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Comment by pcr910303 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

> 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 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.

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.

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