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Comment by Theodores | Hacker News Reader

This is quite a visible moral panic as we can see people glued to their phones in public places, e.g. on the train or bus.

I am not a Facebook person myself but I see no harm in someone spending their time commuting on a train using Facebook instead of something more worthy, e.g. reading a newspaper.

Behind closed doors people plug in to regular TV programming and spend hours on games consoles. There are only so many hours in the day and people who spend hours on social media are spending less time watching regular TV.

Instead of moral panic we need some better numbers. For instance we have unemployment numbers, we could also do with numbers of how many people lost their lives to Facebook/X-Boxes/YouTube/trawling Wikipedia this month.

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> This is quite a visible moral panic as we can see people glued to their phones in public places, e.g. on the train or bus.

The part that disturbs me the most about these conversations is how everyone assumes (and I'm guilty of this too) that when people are "glued to their phones" it's for something superficial like social media. When I'm glued to my phone, I'm checking work email, photos of my kids that family is sending me, paying bills online, researching some side project, making plans for an upcoming vacation, etc.

I don't think people would equate the vacuousness of 'doing it for the gram' with managing your finances. But when we see people on their phones, we just sort of assume they're doing something wasteful. That shouldn't be the default assumption given that you can run your entire life, business, etc from a phone.

I don't think anyone believes that there is no productive use of a smartphone, but I imagine the vast majority of people using smartphones in public are not using them productively.

It is not hard to do a bit of shoulder surfing on a packed train. In fact it is hard to avoid even if you have your eyes fixed on your phone!

If I see a game on a screen or a movie playing then I am reasonably sure that that person is enjoying some down time rather than learning a part for a Shakespeare play, studying for their Mathematics degree or entering their tax returns.

I fail to understand how "reading a newspaper" is more worthy than reading facebook. Both are used for pushing some propaganda and to sell ads..

Newspaper articles, especially pre-internet era, require an attention span longer than 3 seconds to get through. Content had an editorial process, a physical body was held accountable for content. There are tons of differences that make a newspaper a better media for your brain to consume.

Most people I saw reading the newspaper on the subway were reading either a cheap tabloid or the free paper distributed on the subway.

I do still read regular newspapers (print versions in digital format). The quality difference to online news media is gigantic. Depends on what you consume of course.

More worthy is hard to measure. Newspapers have to follow a process in order to publish, including gathering sources, reporting, etc. A Facebook post has none of that.

I aim to not read news throughout the day. Any breaking event is usually poorly reported and gets a lot of things wrong. I prefer to wait until the next day and read the online WSJ copy of the day's paper. I believe it gives me a better idea of what's going on in the world that what others get through social media.

I prefer to wait a few years for the documentary, to really fledge out those details.

It can certainly be harmful when people are walking down the street glued to their phones. Anecdotally, I could not tell you how many times I've seen someone almost walk into traffic, into a stationary object, or into another person on the street because they were listlessly scrolling through (facebook|twitter|instagram|whatever) rather than paying attention to their surroundings.

>, into a stationary object,

Way back in 2008 London was padding lamp posts to protect people that were staring at their devices

https://www.engadget.com/2008/03/06/padded-lampposts-for-dis...

On the same page you link to they debunk this as a PR stunt: https://www.engadget.com/2008/03/17/padded-lampposts-in-lond...

A PR stunt that worked because people are actually walking into lamp posts/traffic.

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