Using a phone is like going to the library, what you do there is what actually matters. Checking social media can be thought of as asking a librarian what new books are in. If you're asking every minute of every hour for 8 hours, then I can see that being a problem. But that's not really how people use the phone. You check email, you read news articles, you look at posts from friends on fb or instagram, you interact with people in a comments section, you take or share pictures, you have music or video essays playing to help you focus on work, you message coworkers, coordinate a meetup in a group chat, among other things.
I don't find it comparable to being a couch potato and watching TV all day. That analogy falls apart because watching TV isn't an interactive exercise.
Yes, for the technologically-not-literate people that I know, Internet = social media, and they totally spend every waking hour refresh the page to see "what's new". I used to do that on reddit.
>check email, you read news articles, you look at posts from friends on fb or instagram, you interact with people in a comments section, you take or share pictures, you have music or video essays playing to help you focus on work, you message coworkers, coordinate a meetup in a group chat, among other things.
Half of this thing are mental garbage, the other half are FOMO and outrage economy, so not doing them may result in a positive outcome.
I also should clarify that I don't categorize reddit as social media because it's generally not people I know. I would consider fb, insta, snapchat as social media but not YouTube, reddit, or even here.
This reminds more of somewhere in between. Like stumbleupon but with a comment section where you can discuss things.
I am only differentiating because I believe the motivation for refreshing news aggregation sites vs social media is different. There's a much higher sense of urgency and importance when it's news. What you find interesting is also different between social media and news.
I think having a catch all term of being on the phone is not productive in helping people understand when the use of technology becomes unhealthy. Calling technology use unhealthy or even an addiction based on the perception of how long you spend is meaningless.
I agree that for some people using technology less would be positive, most often because they stop using technology to escape and ignore their responsibilities.
I don't know how fair it is to say it's garbage, some people like watching terrible films, some watch reality tv, some like video games, some like learning baseball stats, some like collecting NFTs, some like following twitter drama, I personally enjoy this kind of discourse on HN. How people choose to spend their time and what they enjoy is up to them.
I don't personally believe in the idea that constant stimulation is a bad thing as long as my responsibilities are taken care of. But I also have adhd so I don't know if everyone would share that sentiment.
At first I thought "who cares?" But then I found myself in want of browsing the (few) people I follow, and eventually did submit an ID to have my account restored.
I get nothing out of Twitter. Absolutely zero value. Still, apparently, I can't live without it. That's a problem.
Knowing nothing about you, the way this sentence is put is the most disturbing part. If you can’t live without it, at least it fills a hole in your life and that’s as much value as you could expect from anything.
How many things do you do in a day where you can put a crystal clear value on it? I mean, I’m writing this and I’d be hard press to come with a valuation, and I also don’t think it matters much if I don’t find any.
If looking at Twitter reduced your life expectancy by 25% we’d look at it differently, but from your description it doesn’t feels so.
…as I sit here on my phone at 1 am, responding to comments on HN for no particular reason other than worthless internet points, I guess, moderately depressed and anxious, despite having an objectively pretty great life.
If the people you follow stopped posting on twitter at the same time you changed your birthday, would you have cared about getting it restored? Valuing and caring about tweets people have sent isn't the same as being addicted to twitter. Maybe the problem is how much you value seeing those tweets the moment they are tweeted.
That’s what made me quit Facebook. Best decision ever. I do miss the random international friend update from time to time, but nothing vital.
Still working on Twitter.
During the pandemic, my internet usage has been through the roof. At all hours of the day I'm online. It's really my only regular social outlet. It's weird how quickly norms change around you.
I remember someone here on HN once commented something about how the Amish instead of just categorically opposing all new technologies decide collectively which technologies to use and take into consideration how the technology might affect their culture and communities and this has lead them to reject things like the television and cars. I can't find any more realiable sources on this, but it sure seems like a much better way to build the society than ours is.
The "free" Western cultures are increasingly vulnerable to hacking of either human psychology or collective customs and laws. It's like a code base where every new commit automatically gets accepted and only occasionally some commits get reverted because someone managed to prove without doubt that it was a bad idea. To continue the metaphor, this sort of project management might make sense when the code base (or the civilization) is new and the focus is on just getting something running as quickly as possible, but makes the code base (or the cultural heritage of a society) bloated, unmanageable and vulnerable to attacks over longer time periods.
If I wanted to quit a drug addiction, I could probably find a sober community to try to bond with, and you can do stuff that doesn't involve drugs.
But it doesn't feel like there is a real-life world left for me to return to. If I turned off the Internet, I'd be even more alone than I am being on the Internet talking to people all day.
I can't imagine what withdrawal would be cause I can barely conceive of not immediately lighting up again every couple minutes
We aren't addicted to having to use cars in suburban towns. But some can argue that people's legs aren't used like they were used to and we should all embrace biking or running everywhere. Not to mention traffic, pollution, road accidents. There's articles written in the last five years that use the term car addiction to describe modern population's necessity of cars for travel. https://www.credit-suisse.com/about-us-news/en/articles/news...
I think most people realized that the term internet and game addiction is most often used by people who simply don't understand the culture surrounding the internet or gaming.
Isn't that a bit like saying if everyone takes drugs, nobody is a drug addict? "Adapting to the changing times where everybody is on heroin doesn't make people junkies" -- but yes, that's exactly what it makes them.
There must be people studying actual internet and game addiction, but it won’t make headlines as much as it will be for actual pathological behaviors, affecting the few people that need actual treatment.
The same way we’ll probably have a flurry of “VR addiction” panic articles in the next years, that dies down when we get to better understand the topic.
The media itself has an attention span of a small child in its pursuit of ratings so they move onto the next emotional source.