Hacker News Reader

Comment by kiallmacinnes | Hacker News Reader

I was shut out of Facebook for 24 hours and felt like I had a limb chopped off.

I honestly, truly, just don't understand this. Really, I don't. How can anyone allow themselves to become so utterly dependent on a single company like this? This reads like a drug addict describing going cold turkey.

View on HN

That's a fair way of describing it. A couple of years back I had a facebook account, a nice iPhone 4 and an Android tablet and did most of my social organisation and communication through them. Everywhere I went I had one device or another attached to my face or hands permanently. I got anxious if the internet was patchy and went particularly batshit when my ADSL line was down for 2 days resorting to cracking the neighbour's speedtouch router password and using that.

Totally fucked up situation so I fixed it one afternoon.

Today, I have a fastmail box that gets about 2-5 emails a day that I read once a week, a single static web page and a £20 Nokia that I don't actually even know where it is as the battery is flat. Work happens elsewhere via RDP and no corporate phone any more.

Life is good.

The transition from one to the other was initiated by a sudden realisation that I wasn't actually doing anything any more other than piping crap into someone else's product and that I wasn't productive or useful and that my family were suffering. I was like a hamster running in a wheel.

Getting rid of this was hard and could be considered like a drug addict going cold turkey as you say, so spot on. I felt ill for a couple of weeks. Then it wore off suddenly.

Now I just have to lever my wife off it...

I honestly, truly, just don't understand this.

Humans need social interaction. If someone's only form of social interaction has become online interaction, losing that will be akin to being put into solitary confinement (which we know is akin to real physical torture).

Most human beings are lazy. Most people don't change their UI's default setting and similarly most people aren't going to change their default mode of interaction. So even your good friends are not that likely to change from Facebook to some other mode of interaction just because you aren't there.

Now, it would be great to not be lazy in choosing your interaction mode and to have all your friends also not be lazy in this regard but the later part is going to be a lot harder.

I totally understand the need for social interaction, and the effects of that interaction being withheld. I don't however understand how anybody could possibly allow their "only form of social interaction" to become Facebook.

It is pretty simple. When all the people you want to interact with are only using Facebook... What are you going to do?

This is not very uncommon actually. Teenagers all around the country feel the same way about their smartphones. I can't remember when this experiment was done but when smartphones were taken away the kids literally had withdrawal symptoms.

As for the dependence on a single company that's more of an issue with technical training and awareness. You might be able to set up your own VPS with all sorts of open source alternatives to what facebook offers but not many others can.

> literally had withdrawal symptoms

Meaning what? That's a broad-enough statement to be meaningless. If withdrawal symptoms include grumpiness, listlessness, and boredom, I get withdrawal symptoms every time I sit in traffic.

Do a google search and find the study. I'm neither a psychologist nor a neuro-chemist.

It's pretty poor form to cite a study and then say "google it and find it yourself" when somebody asks for clarification.

It's also pretty poor form to ask for a citation on something when you can easily find it on your own. We aren't talking about a generic topic here. A five-second search on "smartphone withdrawal" brings up tons of relevant results, including the study mentioned by parent.

edit: I guess expecting people to do their own work is offensive to some people...

This introduces the additional complication of a back-and-forth exchange about whether we're talking about the same study before we can have a meaningful conversation about the contents of that study (ie, "was the methodology good", "were the results statistically significant", etc.) It also introduces the additional complication that a search engine might tailor my results differently from yours, and therefore not show me the study at all because (for example) it thinks I'm searching for an app to help with caffeine withdrawal because I searched for Pepsi last week.

Best practice is to provide an unambiguous reference to whatever study you're discussing. That can take many forms -- a link, the name of the authors and journal, or the full title. Making every single person who wants to be involved in the discussion have to do their own search and make sure they've found the exact right study simply isn't conducive to productive conversation.

>>Best practice is to provide an unambiguous reference to whatever study you're discussing.

In formal debate, yes. This is an informal discussion. The OP started the sentence in question with, "I can't remember when this experiment was done but..." which set the tone in that particular thread to a conversational one. Do you ask your friends for citations when casually chatting about random stuff over beer? Observe the same protocol here. If you get really curious, just look it up yourself.

> "Do you ask your friends for citations when casually chatting"

Yes.

If they reference a study that I'm interested in, I absolutely do ask them for details. And none of them are stupid enough to tell me to "just google it" without giving me adequate information to be sure I've found the right study.

In particular, if they happen to be at a computer at the time, I'll ask them to look it up for me.

>>Yes.

Nothing is as annoying as the guy who throws a wrench into a casual conversation by asking for citations.

>>And none of them are stupid enough to tell me to "just google it"

Wow. So I imagine your happy hour conversations to be like this:

Guy: I remember reading a study where they found that X happens when people do Y.

You: What study is that?

Guy: I don't know, I just remember reading about it a while ago.

You: Actually, I see that you have your smartphone with you. Can you look it up for me real quick?

Guy: ...

I think it's interesting (euphemistic) how you imagine my friends and I interact. Given that I have actual experience interacting with my friends and you have only your imagination, perhaps you should reconsider the casualness with which you've insulted me. My conversations do not infact involve lots of "I don't know", "...", annoyed responses; people describe the details as well as they remember and then either they or we as a group try to look things up.

Next time, try asking questions instead of imagining or assuming.

>>Given that I have actual experience interacting with my friends and you have only your imagination, perhaps you should reconsider the casualness with which you've insulted me.

Are you seriously saying this with a straight face right after suggesting that someone (i.e. me) who tells you to "just Google it" when you ask for the citation for a casually mentioned study is stupid?

You really are a piece of work. I think I'm done here.

I'm saying that any of my friends who told me to "just Google it" would be stupid, and the rest of my friends would let him know. Because all of my friends know that, if you're having a conversation with us and you reference "a study" you're going to have to back that up with a clear enough description that we can actually find the specific study in question and discuss it. (I think that's also the ethos on Hacker News -- it's generally expected, even in casual HN conversation, that people will give enough information that interested parties can follow up without confusion. Don't tell people "google it"; take the 5 seconds to google it yourself and give them the link.)

I expect people to ask me for citations, and I expect people to give me citations when asked, because that's the sort of social circle I've cultivated (and that's the expectation HN has cultivated as well.) You clearly run in a different social circle than me. I would not call you stupid for not having cultivated the same habits and expectations. But I would appreciate if you didn't criticize me based on how you imagine I socialize.

If it's only a 5 second search, then why didn't the OP provide that study and chose instead to say google it, yourself? Both answers take about the same time after all.

Because I didn't like his tone.

You should also add in the fact that the study found 19% of only 150 total 17-23 year olds responded to a written, university study after 24 hours that they were distressed. Only 11% said they were feeling isolated. There are so many things wrong with the conclusion that its a disgrace to any reader. That somehow equates to addiction to smartphones for a large amount of young people?

Article about one such study in the April 2011 UK Daily Mail:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1374632/Smart...

Oh jeeze, both the article and the research are utter crap. 150 students. 11% said they felt isolated and 19% said they felt "distressed". That is hardly a conclusive study and touting it as fact is silly.

Although I imagine we all appreciate an attempt to provide evidence, it's worth noting that the Daily Mail is basically a tabloid, notorious for misreporting studies and outright lying about things.

I think you can get to the paper from http://theworldunplugged.wordpress.com/, though I've not followed through and read it yet.

Because all of their friends are also dependant on it.

And not just friends, many people depend on Facebook for their work. I know from an ex that the Opera world operates entirely within FB, and I can imagine the same is true for drag queens getting gigs. My realtor also swears by FB.

It's not like people chose to become so dependent on a social network, often you one must to work within the context that's given.

To me, it is simply it has become part of someone's life. You will feel a little sad and even angry when your favorite hang out place is shut down. You simply make it part of your current moment of life. Do people depend on it as a channel to talk to people, sure. Once you are used to something, you build an attachment.

Maybe it's hard to find Facebook essential (as opposed to convenient) if you lived during a time when you had to actually know your friends' phone numbers and enter them manually. As I did.

Anyone you're close to you have a way to contact without Facebook. Anyone else shouldn't make you feel like you're missing anything important. Right?

the same way that many are dependent on gmail

Especially someone who's 58 y/o (according to his Wikipedia profile). Did he just forget that he was living just fine for nearly half a century before Facebook was even created?

That quote was from another person.

“We don’t realize how ingrained Facebook is in our everyday lives,” a drag queen named Heklina told KNTV in San Jose, Calif. “I was shut out of Facebook for 24 hours and felt like I had a limb chopped off.”

I didn't look that up before posting, but yea, it certainly makes it even more difficult to understand.

Edit: Aha, I see from a sibling post that the wikipedia page is for a different person.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com