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Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

We'll forever be addicted to the shared global (or interplanetary at some point) information network, but the phone itself won't be needed forever. I don't think there's a way to get a human to not want to know what other people think about stuff or to more generally get information for free in real time. This plus access to computational power is a pretty good combo.

If the interface is a brain chip or a phone or whatever, it doesn't matter.

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People complain all the time about "being addicted to our phones" but my memory of the world pre-smartphone was that newspapers and magazines were everywhere and frankly...I'm not really seeing the difference - in quality or content.

Because while "the newspaper" was always considered respectable...that's ignoring the endless mounds of gossip magazines, fashion magazines, lifestyle...basically every category which has now moved to Instagram and YouTube. People went somewhere and it was expected that there'd be magazines and newspapers to read.

People didn't pull out a magazine while in a group and read an article for 5 minutes. a bus wouldn't be literally filled with nothing but people reading magazines and books, nobody punished their children by taking their magazines away.

We did have, say, "portable entertainment". music players were kinda similar to this too, but yeah there is a massive difference.

> a bus wouldn't be literally filled with nothing but people reading magazines and books

https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditThroughHistory/comments/1rkhx...

I'm sorry but I don't care about some specific photo somewhere at some point. I don't even think this site leans young enough to ignore the fact that what is displayed on that photo was simply not the norm at all.

https://brendenmulligan.com/in-1950-i-doubt-anyone-ever-chec...

>I just wanted to share the above photo of a subway car from 1947 where every single person, even though they’re in a confined space together, aren’t paying any attention to each other because they’re reading media on a newspaper. The recent version of this is, of course, cellphones and iPads, yet the same people out there who hate change continue to cry foul.

Slight difference is that:

1) everybody read pretty much the same content. And not highly curated personalized content. So if you did strike a conversation with someone you’d have some common ground.

2) When starting said conversation the newspaper didn’t keep vibrating in your fingers or making sounds begging your attention back to it and you didn’t experience the FOMO of not giving said attention to it.

In other words. Sense of community was easier to establish and the artificial attention grabbers weren’t there for the social aspect of our beings to come between us as we try to do that social thing our species is known for.

Also, it was when much content was meaningful. Scientific American was interesting. Popular mechanics had actual mechanical projects. Computer magazines were all adds but even the adds were showing amazing things full of real potential. Now corprat curated content is much cheaper empty calories.

There is great content but you have to dig and sometimes I am just to tired from real life.

I used to carry a book with me everywhere. If I was standing in line at the store, I read my book, doctor’s office? read my book. And yes, when I was younger my parents would punish me by taking my book away. The phone has just made it more convenient to carry books around with me.

Too many books in ones pocket is for many a curse, ending up reading none. For a minority of with very much self control and determination tough, it probably is a super power to have a library in the pocket.

You are mistaken. I distinctly remember attending gatherings with friends of my parents’ when I was a kid (1980s). At some point in the night, usually after dinner, someone would pull out the latest issue of “People” or “Cosmopolitan” and narrate their favorite article(s) to the rest of the group.

Now, this is much more communal than you posited but if that was happening I have no doubt people were sneaking an article or two while out with friends.

When paperback books came out they too were looked at with disdain. Too inexpensive to produce, therefore not trustworthy. Too easy for anyone to read, anytime. They were designed to fit into pockets. Then, even cheaper and disposable comics were created. They were taken away by parents for being junk, a waste of time. Then they got rebranded as graphic novels in order to give them more legitimatcy.

Other people have shown pictures of people reading in the bus, but here's the other thing: it was (and still is!) common to read a magazine or newspaper when you're out in a group for casual outings like a casual coffee, breakfast or even dinner with the family, lunch or coffee break with co-workers in a restaurant. It was often the only time you had to read the newspaper (unless you're were commuting by bus, hah!).

Kids would have coloring books or comics. Disinterested teens would have a book. I remember my grandmother carrying a crosswords puzzle, Stanley-style.

Sure it's not something you would do in an occasion where you're expected to keep conversation, like a social living room visit, a fancier diner, a sales call, a date or a birthday party. But even in special occasions with the extended family would be totally normal to excuse yourself to go read a newspaper or something if the rest of the people were engaged in conversation you're not interested in.

I think push notifications and dark patterns would be better examples. A bus in any year could be filled with people reading, writing, playing solitary games, and conversing with people they knew. Parents punished children by taking reading material they disapproved. And denying music, games, and social activities.

> People didn't pull out a magazine while in a group and read an article for 5 minutes

Are you being sarcastic? I'm 57 and I recall they absolutely DID do those things in the 70's and 80's. Trains and station platforms? Google some photos!

I mean, it's even a trope that a private detective, trying to go unnoticed in a group of people, would pull out a newspaper...

While in a group as in, meeting 5 friends and ignoring them to read stuff instead, not as in "somewhere with more people".

I recall it was perfectly common for a group of us to be sat around a table, or on a sofa or somewhere and somebody might drop out of the conversation and take out a magazine or a book, crossword or whatever (in fact Game&Watch and others were a thing back then too) while the rest of us chatted. They might say "I'm still listening", or one of us might bat it out of their hands or something too.

> a bus wouldn't be literally filled with nothing but people reading magazines and books

Laughably wrong.

> nobody punished their children by taking their magazines away.

Also wrong, but less laughably so, as this happened to me (well, with books) :P

People might listen to a radio while driving, or have a TV show on while eating dinner or chatting with friends, magazines/newspapers might be expected at doctor's offices.

We didn't dip in and out of personalized media feeds throughout the day, getting bombarded with what's happening right this minute with our family, friends, city, state, nation, celebrities, industries, hobbies, etc... everything was slower, people seemed more methodical and present.

While it's true that there were always ways to entertain oneself, I'd argue that the the ease of consumption (or alternatively, "effort required to consume") and potency of the effect on dopaminergic networks in the brain have increased _dramatically_. And unfortunately, it turns out that this kind of entertainment is directly related to the biggest money firehose that humanity has ever invented: targeted advertising.

Which means that the world's most powerful algorithms have a strong incentive to optimize both of those variables. Great for the people in control of the algorithms and content networks, not so good for the people who are suddenly exposed to a very powerful "drug" that they were not prepared to keep at bay.

> And unfortunately, it turns out that this kind of entertainment consumption is directly related to the biggest money firehose that humanity has ever invented: targeted advertising

I'm not convinced they target any better than the newspapers. I'm British and FB's targeting showed me an ad for how to renounce "Your US Citizenship for tax purposes", local news for a city I've never been to in Florida, and my response to the Brexit referendum result was to move to Berlin yet FB is showing me UK-specific ads. YouTube is no better, showing me an ad fronted by Nigel Farage, and a lot of obvious scams that couldn't (at the time) be reported. Twitter, back when it was that, classified me as being interested in three languages I can't speak and spectator sports I've never once watched.

It is of course possible that I'm merely weird enough that the optimisers can't figure me out. Anecdotes don't make for good datasets.

>People complain all the time about "being addicted to our phones" but my memory of the world pre-smartphone was that newspapers and magazines were everywhere and frankly...I'm not really seeing the difference - in quality or content.

I have to vehemently disagree with this one. Since the advent of Twitter, news has become "who is first" over "who is most accurate", and it has become a cancer on all of mankind. The quality was so much better it's almost difficult to describe to someone who is under the age of 30.

I can't even imagine something like Watergate happening today, and if it did it would have had nowhere near the impact because half the US population would've been seeing Russian misinformation on Twitter convincing them it was all a "deep state conspiracy" and they'd believe it.

There was always a "who is first" element to the news, but it seems categorically different when "first" was a full day rather than minutes. And it meant you were roundly shamed if you got it wrong, because everyone else had a chance to refute it during the publication cycle.

I recently subscribed to a newspaper as in printed on paper and delivered to my mailbox once a week. It's pretty interesting experience. Main thing about it is it's finitness. There is only so much information in the weekly issue. It's deliberately slow. It's local and it's more than 140 symbols too.

Finite feeds are something I really miss. I can never finish reading modern social media, more content is always loaded for me.

There is so much obvious stuff to do when not refreshing the feed:

- playing video games;

- reading a book;

- going for a walk;

- preparing food;

- looking out of the window;

- calling people on the phone;

- doing drugs;

Literally anything is better than the default option of mindlessly taking the the thing out of the pocket and diving into entropy.

I see the difference when I drive home - so many people looking at phones when driving instead of paying attention to the road.

There is a difference in scale - smartphones give access to a much wider array of content, even if you were to carry around a television and 20 newspapers.

There is also an important difference in kind - internet connected devices are bidirectional, which allows bad actors to implement addictive patterns that aren’t possible with one-directional media.

A big part of McLuhan’s idea of “the medium is the message” is that consuming the same content via two different mediums is not the same.

> my memory of the world pre-smartphone was that newspapers and magazines were everywhere

May I add... Television!

There were more real world options. Roller skating rinks, malls (a sign of the online world to come but still real world), water skiing. Also, there was real content in a lot of the older media (Scientific American,Popular Mechanics pre 90s for example) even television news showed some actual news. It just all went from some actual content, expensive, fraught with difficulties to get right (what is truth anyway), to empty calories, cheap, easy to produce, and just more profitable.

In my experience the older styles media were consumed in "down time" even if it was for a minute or two at work. People (in my memory, I'm 50+yo) did more real life things. There were malls, movie theaters, skating rings, box stores. These were a herald of things to come on the internet.

This was also the last days of interesting Popular Mechanics and Scientific American.

There was also more standing around literally doing nothing and waiting.

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