As I think and wonder sometimes: human race have some kind of "bug", we are not prepared for phones and notifications.
How Your Phone Is Designed to Control Your Life [video]
21–30 of 66 posts
Re: How Your Phone Is Designed to Control Your Life [video]
#22I actually am very far from addicted to my smartphone. I spend very little time trying to digest information on a 6" screen when I can wait till I get home and digest it on a 4K display and able to concentrate on my work. For me the most annoying thing is that other people expect me to be glued to my smartphone like them. They expect that I can be reachable at any hour, any minute, and always checking my messages. Pe…
I tend to leave my phone in my bag all day except to use 2-factor auth or something. I would rather stare out of the window on the train in the morning than at facebook or twitter. Instead of people using technology to magnify their lives, they are confining their lives to their phone.
>Instead of people using technology to magnify their lives, they are confining their lives to their phone.
I just love it how people jump to conclusions about what is going on with other people, based on cursory observation.
I doubt your conclusions are very accurate. I suspect many of the people you see engaged with their phones are enriching their real lives, not just the life in the phone, but the life outside of the phone, by connecting with friends, arranging IRL meetings, and learning.
The guy in the video was doing this to a pathological degree... projecting his own unexamined intuitions as facts about other people.
Re: How Your Phone Is Designed to Control Your Life [video]
#23This was covered in a comment already re: Netflix, but it can't be stressed enough: much of this is a consequence of free software services that need users to spend as much time as possible on the service in order to maximize ad revenue. If the software service required a subscription, then none of these issues are present. In fact, the provider company would have a fairly neutral position on usage, as long as costs…
We have the example of services like cable tv where people pay for a service to be inundated with ads. So not necessarily the case. We have a pretty diseased relationship with the corporations which are suppose to serve us but instead prey upon us.
Re: How Your Phone Is Designed to Control Your Life [video]
#24I actually am very far from addicted to my smartphone. I spend very little time trying to digest information on a 6" screen when I can wait till I get home and digest it on a 4K display and able to concentrate on my work. For me the most annoying thing is that other people expect me to be glued to my smartphone like them. They expect that I can be reachable at any hour, any minute, and always checking my messages. Pe…
> I spend very little time trying to digest information on a 6" screen when I can wait till I get home and digest it on a 4K display and able to concentrate on my work. This is so important. Not only are larger screens better for content creation, they are better for consumption as well. Virtually everything I do on my phone is done so only because of circumstance--I am not close to my home workstation, office workst…
The closest I have been to a "real computer" in days is using Remote Desktop to connect to one from my iPhone 7+. FWIW, I seriously did some simple video editing using Premiere Pro that I happily admit would have taken me much less time and would have been much more enjoyable to do at the computer... but then I would have had to be at the computer :/. I don't want to be "at my real computer", and I definitely do not want to be traveling back and forth from where I am to my "real computer". I thereby make do with computers no larger than the 12" MacBook and am getting better at doing things on my iPhone 7+. Maybe one day I will never have to sit in front of a "real computer" ever again, and as far as I am concerned that will be amazing.
Re: How Your Phone Is Designed to Control Your Life [video]
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, grocery stores already do that. And it's hard to imagine what a 'healthier version' of an app, say Spotify, would look like. Unless you're suggesting they move to Netflix's business model, but that's a market niche that's already filled.
I'd imagine the spectrum of software healthiness is something along the lines of: Snapchat -> Facebook -> Reddit -> Hacker News -> BBS (Bulletin Board Systems)
I confess that I can't see what gradient this ranking follows. It looks like the users get progressively more anonymous, except Reddit has the most anonymous users and it's in the middle; it also looks like the average use time per day goes down, except I have no idea whether that's the case.
Re: How Your Phone Is Designed to Control Your Life [video]
#26[deleted]
Re: How Your Phone Is Designed to Control Your Life [video]
#27I actually am very far from addicted to my smartphone. I spend very little time trying to digest information on a 6" screen when I can wait till I get home and digest it on a 4K display and able to concentrate on my work. For me the most annoying thing is that other people expect me to be glued to my smartphone like them. They expect that I can be reachable at any hour, any minute, and always checking my messages. Pe…
> I spend very little time trying to digest information on a 6" screen when I can wait till I get home and digest it on a 4K display and able to concentrate on my work. This is so important. Not only are larger screens better for content creation, they are better for consumption as well. Virtually everything I do on my phone is done so only because of circumstance--I am not close to my home workstation, office workst…
To counter this anecdote - my iPhone 7 is my primary computing device. It's the computer that's with me the most, and it's the one that I use the most. Sometimes I'll have my real computer with me and yet I still prefer the handheld form factor and the swipe interactions of iOS (especially when I'm consuming, rather than creating).
It's mind blowing how many computing use cases my iPhone completely takes over for me.
There's some things that my phone will never be able to fully handle, like my full-fledged Lightroom photo management and editing workflow for example...but that's fine. Even some basic photo editing workflows are being handled by Instagram these days and the touch interactions are surprisingly efficient.
Re: How Your Phone Is Designed to Control Your Life [video]
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tend to leave my phone in my bag all day except to use 2-factor auth or something. I would rather stare out of the window on the train in the morning than at facebook or twitter. Instead of people using technology to magnify their lives, they are confining their lives to their phone.
>Instead of people using technology to magnify their lives, they are confining their lives to their phone. I just love it how people jump to conclusions about what is going on with other people, based on cursory observation. I doubt your conclusions are very accurate. I suspect many of the people you see engaged with their phones are enriching their real lives, not just the life in the phone, but the life outside of…
>I just love it how people jump to conclusions about what is going on with other people, based on cursory observation.
If by "cursory" you mean "many years of close, and 24x7 observation, including of close relatives and friends", then what's not to love?
It's not like people saying that are some tourists to Earth that have just some short-term cursory relationship with the "other people".
At some point, there's enough observation to "jump to conclusions" about what is going on with other people.
The alternative is a kind of solipsism, as if we cannot say anything and make generalizations of what we see people do ever, and can only speak for ourselves.
As if everybody else is some unique snowflake that one needs to study meticulously to draw conclusions from their behavior.
Or as if somehow there's some inner difference that makes their outward behavior (e.g. glued to a screen all the time, even in the most intimate situations) unfit to draw conclusions from ("Yeah, this person has his eyes glued to some BS mobile app while just 10 meters in front of them there's fireworks and naked people running around and Kanye jamming with Bruce Springsteen, KISS, Aphex Twin and Keith Jarrett on stage, but you cannot say that they're oblivious to their surroundings -- in actuality said person totally enjoys and absorbs whats going on around them").
We should be able to call a spade a space, and masses of tourists with their phones out snapping pictures of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre as uncultivated idiots.
Re: How Your Phone Is Designed to Control Your Life [video]
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd imagine the spectrum of software healthiness is something along the lines of: Snapchat -> Facebook -> Reddit -> Hacker News -> BBS (Bulletin Board Systems)
I confess that I can't see what gradient this ranking follows. It looks like the users get progressively more anonymous, except Reddit has the most anonymous users and it's in the middle; it also looks like the average use time per day goes down, except I have no idea whether that's the case.
BBS, Usenet and Email don't have ratings, likes or follower counts. I think the gradient follows less 'dopaminergic' services that don't offer rewards beyond the intrinsic content people send.
Re: How Your Phone Is Designed to Control Your Life [video]
#30I actually am very far from addicted to my smartphone. I spend very little time trying to digest information on a 6" screen when I can wait till I get home and digest it on a 4K display and able to concentrate on my work. For me the most annoying thing is that other people expect me to be glued to my smartphone like them. They expect that I can be reachable at any hour, any minute, and always checking my messages. Pe…
I tend to leave my phone in my bag all day except to use 2-factor auth or something. I would rather stare out of the window on the train in the morning than at facebook or twitter. Instead of people using technology to magnify their lives, they are confining their lives to their phone.
> Instead of people using technology to magnify their lives, they are confining their lives to their phone.
No, you're just jumping to conclusions that fit your imagined narrative.
When I'm using my phone on the train, I'm going through my reading list or listening to podcasts. If I had a physical book in-hand, I bet you wouldn't jump to similar conclusions. Yet the activities are the same and the content is the same.
People who want to waste time will waste time. Back in the day people read garbage magazines to fill that same time that they now fill with maybe Candy Crush. Everything is different and yet everything is the same and that's what people fail to realize.
The difference now is accessibility. It's the 24/7 nature of it that I think is valid to critique. But the commuters who don't stare out the window now weren't staring out the window pre-smartphone era anyway. They were reading newspaper columns, gossip magazines, playing handheld games, etc. So I'm not sure your example is the best.