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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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