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Thumb Nation: How We Learned to Play with Our Fingers

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26 pointsecliptik8 comments

How about people who enter text into their phone by swiping across an on-screen keyboard to form words? Are we the new generation or the old generation? How prevalent are we among mobile phone users?

I find it quaint to see thumb-typists in action, since I feel finger-swiping is faster and less demanding. Yet also wonder how they manage to do it on modern, nearly-edgeless phone screens where it would seem to be so easy to accidentally touch the edge of the screen while you're thumb typing.

My phone-typing origin story is probably atypical. Though I've used cell phones for twenty years, for most of those years I actively avoided typing on the phone, since I hated the experience so much. I usually tried to wait until I could connect the phone to a computer and a keyboard to type messages or tried to send the shortest message possible when urgency made typing on the phone unavoidable. After swipable phone keyboards appeared, though, I became a little more open to entering text into my phone by swiping. However, I still type in most messages by connecting my phone to a computer with a keyboard.

I don’t know why but swiping hurts my old joints and thumb typing does not.

Weird article, in my experience it's the other way around and the article kinda explains why:

Old people grew up with thumb based gaming consoles, e.g. the Game Boy, whereas people 20 years old or younger grew up with smart phones as their gaming devices and thus use their index finger.

This makes perfect sense, given that the thumb is the least dexterous finger: People around 40 might be the first and last thumb generation.

> This makes perfect sense, given that the thumb is the least dexterous finger

I disagree on this. For an item you are looking at, the thumb's range of motion covers the most area, and the joint angles of the thumb means it has more degrees of freedom of movement across that area. An index finger can be more precise but a thumb can reach more positions.

> However, it’s easy to identify who was an early user of mobile phones versus new users mostly by the way they type with the keyboard: Newer users type with their thumbs.

I don’t understand this. I’m not a newer user and not only do I type with my thumbs but I can’t imagine how to do it otherwise, nor have I seen anyone do so. Can someone clue me in?

Edit: do they mean like index finger typing? Is that a thing early adopters do?!

I use smartphones (including typing) by pecking at the screen with my ring finger, I find pecking with my index finger uncomfortable and my thumb too short to reach everywhere.

I'm probably a useless sample, though. Because the "proper" way to thumb a smartphone is to hold it in both hands and use both thumbs to smother the phone. I find this impossible because I have unusually sweaty hands.

There is a song about this phenomenon from Gus Johnson https://youtu.be/er6Nf6GlIwQ

Interesting article would appreciate the including VR controllers.

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