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Comment by mattlondon | Hacker News Reader

> books read, games played,

So that is positive, but reading and playing games on a phone is negative?

Yes, I think so. For one thing, reading on a phone is harder and leads to worse retention. The content you consume is likely to be shorter and less intellectually valuable. Maybe more importantly, doing anything on a phone seems to encourage a shorter attention span and switching over to other activities, such as tapping useless notifications and doomscrolling your way into anger, unhappiness, depression, anxiety etc. all generated by content that was designed for mobile users. Books don't do this.

I had a feeling someone might pick on the gaming reference here, but what I am saying is that hours of doomscrolling have been replaced by a mix of a half dozen activities, all of which I enjoy more than doomscrolling, and many of which are more useful.

Why would reading on a phone be any less intellectually valuable? A book is a book regardless.

Just uninstall the social apps and/or turn off notifications if you are easily distracted. It's not rocket science (which incidentally you can learn on a phone if you wanted)

I am actually surprised that this is not self-evident, I figured everyone knew it, but upon reflection I suppose not.

So we have a bunch of data that points to these conclusions, since I'm not sure precisely what I'm trying to prove here, I'll start with what I consider some key insights

- We know that attention spans are just massively shorter on phones than any other medium, the evidence from this comes from multiple disciplines and subjects - like pretty much any task you might do, when you do it on the phone you do it for a smaller period of time, on the web for example you always see higher bounce rates and shorter session times. Same with game/media engagement

- When it comes to reading we have a fair amount of research showing that memory and retention seem to suffer on screens in general, especially smaller screens; the gold standard is still reading from paper, and then handwriting notes about what you read

- It follows from the various above points that you're going to struggle to read and digest long, complex texts on a phone more than you would on a larger screen or in a paper book. And sure enough the type of behavior we see on phones is the consumption of bite-size content where it's difficult to express much in the way of complexity.

Recently, the writing-by-hand vs typing debate has been getting some more press, with people saying that pen and paper leads to better retention while note taking. Could reading have similar differences between methods?

Theoretically yes. In practice it is extremely difficult to say no to the short dopamine shots that a smart phone can deliver. Perhaps, comparable how alcoholics struggle to drink moderately.

Why would food at McDonalds be any nutritionally less valuable than food at home?! After all, food is food, and there is nothing stopping someone from having home cooked food at a McDonalds.

Because many people will read different content than in physical book form.

Doing challenging intellectual activity on a phone is possible, but it's a very small portion of what people actually do when they pick up said phone.

Phones are wonderful objects full of possibility, but in this context they're objects of mass distractions. That's 99.9% of their reality. Nothing wrong with normalising them as such.

Cocaine might be wonderfully productive for certain people, but that's not how it should be broadly discussed when we talk about its usage.

I’m not a specialist but I think someone having in its hand the same device they do other activities on, may trigger some habits they have/had on that same device. That doesn’t refrain someone to be productive but not the easiest way.

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