'Everybody is looking at their phones,' says man freed after 30 years in prison
news.sky.com
news.sky.com
I bought smartphones before the iPhone.
I stood in line for four hours to buy the first iPhone (never again).
I still use an iPhone.
Yet, I am regularly surprised by how often everyone is looking at their phones.
(Context: I live in a rural area outside a metro area and don’t go there often, except for work.)
When their kid is at a crowded city park, the parent is glued to their phone.
When their kid is performing, the parent is glued to their phone, their thumb scrolling.
During any break from activity, they whip out their phones.
I used to be skeptical about the claim that devices contribute to societal brain rot through dopamine hits. However, the more I pay attention, the more I notice it. Even though I'm quite disciplined, I still catch myself instinctively pulling out my phone.
I can easily see this man having that sincere thought. You know smartphones exist, but you have no idea how much they are used.
I truly believe we are at a stage where one could argue that smartphones qualify as cybernetics.
1. Insofar as no apps on phone, minimal social media usage at all, and willful focus on a return to my 70s/80s roots where I embrace active boredom doing nothing.
Addicted is right.
#sentfrommyiphone
This was considered a respectable way of telling people to not disturb you only a while back.
I don't know what we should do about it though. Like any cure would be to authoritarian for my taste. Hope for culture change? Like how fronting the TV as the center of your family life at home is not hip anymore.
I remember much talk of "internet addiction" in the late 1990s, but rarely hear much of it anymore
You'd have to have some non abstract damage to write simple articles. Otherwise the journalist need to do a deep dive in the victim's life to explain the damage.
That doesn’t seem like the default for most things in the universe.
I for example am burned out on scrolling feeds since I consumed way too much memes on like some meme rating feed site I don't even remember the name of, before feeds was a thing.
So maybe people might just cut down on it by them self?
Some young people feel anxiety without their phones to the level they don't go out even for a few minutes without a phone. They still lose their phone inside their homes, but they feel comfortable because they know it's nearby. But if you are asking someone to come to help carry something, takes max 2 minutes, and they refuse until they find their phone. It is same for taking out the trash, and visiting the nearby shop (5 min max).
Ugh..I felt like I was on the high ground until I read that.
A power outage caused by a disaster. Lost phone and card. Any situation where you can’t ask the bank for permission to push a payment.
Be careful putting so much trust into institutions, especially in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty five, jesus
> Also, a big reason to avoid cash is that you never know who was its previous owner, and whether they washed their hands.
This is silly. By this same reasoning you should never touch a door handle in public.
Honestly that's a miserable way to live life IMO, being afraid to that extent.
How old are you if you don't mind sharing? I'm wondering to what extent COVID may have impacted the development of your views here.
> let me blow your mind even further: you should also never eat food that fell on the ground,
Yeah, not really comparable to opening a door lol
I know right. Ignorance is bliss.
> How old are you if you don't mind sharing? I'm wondering to what extent COVID may have impacted the development of your views here.
I'm 19, but no worries, when COVID happened I was not affected because I rarely went outside.
No ignorance here, quite the opposite. When you realize how low the odds are of the worst case scenarios you use to justify your behavior and do a cost/benefit analysis you'll find it isn't in favor of that level of mild paranoia.
> I'm 19, but no worries, when COVID happened I was not affected
Being afraid to touch door handles in public and being as attached to a smartphone as you are would indicate the pandemic did indeed affect your development. The question is to what extent is your development typical.
I'm not going to argue about door handles, I'm just going to point out this is objectively not normal, as in common, behavior - and that you think this does seem to have been due to you growing up while COVID was a threat.
> Also, I did leave my phone in the house when taking out trashes, so can’t say I’m that attached.
That might be setting the bar unreasonably low.
Say no more
My wife's vice seems to FB, but unsure if that's what everyone else is doing.
I do check HN from my phone, typically in the mornings and night when I have downtime and don't want to watch TV or read a book. But I can't say I've ever been at a park, bar, or airport lounge and just itching to see what was going on HN this second.
Had to teach him how to pay with a debit card and PIN for everything as that wasn't a thing before he went in.
Humans are very adaptable.
The point of this (low quality) article was that, after 30 years far from the usual life, the man points out juste 2 changes during the period: "Everybody is looking at their phones" and a 2023 wildfire. He knew people had smartphones, but I guess he didn't not know to what extent. It's a/the most important part of the life for many people.
Last week, I saw a couple riveted to their screens while walking their dog on the river's edge. The woman didn't raise her eyes when she caught and threw the stick the dog had brought. I wondered how the dog could be so obviously excited, despite the lack of attention.
I don't know how strong your prey drive is, but for me, chasing a thrown stick and returning it to the boss is good fun.
So we depict this romantic view where the phone can do everything we need but nobody is addicted to it
I would imagine it would be much harder to adapt to T9 input. My boomer parent stubbornly refused to adopt cell phones early on and that mindset crippled them as the world pivoted to apps and touchscreens.
The drugs have arrived. They just take the form of phone and computer screens which keep games, forums, but even selective news true or fake in front of our eyes, sometimes BS office memos. We don't know how to make drugs alter our vision, mood, perception of the world to outright provide a "better" one. But we don't really need them. We know how to achieve that with screens and software. (And for the rest, SSRIs and such can alter our mood without even bothering to change the stimulus.)
It is surprising when you look up (from your screen) in the train and see everyone captured by their own reality - which is our new shared reality? Kind of? Pretty close for sci-fi.
The BS office memo asks us to justify our usefulness by Monday fist thing or report to reactor shielding (too soon? too soon.)
…
“People didn’t evolve. I mean, the world became faster and smarter and in some ways cleaner. Like cars—cars didn’t smell anymore. But people stayed the same. They actually—wait—what’s the opposite of progressed?”
Excerpt From Girlfriend in a Coma Douglas Coupland This material may be protected by copyright.
>A hyperconnected brain is a brain with increased connectivity between regions, or hubs. This can be a response to neuropathology, such as autism, depression, or schizophrenia.
>Hyperconnectivity in the brain can contribute to epilepsy by increasing the likelihood of seizures. This can occur due to a number of factors, including injury, disease progression, and changes in brain structure.
The world is in one big epileptic fit right now due to tech hyperconnectivity and I’m unsure how to fix that.
I hate the device and ecosystem itself.
Felt right to finally figure that out
It takes some self discipline and effort to use our phones in non-unhealthy ways. I'm still working on it myself: to configure software, notifications, reduce mindless scrolling.
I'm naturally curious and so I often find myself asking an AI chat bot about things: sometimes about random stuff but more often my AI chats are aligned with my learning goals, and I love that proximity to knowledge. I guess this could become a somewhat unhealthy behavior, but I don't consider it a problem yet.
For me the most important thing is to be mindful of the power and addictive tendency of our phones, and crucially for me: to use the phone as a tool, especially for creative endeavors.
It's not hard.
The devices are amazing tools, just don't use social media and you'll be fine.
Turns out most of us don't like talking to others.
I definitely don't. I enjoy online interactions way more than face to face.
1) I would always struggle to interject in time due to slow processing, and 2) I could write better than others because I could edit.
However, this changed / improved over time. And I have a sneaking suspicion that it changed after I had stents placed giving me more oxygen supply. I believe many parts of my life changed around the same time. Not immediately but over the next year or 2, it has now been 9 years. This could just be life eventually connecting all the neurons in the right way, and of course I do not recommend getting stents as an experiment, but I wonder if apart from this being how we are built, there may be fixes (herbs or surgeries) that may be able to improve this.
It means you haven't met the right people yet, and that's a shame. Not just for you but for so many people missing out on the best parts of life.
But...
> I enjoy online interactions way more than face to face.
...that's still talking to others. Just in a different, er, arena.
Earlier this week I took a bus at school ending time. Several children — roughly 8-12 years old — spent their whole journey on their phones.
Having typed all that I realized my kid is in a bus free school, we parents are responsible for transportation, and he’ll never even experience it at all. I’m sure he won’t miss it. Was more of a sign of the times for my era than a necessity for a good childhood but, if you’re on a bus with dozens of peers and all glued to your phones, it does feel like some missed opportunities
Taking a normal city bus home from school was wonderful for me. I think it was the first time I had some independence from my overprotective parents.
I could "miss" the bus, which gave me 15 minutes to look round the Warhammer shop (or similar) before the next bus.
I could more-or-less spontaneously go to a friend's house and phone my parents from there — they wouldn't be left waiting to pick me up from school.
Best part, all gadgets are locked up in a safe on arrival and returned when you leave.
Maybe look into where that hatred comes from, because I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with me.
Ironically, I think we have never been as lonely and isolated as we are now.
We didn't live in some utopia before smartphones and 3g where everyone was nice and spoke to the person sitting next to each other in genuine conversation for their entire journeys. People were still selfish and rude. If a stranger (cluse is in the word there - strange-er... And that word has been around longer than phones) struck up a conversation with you on the bus or train you changed seat or carriage at the EARLIEST opportunity even then.
Also, I am pretty sure that people won't even look at > 90 % of everything that they have captured.
And Android/iOS has closed source code that makes you unable to update.
I'm sure that this already exists to some extant in certain subgroups, but I'd bet a small amount of money that this will grow to be a visible trend.
Just a fun thought!
I guess I’ll just leave this comment and put my phone down. And try to be more mindful to not browse sites like this aimlessly. But I’ve tried that before too.
Being stuck in scroll mode for most of the day is soul killing.
But I strongly dislike and am saddened by this impact that it's had on society.
Also, isn’t this double jeopardy?
Mobile apps and their business models are designed for maximum addict^H^H^H^H^H^Hengagement. Journalists have written stories about social media and gaming companies hiring psychologists to better understand how to make their apps more engaging to people, even.
Unfortunately, it seems that state, federal or country-level governments have no interest in reeling this in. In fact, they actively enable this behavior by using ex-Twitter et. al. for official communications!
It's even worse than that, too; many businesses _only_ advertise or maintain business hours on social media platforms, so people that refuse to use these services are, effectively, digital dinosaurs.
I don't think things like checking your phone (usually social media) at a stoplight or a long stretch of road while you're driving becoming become more-or-less socially acceptable was what the iPhone team had envisioned when creating the phone, but here we are.
To be fair, though, this would have been just as much of a problem in 1994 as it is now if we had the technology back then. TV addiction was all the rage back then.
Instead, if I want to use my phone I have to deliberately look for things.
On the other hand, the gold rush tech bros have made the industry miserable for us OG nerds.