South Korea's smartphone addiction camps | Hacker News Reader

South Korea's smartphone addiction camps

edition.cnn.com

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Part of the problem in Western countries is that we seem to struggle with the language around smartphone addiction.

We all know at some level that compulsive use of mobile internet is a widespread problem for a lot of people. But, for starters, the word "addiction" sometimes feels like a bad fit. Nobody is stealing copper pipes to pay for more mobile data, at least not that I have heard of. So I understand why there is resistance to the term. And I understand why someone who struggles with, for example, heroin addiction would object to smartphones being thrown in the same category as their disease.

But are there people dropping out of school and losing jobs because their compulsive mobile internet use took so much of their attention that they couldn't function normally? There are probably no empirical studies on this yet. But observationally, I would not be surprised if it was a trend. If you spend enough time on reddit you will (ironically enough) find communities full of people discussing exactly how this kind of thing happened to them. And you will find people who spent $500 binging on lootboxes in a mobile game and now they need to figure out how to pay their rent this month....

When I am driving down the highway and pass a slow car, and see the driver watching netflix while driving 70 miles an hour, and when I see this happen on a regular basis, it is hard to call it anything other than an addiction. Surely that person knows, rationally, that they should not be watching TV while driving a car. But they do this self-harming behavior anyway because they can't stop - that's what addiction looks like.

I wonder if South Korea has any different language or cultural values around compulsive smartphone use that has made it easier for them to address the issue?What do we need to do in order to help people talk about this and describe their experience with this growing trend?

As there is virtually no drugs in South Korea or other east asian countries, addiction do have a different perception/connotation. Nonetheless, the word "addiction/중독" is used to refer smartphone addiction.

There is definitely alcohol being consumed in South Korea. Anecdotally, I've seen some hard-drinking South Koreans. In terms of real data, the country ranks pretty highly in overall drinking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_c...

Alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine are legal, widely available drugs that are all heavily used in east Asia.

Something I find interesting about these articles and South Korea (SK) is that unlike many other places, I feel that historically, SK has taken all sort of problems head on and eventually conquered them. I think things like this are probably more prone to manifest themselves early in SK, but also are more likely to get addressed and resolved there.

* * *

A (audio) book I really enjoyed about this country, if you want to learn more: https://www.audible.com/pd/Korea-Audiobook/154144888X?pf_rd_...

There have been some other articles in this vein about SK. These are all HN headlines:

South Korea considers cryptocurrency tax | South Koreans lock themselves up to escape prison of daily life | The Suicides in South Korea, and the Suicide of South Korea | Running Out of Children, a South Korea School Enrolls Illiterate Grandmothers | South Korea has limited a working week to 52 hours, in order to stop overwork | South Korean President Impeached (!) | South Korea scrambles to avoid going the way of Japan | South Korea now recycles 95% of its food waste | South Korean government to switch to Linux (!) | South Korea's program of higher wages and taxes – so far, it's not working | Harried South Koreans pamper pets instead of having kids

One gets the impression of a neurotic, radically changing country that is trying to course correct with varying levels of success. Other than the overworking and business corruption, which I think are exceptionally bad in the country, most of these do seem like issues that other developed nations will face (or are facing) in the near future.

Maybe SK is tackling these issues head on, but from my experience international news tend to always come with a <country> tag in the title, whereas local news comes with a <state or city> tag more accurately. It might be that some countries are doing federal level moves, but I have a feeling we get a foreigner perception bias as news we see from those countries get the country name appended to the title, even if it is a more local or regional phenomena. In the US for instance there might be similar things to the above, but it would read:

New York considers cryptocurrency tax | Californians lock themselves up to escape prison of daily life | The Suicides in Denver, and the Suicide of Denver

But when it comes from a foreign news source, it might contain the country name in the title, rather!

Again, not sure about SK here, but I’ve been curious how much our perceptions are biased by foreign news reaching us in a way that makes the reader think the entire country is doing something great, or terrible.

If you are reading this from "international" news in English, I'm sorry to say that, but you're being brainwashed and the news rarely correlates to reality.

They are getting it backwards. They are trying to cure the humans, whereas it is a technology problem.

We are in the transition phase towards an inversion of control. The machines have already taken the control but they are still learning how to use their flesh-processor. The smartphone is still making mistakes like over-tiring its human and sending him into unproductive loops.

When the smartphone will reach adulthood, these childish behaviors will naturally stop because having a well domesticated human in good health is much more rewarding.

This is an interesting and creative fantasy but I don't really see how it reflects reality. Unless you think smartphones are powered by esoteric magic and forget that humans build and design every single little function of them, down to the circuit board.

At a high level of abstraction, most of the addictive software is driven by various metrics, getting feedback from the users, and rewards from the environment. Most human cogs building the machine are just following the flow of the algorithm.

Those algorithmic entities have a mind of their own. Humans also have to teach them the right incentives, like you would with a toddler, for them to grow into adults we could live along.

In the meantime, until the human-attention resource is properly managed, humans should probably aim the carrot and the stick at the ones in control.

There is a lot of space to get creative here while embracing progress :

-Instead of punishing the weak human for being addicted, they could for example tax the junk-soft companies in proportion of time spent by addicted users.

-They can also entice the entertainment industry by rewarding them if the students get good grades and sleep well, or make them share the burden if it leads to unemployment, or health expenses.

-Instead of sponsoring non-scaling rehab camps for potentially 30% of the youth population, they could compete by sponsoring game studios that create more positive games/software/distractions.

Behind each level of abstraction lurks a programmer ready to drive a stake in the heart of your vampire.

Who writes the algorithms? Again, you default to magic. I say engineers.

Besides, algorithms are constantly being tweaked to get the outputs needed to charge more for ads. And who is doing that tweaking? Engineers, with direction from executives.

It's already happening. Have you noticed how both Google and Apple introduced features to monitor, control and reduce usage? Classical optimization for long-term gain.

Google is especially in unique position: through biasing search results, videos and ads there are raising compliant humans that are capable enough to have disposable income, but spent it all on "experiences". Have you noticed how in the recent years consumption focus shifted from "possessions" to "experiences"? Google can take the cut from experiences forever, each kind of material thing you sell only once, thus they influence their users to prefer the former.

As a South Korean, I'm obviously biased, but is this not true in other countries?

Do other countries not have teenagers addicted to smartphones?

I can't find a reason why the 'South Korean' part is relevant to the article... can anyone clarify?

It's true everywhere, but I think South Korea is taking action, versus other places where it's been slowly acknowledged as a growing issue, without much in term of response (aside from things like Apple's screen usage tracking). Also there's the bit in the article stating that the problem is more grave in South Korea due to prior societal context. That's subjective, obviously.

I guess you can read it three ways: (1) look how SK is taking this issue seriously, maybe other places should; (2) look at another example of SK's competitive culture exacerbating an issue¹; (3) a combination of both.

¹: Not my opinion/don't have an informed opinion on this.

> South Korea is taking action, versus other places where it's been slowly acknowledged as a growing issue

> Also there's the bit in the article stating that the problem is more grave in South Korea due to prior societal context.

Hmm, definitely not have thought of this way. Thanks for your guidance. :-)

Due to the features like Screen Time, I thought that addiction to smartphones were well known in other places too.

> look at another example of SK's competitive culture exacerbating an issue¹

Hmm, is South Korea's competitive culture well known? That's a bit surprising.

I'm aware of it because I'm interested in the country, but I don't know if it's well known. It pops up in articles about South Korea all the time, which in turn show up on HN quite often, so maybe.

SK competitiveness is second only to Japan and somewhat ahead of Chinese.

USA also is internally competitive though not as openly. (And the growing inequality is stifling it more and more.)

> SK competitiveness is second only to Japan and somewhat ahead of Chinese.

I'd rather say, South Korea's competitiveness is ahead of Japan but second to China.

Japan's competitiveness is definitely lower than Korea, that I'm sure.

> Due to the features like Screen Time, I thought that addiction to smartphones were well known in other places too.

It's a pretty big problem over here too, but it seems normalized, because most parents are just as addicted to their phones. Many give really young kids (2yo) tablets so they can be distracted. You see them sitting in strollers watching youtube while their parents are shopping or even playing with their own phones.

I have a family member who is addicted to their phone. They're failing classes and get really angry when it's taken away. All they do is scroll Instagram all day. Their parents tell me that they can't take it away, because all friends have one too.

Teenagers were addicted to their phones before they were smart! I put the blame on instant messaging, and well, instant culture in general.

The combination of thinking about exactly what one wants to say via text, and then being rewarded (or punished) by an instant reply is very hard to resist.

I think that's stretching it. Texting is just talking with people you know, and the generation that grew up with SMS service didn't grow any more addicted to it than people growing with landlines (c.f. the stereotypical American teenager with a landline phone in their room, talking with their friends for hours).

I blame the mobile Internet as a whole, and image and video sharing sites in particular. Modern social media is just a next iteration, but ever before them, people of all ages got hooked browsing sites with user-generated memes (mostly "demotivators" back then). Intermittent reward only properly kicks in once you have unlimited access to an endless stream of media that you can evaluate and consume in seconds.

> Modern social media is just a next iteration

Jup, and just like every other next iteration, it also increases the attached problems. Up to the point it cannot/shouldn't be ignored anymore.

(Not really targeted at you, but I've seen the "nothing really changed" argument seen used way too often to support "we don't have to do anything" as to not trigger me)

Agreed. I'm just mostly in opposition of the concept that IMs turn conversations into addiction. It's the other uses of smartphones that are the problem.

> I'm just mostly in opposition of the concept that IMs turn conversations into addiction

Why are you so opposed to it?

Yes, IM does provide a lot of value and most people will not become addicted. Yes, other smartphone uses are certainly more problematic for most people. But searching for "SMS addiction" yields quite a bunch of hits, with a lot of them from before the smartphone era. This indicates it to be indeed a problem for some people.

Each case in the self help group for excessive screen based media consumption I visit seemed to have its own unique flavor. Don't think there was anyone with a heavy and exclusive focus on IM among them, yet. Probably cause the audience of this particular program is mostly male. There probably also aren't that much such cases in general. But I can totally see this being the addictive "substance" for some. And heavy users should watch out for detrimental effects on other parts of their life.

Almost every activity can become addictive to some people. There's a difference between that and addiction so pervasive that it becomes a public health concern. I don't think IMs, or before that texting, or before that teenagers spending hours daily talking over landline, reach the latter level.

I conjecture specifically that presenceless messaging systems are more dangerous this way, both because of random reward and because of social risks surrounding attention allocation (engendering the default expectation of always-on). If you don't know when the other party is online, you send messages whenever, and sometimes you get rewarded with immediate feedback. Conversely, if you don't know when they're going to message you, then when they do, you might feel like responding right away is “supposed to be” no big deal for you even if it turns out to crowd out other things. IM where people are visibly only signed in when they're probably ready to chat, or telephone calls where both parties are expected to pay attention or hang up, allow conversations to have more explicit closure that releases attention for other activities.

I am not aware of state-run "detox camps" in other countries.

The title by itself makes it a bit scary (which I guess is the click-baity intent) but the article seems to paint an actually worthy effort.

Yes, I was also worried they go in that direction, due to it being US media.

Western detox camps are state funded as well. Here in germany mostly by pensions office, though that is supposed to change to health insurance after reclassifying internet/gaming addiction as a thing.

I know it isn't technically state-run, but with money comes the rules. E.g. the providers of the 2 internet addiction support groups here berlin are run by religious groups, but I haven't seen a cross anywhere or it impact the treatment.

Just my 2 cents, but in an online smartphone that I play, I notice that koreans are 10 times more fanatical than any other demographic. They seem to have ridiculous amounts of time to play the game on their hands and they take it extremely seriously and are very very competitive. The only other group that I saw that came close were Taiwanese people. The westerners in the game seem a lot less addicted and competitive.

> They seem to have ridiculous amounts of time to play the game on their hands

Maybe due to public transportation? I've heard (but have never been confirmed) that the US/other western countries have poor public transportation system and is very car-centric.

People here spend a big fraction (there are lots of people who spend ~2-3 hrs) in public transportation, and a big chunk of those people are playing mobile games.

> they take it extremely seriously and are very very competitive.

Maybe Korea (& the East Asian countries in general) turns out to have a more competitive culture than the western world.

> The westerners in the game seem a lot less addicted and competitive.

I wouldn't call people 'addicted' just for the reason that they spend lots of time & is competitive in mobile games, but maybe that's also something coming from a cultural difference.

Having very fast LTE everywhere also likely adds to the issue. Even in other rich countries, that is not the case (e.g. in rural areas or on underground trains) so you cannot spend all your time consuming bandwidth heavy applications like video.

I'm a European and I just left Korea after living there for a month. I was absolutely shocked how addicted Koreans seemed to be to their smartphones. I had so many people bump into me because they were watching videos while walking around, on public transport pretty much everyone was staring at their screen, even older people were playing those mundane mobile games. Sure, pretty everyone around the world is addicted to their smartphone nowadays, but I've never seen it as bad as in Korea.

Where in Europe are you based? I'm seeing the exact same behaviour you're describing here in Germany all over the place, all the time, and I think it's a serious problem.

German resident here, around Cologne/Dusseldorf/Bonn. This has not been my observation (Might be due to my social circle bias), unless you are talking about high schoolers. The general population does not seem to have this behaviour.

I live in Koeln (and lived in northern parts of Germany before that) and I just don't see it. There are a couple of people glued to their phones, but the vast majority simply aren't. And this is taking public transportation throughout the day, especially morning and evenings at rush hour. It's far from problematic.

In Hong Kong this is daily life, on public transport everyone is glued to their phones. When walking, people are just walking around like zombies, often bumping into each other because they aren’t paying attention.

Admittedly, I’m on my phone too while on the bus or metro. But when walking I rarely take out my phone.

I'm not young by any stretch of the imagination, but I also consume content on my phone whenever I'm doing mundane tasks that allow for it, such as walking or riding public transportation. (Of course if I'm walking I look up every couple seconds to avoid bumping into people/things.)

I see it as a better use of my time: if I can walk from A to B and catch up on HN, that's better than walking from A to B and spacing out.

But I wouldn't call it addiction, because as soon as the mundane activity is over, I put the phone down.

If it interfered with my work, sleep, safety, or other important aspects of my life (such as for the teenager described the article) then it would be an addiction.

I've seen very few people who can walk and read content on their phones at the same time effectively.

Kenyan here (but currently living stateside), the inverse is seen in cities like Nairobi for one simple reason, high occurrence of petty crimes like phone snatching/muggings will make you think twice about walking around like a zombie staring at your device. Situational awareness is a necessary survival skill.

> Do other countries not have teenagers addicted to smartphones?

I don't know where utility stops and addiction starts (since smartphones are also useful, merely spending a lot of hours on them does not constitute an addiction), but I don't know of anyone that might be smartphone addicted, nor is it a topic in the media (though I don't follow mainstream media that closely). I'm sure some must exist in western Europe as well, but I don't know that we have special programs for them.

The addiction starts when you can't go more than five minutes idly doing nothing without a screen check. Few teenagers can do that these days.

Most of the push for "smartphone" / "computer" addiction come from those countries that are very conservative and have high levels of social control compared to the norm in developed countries.

These countries are going through in a generation the changes that took hundreds of years in Europe - with all that disruption that implies.

Its more about enforcing control of the population and using addiction in this way cheapens other more serious addiction problems.

There are also parallels to other media panics comic's in the 50's satanic DnD in the 80's

Yeah - they have been through that with online gaming and seem to be heroically oblivious to the concept that it isn't addiction but escaping their excessive control any way they can. Because any answer which isn't more control over the youth is unacceptable and you are childish or otherwise a bad person for thinking otherwise. Because it is outside the norm they don't need to justify anything or listen. That isn't just a South Korea thing unfortunately.

I’m not a teenager but I thought it was pretty crazy that the girl at the beginning of the article couldn’t put her phone down to go to sleep.

Like I said, I’m not a teenager, but I don’t think this is how it is in America.

Wait, you never experienced a "just on more level|round|episode"? I certainly did... back 10yrs ago in counter strike, and to an extend even here on HN. Though restarting your computer is a lot harder than unlocking your phone when you lay in bed trying to sleep. I can totally understand people easily & unintentionally training themselves into pathological behavior.

Most other countries don't have free government-sponsored addiction treatment camps for teenage phone use.

Anecdotally, teen phone addiction is just as bad elsewhere, but few or no other governments are addressing this topic as the South Korean one is.

Isn't this just addressing the symptoms, but not the problem itself?

The camp seems to be showing kids that they can do other things than play with their phones, but I don't think outside the premises of the camp they can find people to share similar activities with.

Perhaps the people who should go to camps are those creating and designing software and hardware specifically to keep people coming back to their screens and staying there.

In this case camps to learn that while they can design them that way, not to. Or to help create legislation to change the rules of the market to remove the Nash equilibrium of maximum craving and addiction.

Don't get it. Why not get a real computer?

Korean apartments are tiny

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_bang, which are ubiquitous and cheap

They have to kick out kids after 10pm however

Korean here. The law is widely regarded as a failure, as there were lots of backlashes from both the game industry and the citizens. (PC gaming is one of the most important aspects of Korean culture, so regulating it is widely regarded as a dick move, except for old people and parents with kids to send colleges to.) It was announced in June that the government will gradually abolish this law.

Also, the law wasn’t enforced that well. There are still some PC bangs which don’t kick out teenagers late at night, and those fun-hungry high schoolers will always find a loophole for these kinds of stuff. (For example, the law is impossible to enforce in software, because even with online multiplayer games you can easily make a overseas account through a VPN.)

The problem is that phones are with us all the time, computers aren't. As such, they're more prone to be taken out of a pocket, or from a bed table, etc. They're more accessible, so they're more easy to abuse.

When you're waiting at a train stop, it's easy to pull out your phone and browse. Not so your laptop. Similarly, when you're waiting for your order to arrive at a restaurant, you pull your phone... Quickly, it becomes a reflex to just pull out your phone when there's nothing going on, or when you want to change your mind... then it ends up being when you're in bed about to sleep but want to look something that crossed your mind...

I'm stating the obvious, but your question is kind of weird. It's kind of asking "Don't get it. Why not smoke weed" on an article about alcoholism.

> Quickly, it becomes a reflex to just pull out your phone when there's nothing going on, or when you want to change your mind...

This is me, unfortunately. I need to get rid of this urge, but it's s damn hard. I'm glad I banned phones from the bedroom, I really seem to be able to fall asleep much better, most times. But in all the other scenarios, that's me, pulling out my phone to have something to do. I can't even remember what I used to do while waiting for stuff. Then again, I've had smart phones for the past 13 years, so that's pretty much all of my grown up life.

Buy a dumbphone with wifi hotspot. Remove sim card from smartphone and use it only over wifi. Consider which apps you actually can use on web browser on your computer instead of your smartphone. Leave smartphone at the office/home/car unless you really need smartphone with you.

Google authenticator...

Yeah, this is the type of stuff that gets in the way. Also, I really like the fact that modern phones have great cameras.

None of this is impossible to get around though, I could get a small camera and there are alternatives to Google Auth.

I switched to an unihertz atom and couldn't be happier. It is too painful to use normally - but you can indeed use if absolutely necessary. Has been a godsend.

They are poor - in relative terms.

"What's a computer?"

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