoy taking very good quality pictures at the fraction of the cost of a bulky thousand dollar camera, alongside the auto-backups and location-data stored alongside.
I don't use Uber, so I don't have that issue. I can see where that may be troublesome and I agree a text service would be nice for that.
I thought it would be super easy to just use my iPhone for MFA and email, but I wound up needing to carry two devices wherever I went instead of just one. I tried hard not to use mobile email altogether anymore, until something came up and it was just easier to pull out the smartphone to reply to it instead of pulling out the laptop.
I'm still hopeful that I can get entirely off of a smartphone, but it's a massive challenge when work demands certain apps that just aren't dumbphone compatible.
Today’s internet can be a toxic place, and not one where people should spend large amounts of time.
But many of these networks were built by young men who couldn’t conceive of all the ways things could go wrong.
... and even dopamine drug dealers like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube have begun to ...
Thankfully, as this study shows, there’s growing awareness of this among younger users, and maybe, some of them will even do something about it in the future – when they’re the bosses, the parents, and the engineers, they can craft new work/life policies, make new house rules, and write better code.
Yep, every group of teenagers thinks exactly the same thing. "Our parents fucked things up, but when we're in charge, we'll fix it all". Sadly the real world does not make it easy to effect such change on a large scale. But hey, now that my generation (Gen-X) occupies many key positions of influence, maybe we can finally get it right...
Most social networks are bad for you. They’re deliberately designed to be addictive in pointless ways.
I’d prefer teenagers to be tech savvy individuals who have plenty of face to face skills like conversational skills, curiosity, travel, ability to think, work, play, and plenty of other practical skills such as woodworking etc.
Technology as tool but not as a bubble to live in.
Is today the "Submarine Ad" day for "Kids aren't using social media"? If so, who makes money from us knowing that young people don't use social media? What are they trying to sell to us?
I think 98% of US teens are trolling polls...
Limit motion effects / animation.
Enable grayscale filter.
Don't whip out the phone every 10 seconds or around other people.
^- problem (somewhat) solved
Yet, so many have the opposite gut reaction: Teens using too much social media? Regulate the industry! Tax them! Take away their phones!
I'm glad to see things working themselves out with social media usage and hope its successes help increase our ability to avoid expensive and fruitless regulations in the future.
This particular survey featured interviews with 1,058 parents who belong to the panel and have a teen ages 13 to 17, as well as interviews with 743 teens
Link: http://www.pewinternet.org/2018/08/22/teens-and-screen-time-...
I get that surveys are really hard, but.... 743 seems like a ridiculously low number.
Looks like the surveys are through the "NORC AmeriSpeak panel".
Pew links to this about AmeriSpeak:
http://www.norc.org/PDFs/AmeriSpeak%20Technical%20Overview%2...
I don't know.... maybe someone who understands surveying & statistics can validate these numbers & their significance better than me?
Source: I run and analyze surveys for a living
AmeriSpeak seems to have national representation, so I can only assume it was drawn randomly throughout the nation.
Look at one high school, then another. Take each high school from opposite ends of the country. Same results? Not sure about that. But hey, magic number says we’re all good. Run the article, right?
Would you think it was any better if it was 3000 people from the same area rather than 300? Probably not a lot.
If you pick 300 or more random people throughout the country, you've going to get a pretty accurate representation of the average person.