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Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

> The original article makes me sad that people a few years younger than me are so addicted to this screen that 3 days away is as difficult and mind-boggling for them as 3 days without booze is for me.

This is the same argument that has been used for generations. Our parents were addicted to rock music, before that it was something else, and you can go as far back as socrates to say they preferred "chatter" to exercise.

Why is 3 days without any screens such a big deal. Not all screens are the same. 3 days of doomscrolling on instagram is not the same as watching an hour of a movie or a tv series, or using youtube for guitar lessons. Why is not going 3 days without screens an addiction, but not going 3 days without reading a book not an addiction?

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No, those aren't the same things at all. Your parents weren't listening to rock music while saying "I know this is bad for me and I want to stop, but can't."

Comparisons of social media to alcohol and tobacco are apt, it is something that's both harmful and difficult to quit. Rock music and books are not similar.

Well, if you spend your time listening to rock music instead of working or if you spend all your money on drug-fueled concerts, it might be a problem. Just browsing on social media in itself does not hurt you at all. Excessive use and addiction is the problem. Same with books: They're usually seen as good, but just reading fantasy books all day is still not a great way to spend your time.

Now, obviously rock music and books probably have less addictive design than social media, but it's still true: Once it starts negatively impacting your live, it becomes a problem.

But the comparison isn't social media, it's "all screens". I'm definitely more on the side of social media platforms being problematic, but claiming BBC dramas are as bad as TikTok feeds is just nonsense.

> Rock music and books are not similar.

The issue isn't rock music, or dancing, or books. It's an older generation claiming that the way that they experienced things is better than the way the the current generation are, and they're worse off for it, and the younger generation just need to take their word for it (which is exactly what the commentor I've been replying to keeps saying).

> Why is not going 3 days without screens an addiction, but not going 3 days without reading a book not an addiction?

Because books are not (yet) generally authored by sociopaths working at social media companies, altering what you see to maximise "engagement".

> Because books are not (yet) generally authored by sociopaths working at social media companies, altering what you see to maximise "engagement".

You're making the same mistake that OP is; conflating screens and social media. How is watching one hour of Line of Duty/Better Call Saul a day worse than reading 3-4 hours of any of the hundreds of nonsense romance novels that are published every year. Also, if you think that book publishing is exempt from the abusive marketing/psychology tactics, you're sorely mistaken.

> How is watching one hour of Line of Duty/Better Call Saul a day worse than reading 3-4 hours of any of the hundreds of nonsense romance novels

Watching doesn't require imagination. It doesn't activate the creative part of the brain that even the most idiotic dime store novel requires to interpret. That's how. Again, this isn't new; it was standard knowledge taught to children in the 1960s-1980s as to why television was mind-rot.

That is such complete and utter nonsense. And lots of things taught to children over the years have been complete and utter nonsense.

Yes, at some level, you can sit in front of a mindless sitcom or reality show half-asleep and not engage at all. But there are plenty of TV shows and movies that require active engagement to even know what's going on. The idea that printed material occupies some higher plane than video material because it requires turning a page doesn't make a lot of sense.

imagination is not the same thing as visualisation. If you look at many modern TV shows, video games, and movies and only see what is explicitly put in front of you, that's on you, not the medium.

Having one foot in both eras - pre and post internet screens - I can clearly see that no activity that existed before (TV, "rock music", radio shows) was anywhere near as addictive for me as the crack cocaine of smart phone apps. And I'm relatively inoculated against it. Relatively: Compared to people who never knew the world before.

Our parents weren't "addicted" to rock music. Reading a book is, objectively, infinitely better for your mind than watching even the most erudite educational video on YouTube, for the simple reason that you're required to visualize the content for yourself. This was common knowledge during the TV era. The only thing that made TV not the end of reason was that it was a large object that children couldn't drag with them everywhere.

No, it's not just an "old man" generational thing. The people raised in the smart phone era are different. This is a qualitatively different technology, a far more invasive and all-encompassing form of media than anything that's existed before, and it distorts the basic elements of what it means to be human, namely: *How one encounters others, how one encounters nature, and how one encounters oneself*. Three fundamental discoveries that are lost when they are discovered "for you" via a constant stream of videos, podcasts, news feeds, texts and blog posts in your pocket.

For the first time, it's possible to imagine a human who never discovers any of the basic things about life; who lives from cradle to grave being shown images of kangaroos and dolphins, watching shows about lovers and wars, without ever actually experiencing any of them, and being satiated with the constant flood of images presented, dying with no knowledge of anything besides the shadows on the cave wall. That is a fundamental shift in what we do as a society with human capital, what we teach children, and what it means to be an adult; and this is visible throughout every aspect of our current decline as a civilization. Listen to an interview on YouTube with random people on the street in 1960, on any subject, and you will hear voices from blue-collar high school educated people that are more eloquent - by habit of learning to communicate directly with others - than the most gifted podcasters are today.

So no, the difference here is not just "rock and roll" versus "big band". Or even printing press versus handwritten scrolls. It's a cheapening and denuding of the human landscape; and I say this as someone who spent most of my life building the systems that contributed to it and, superficially, am mostly enmeshed in it, understand it, and don't believe it should rob us of authenticity. But it does.

Rock and roll never robbed anyone of authentic experience. Neither did reading a book.

This is a nice post to read but it's utter nonsense.

> anywhere near as addictive for me as the crack cocaine of smart phone apps.

There's a big difference between smart phone apps and screens, you've just said it yourself. I don't think there's any argument that modern apps are destructive to many people, but the rest of your post is really just not understanding how anyone can have a view point that isn't yours.

> For the first time, it's possible to imagine a human who never discovers any of the basic things about life; who lives from cradle to grave being shown images of kangaroos and dolphins, watching shows about lovers and wars, without ever actually experiencing any of them,

Complete rubbish. Books have been giving that experience for generations. TV shows have been providing that experience for 50+ years.

> Rock and roll never robbed anyone of authentic experience. Neither did reading a book.

As much as you think this is a unique thought, this is what your parents generation thought about the decisions you made. Nonsense like what you're claiming here has been spouted about music, video games,TV shows, movies, dancing, music, etc.

> As much as you think this is a unique thought, this is what your parents generation thought about the decisions you made. Nonsense like what you're claiming here has been spouted about music, video games,TV shows, movies, dancing, music, etc.

No, I maintain that there's a qualitative difference between screens and books.

"Screens" includes video games. Which are a model that encourages one person to sacrifice their life and time trying to decipher someone else's creation. RPGs are the same way. Yes, books can be treated this way, but only by zealots. The average person did not spend 8-12 hours a day reading books as an escape, at any time in history. That wouldn't be considered healthy.

Screens can deliver good things -- they actually did, when they were liberated for content in the 90s and weren't just feeding distraction to the masses. That's long gone.

You think you see what I'm saying because you've been told that any attack on the media environment you're accustomed to is just a reactionary howl like older generations always have. But I have no primary issue with Tiktok or Instagram. I have a problem with what I've literally witnessed them do to people's minds. And I have 40+ years of firsthand data collected as to how absolutely fucking melted people have become as the juggernaut of mass-social-media and smartphones has progressed to become a constant habit.

All you have is an objection on the grounds that every generation thinks things were better before. But you have no proof (and can't prove) that the time you're living in is not intellectually inferior. You would have had to actually been alive before to know that.

> The average person did not spend 8-12 hours a day reading books as an escape, at any time in history. That wouldn't be considered healthy.

You've pulled numbers out of the air, and conflated the topics _again_. Taking your number at face value, that screen time generally includes work time, and doubles up on time (internet plus TV). It's also not an average person spending 8 hours a day as an escape. Finally, I think you're misremembering the past here, at least my experience was that people _did_ read and watch TV for the majority of their leisure time. I can't speak for a time before TV unfortunately.

Yet again, you're conflating screens and social media apps. You say screens are unhealthy (well, the modern kinds, not the kinds that you had in the 90s), but only talk about TikTok, and not youtube channels like JustinGuitar, This Old House, Serious Eats, etc etc. I don't think anyone here (and I certainly am not) is claiming that the amount of time spent on Instagram/Snapchat/TikTok is healthy (who knows, I might be eating those words in 10 years), but this fear mongering is _exactly_ the same as the video game propaganda that came out 30 years ago. Unfortunately, I'm finding google hard to wrangle today on this topic, but here's an argument from 12 years ago [0] that pretty much makes the same complaints about video games that you're making about TikTok here.

> And I have 40+ years of firsthand data ... You would have had to actually been alive before to know that.

1) You're assuming my age here. 2) Your argument boils down to the same argument that has been made by every generation for 2000 years. "Your elders know better because of experience, so trust me" _My_ experience with people who play this card play it because it's their only card. And after all, I should know, I have 30+ years of experience of people telling me that.

[0] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/duncan-smith-games-ar...

>> Unfortunately, I'm finding google hard to wrangle today on this topic

That's because Google sucks now, and the web sucks, and the entire ecosystem has quietly morphed from what it was 15 years ago into a dead botnet flying through space, populated by zombies. But based on your argument, that's just my nostalgia talking.

Your 30+ years means you were 14 when the iphone came out. I was 24. Although I wholly embraced the coolness of the technology, my thoughts, opinions and habits for conversing with other humans had already been fully formed. When I was 14, I was the only kid in my class who owned a modem.

Can't you kind of see that it's unusual, unprecedented, for all communication to suddenly flow through a new wall-to-wall ecosystem, mostly privately owned, (including the screens) going from nothing to full saturation within 10 years?

It's not the same argument as every generation. It's not about the fashion, style, sound, art, literature (fuck, I wish there was literature). What has been lost to people born since ~1990 and definitely since 2000 is, essentially, the ability to conduct themselves in any fashion outside of a machine-mediated setting. If that's not unprecedented, I don't know what is.

> That's because Google sucks now, and the web sucks, and the entire ecosystem has quietly morphed from what it was 15 years ago into a dead botnet flying through space, populated by zombies. But based on your argument, that's just my nostalgia talking.

You're doing what you've done in all of your other comments; your building a strawman. The quality of google search results declining doesn't mean the web sucks, and I'm not blaming your nostalgia on that one, I'm blaming your attempt at building an emotive argument to a point that I'm not making.

> Your 30+ years means you were 14 when the iphone came out. I was 24.

The iPhone came out in 2007, not 2002. I was giving you the benefit of the doubt up to this point, but it's pretty clear that you're not arguing in good faith; you're building strawmen and tearing them down.

> Can't you kind of see that it's unusual, unprecedented, for all communication to suddenly flow through a new wall-to-wall ecosystem, mostly privately owned, (including the screens) going from nothing to full saturation within 10 years?

The goalposts are so far from where we started here that we're playing different sports. To answer your question, it's completely bizarre, and likely dangerous. Again I ask, what does that have to do with an addiction to screens and technology? Why is the content that they're publishing so much worse than the utter drivel generated by Fox News, the Daily Express, etc.

> literature (fuck, I wish there was literature)

now _this_ is your nostalgia talking. There is still excellent quality books being published, there are other forms of storytelling (podcasts, video games, movies) which are definitely not perfect, but neither was buying books at any time ever. For every To Kill a mockingbird, Lolita or The Road, there are hundreds if not thousands of terrible, forgettable books. The same is true of other mediums.

> the ability to conduct themselves in any fashion outside of a machine-mediated setting

That's not what's happening at all, and believing that it is is falling into the trap I've been talking about all along. People spending time in front of screens doesn't mean they can't conduct themselves outside of the worlds of technology. Young(er) people (than me) are still travelling, taking gap years, experiencing festivals, drugs, rediscovering theater, food, drink, etc. I'm not sure where you live (no need to share of course) but in my city there are numerous food markets where the majority of the attendees are under 35s (the demographic I fall into) experiencing a variety of things the world has to offer, prepared by people the same age as them and shared as an experience.

I've been following this thread and I have to agree with noduerme.

Despite the truisms that each generation tends to think things are going to hell, this time they really are going to hell.

A life unmediated by machines is qualitatively different from one that is. Books, TV, video games were self limiting compared to the modern internet—especially social media—delivered via smartphones. Why?

1. Because they change the way we acquire knowledge. Anyone who has taken trips to foreign countries before smartphones and GPS would have been forced to talk to _people_. We had paper maps and guidebooks (Lonely Planet, my ass it's today's planet that seems lonely), but when those didn't match the reality on the ground, we were forced to ask people. Now we can all go along in our own little bubbles with our phones and experience things without talking to people.

2. It is reducing our connection to our bodies and bringing us up into our heads even more. To live a full life means to be in contact with the physical world, and to act within it.

3. As has been said above, the incentives of the makers of smartphone apps are almost always at odds with living a meaningful life. The apps almost always will try to increase your engagement with your phone, and because time isn't infinite, this means decreasing your engagement with life.

4. Because of the portability, smartphones are omnipresent. Some people even check them while they sleep.

And the sad thing is that, yes, it takes people who have lived almost their entire lives outside of the 'app' ecosystem to tell younger people this.

The apps and the phone and the habit of using them all the time have changed you developmentally. You can't see the water your swimming in, but there are some of us who still can.

>> Because they change the way we acquire knowledge. Anyone who has taken trips to foreign countries before smartphones and GPS would have been forced to talk to _people_.

This is such an excellent point, because it starts to bring into focus the really terrible problem of smartphones: There's nowhere to escape. The minds you encounter now, of people of any age, whose brain-meat is capable of looking you in the eye and not checking their phone for 5 minutes, are rare. It is lonelier than it was when Lonely Planet was the dog-eared guidebook. Even then, I prided myself on not checking guide books before I went. That attitude's been lost (and more importantly, the adventure and discovery has been lost) because it's virtually impossible to avoid seeing the weather and being sold ads in your pocket the moment you buy a ticket anywhere. That particular experience of traveling, meeting people, having unplanned experiences, getting lost in the world -- it really encapsulates all of the things we've lost to this hypnotic online lifestyle in one fell swoop. And it's so central to the human experience, it's fuckin terrifying to me what these new human-bots are going to be like without understanding or sympathy for it.

>> You can't see the water your swimming in

Neither can any of us. But I'm glad my folks banned me from watching too much TV, and told me it would rot my brain. I'm pretty disgusted with the Yuppie generation that raised children by handing them smartphones to stop them from crying, and never checked in to see if their kids were being raised to think or not.

I still find those people, look in the eyes of another new human and learn things. It's just hard, and when you meet them it's like meeting someone in a wasteland. You're just happy to see each other. But hey, I was at a bar a few nights ago and chatting with a girl and her boyfriend who were very shy, but she told me about her art show (all promoted online) and I said I'd bring some friends. And as I walked away I heard her say, "see?! What did I tell you! Going out and meeting people in person!"

And... yeah, I'm sad.

> Books, TV, video games were self limiting compared to the modern internet—especially social media—delivered via smartphones.

So make that argument against social media on smartphones, not against all screens, and modern media only being "feeding distraction to the masses" (a direct quote from noduerme).

> Anyone who has taken trips to foreign countries before smartphones and GPS would have been forced to talk to _people_

Speaking slowly and loudly in english at someone in a small french village asking for the bakery isn't something that we should mourn losing. The meme of loud americans/english travelling to places and expecting everyone to speak english predates most people on this thread, and was the reality for most people.

> To live a full life means to be in contact with the physical world, and to act within it.

There is nothing about modern media formats - tv, video games, many parts of the internet, that stop you from doing so. As a child, I grew up watching TV programmes, playing games and reading books that inspired me to explore and take on new experiences. I'm never going to go wild camping in yosemite, and that's fine, but I was never going to do that in a pre-smartphone world either.

> apps almost always will try to increase your engagement with your phone, and because time isn't infinite, this means decreasing your engagement with life.

This is not a tautology. it only decreses engagement if you min max your life (which would be at odds with what you're saying).

> You can't see the water your swimming in, but there are some of us who still can.

To use your analogy, you can't see that the water you're swimming in is the same water your parents were swimming in when they were telling you the same thing about <whatever>.

> Speaking slowly and loudly in english at someone in a small french village asking for the bakery isn't something that we should mourn losing.

So don't shout then, and god forbid, maybe learn some French?

English isn't my fist language, and yet here I am talking to you.

This post and the subsequent thread are great. Sadly, HN is part of my internet/screens addiction, but it is nice to step aside and reflect on how life has changed between pre and post internet. Thanks for you well thought out comment.

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