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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a good message, but by making the phone the problem I fear the author misses a fundamental connection to the youth he addresses.

The issue is what you do on a phone, not the phone itself.

In fact, phones make it a lot easier to create and not just consume, than televisions did back in the author's youth. And I bet there were similar anti-TV op-eds in newspapers in those days that the author would have rolled his eyes at.

The message should've been to create more and consume less. A phone let's you do either, the device is hardly related at all. You can't see what a person is doing when they're bent over their phone.

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> The message should've been to create, not consume.

This needs to be said more and more with each passing year. I became aware of this phenomenon back in the early 2000s, with Facebook gaining popularity among my friends, and blogs were gradually losing steam -- people aren't creating anymore, but simply consuming media, and therein lies the problem: how can you express independent thought when your media consumption habits dictate your beliefs?

Nah. People are more creative now than they have ever been. You just haven't followed them to the new platforms. On the Internet, go check out SoundCloud and YouTube and Instagram and TikTok and Open Source communities. Off the Internet, go check in with your local independent radio, theatre communities, and maker spaces. Creativity is exploding. People haven't stagnated; you have.

Can we quantify this?

..create, not consume

A nice essay on this was posted to HN last year.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20781463

Create what exactly? I'm under the impression that you can hardly create anything on a phone except for cat movies and shopping lists.

You're already looking too deeply into this. Just create, call yourself a creator and call your output content. Don't think about it too much.

Got it, I'm a creator of comment-section content.

Now you're ready for merchandising.

You joke, but there's an actual market for that on Reddit.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_phone_novel

I think some indie movies as well, but don’t have a handy reference on my phone.

You can create your base of knowledge by watching courses and reading articles and books instead of hanging on tiktok all day long, I guess.

One example: there are phone apps which simulate a piano keyboard, so you can create and record music (or at least jot down chord/melody ideas) while out and about.

Get some talented people together, and you can do some pretty good looking movies. E.g., "Snowbrawl" [1]. Here's a "making of" for that [2] showing the equipment used.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cM8DcCoZulw

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAJwbyu-2mE

While you're right, the addictiveness of social media makes it extremely difficult to self-regulate once exposed to something that gets you hooked.

The phone as a device appears to definitely be biased towards consumption rather than production. Another message to add about creativity: don't forget about building real physical things. It is great to have digital wealth, but we also need physical stuff and society seems more and more detached from the creation of this physical stuff, which strikes me as a worrying trend.

> It is great to have digital wealth, but we also need physical stuff and society seems more and more detached from the creation of this physical stuff, which strikes me as a worrying trend.

I’m sorry, what exactly is “digital wealth” supposed to mean?

wealth - plentiful supplies of a particular resource

digital - involving or relating to the use of computer technology

In this context, they presumably mean the abundance of resources that exist solely or primarily in the digital realm. Social media, Youtube, streaming services, and software / data in general as opposed to physical things like cars, houses, consumer goods, etc.

> The issue is what you do on a phone, not the phone itself.

Now try that with tobacco. Indeed, in a very technical sense of the word, cigarettes nor mobile phones are not the issue. But telling people "just stop smoking" didn't do the trick.

> The issue is what you do on a phone, not the phone itself.

Are you sure?

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

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