221–230 of 411 posts
These guys clearly weren't around for the introduction of television. If ever there was a technology tailor-made to hijack our minds with, it was TV. It wasn't the end of the world.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Arguments_for_the_Elimi...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s a very solid argument for TV as stunting people’s development. There’s lack of reading, albeit not necessarily due to television ( https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/the-dec... ) There’s a direct link between television and obesity ( http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/75/5/807 ) And more general health dangers ( http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/newsplus/prolonged-tel... ) Etc…
One substantial benefit of Television was that everyone was simultaneously watching the same thing. This increased political homogeneity by providing a shared belief system, or at least some more common ground. Such homogeneity is correlated strongly with stability and prosperity on a nation-state level. This was particularly true from 1950 until 1970 or so, before cable television exploded (it remained true for long…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is, smartphones are not magically holding people back, who would otherwise be creative and do cool stuff. In fact, it's pretty much the opposite, as even the constant stream of shit Internet content eventually exposes you to e.g. DIY tutorials in precisely your favourite area . Nevertheless, some people have less of intellectual lives than others, and (as GP argues and I agree with) whatever the reason, it'…
They (or, rather, the software they connect to) are holding me back from precisely that. If there was no social media, the novel I’m writing would have been done a year ago.
There's the well-known anecdote that Steve Jobs didn't let his own kids use the iPad.[1] If there was a tech equivalent of "don't get high on your own supply" , that was it. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=steve+jobs+doesn%27t+let+kid...
The same Steve Jobs who thought you could cure cancer by eating carrots, right? Just because he was smart and did some things right doesn’t mean he has some secret wisdom in unrelated fields, here.
If this is true Then it also presents a unique opportunity. I.e. There should be a very real and observable productivity boost from being able to ignore your phone and working on career building/family-relationship projects. If you can tear yourself from your phone for 3 Hours a day and work on career building projects, you should be able to get far ahead of others in your social circles who can't break the addiction…
B J Fogg, who gets brief mention in this article, teaches his students to cause behaviour by making the behaviour easy and then delivering timely triggers [1]. If you find yourself behaving in ways you don't reflectively endorse, your basic approach should be to flip the Fogg model upside down – avoid triggers and make it harder.
In my own case, that's meant disabling notifications and blocking websites and apps. I also hacked a Chrome extension which applies the "avoid triggers and make it harder" idea to Gmail [2]. The extension has several thousand users, many of whom reclaim 30-60 minutes of focussed work each week which would otherwise be lost to compulsive inbox processing.
This is an appropriate time to show appreciation and support for the companies who are trying to demonstrate successful revenue models which are NOT based on advertising:
Medium - the replacement of “Recommends” with “Claps” was to allow Medium to better understand how much authors should be paid (with the money coming from the paid “Medium Member” plan). [1]
Patreon - probably the most popular service for paying independent content creators today. If you are a regular consumer of a content channel who’s creator is on Patreon and you haven’t already set up micro payments, then please part with a few pennies and help show the industry that an advertising revenue model isn’t the only option.
Wikipedia - Ad-free since its inception, and the web’s most popular encyclopaedia which is completely free to use for all. If you feel like you have the resources to part with a few dollars per month to support Wikipedia, and haven’t already done so, then please do. [2]
Please let me know if there are any others I’ve missed out.
[1] https://blog.medium.com/expanding-the-medium-partner-program...
I don't buy the idea that smartphones are extinguishing the life of the mind. Sure, smartphones provide access to almost unlimited trash. But they also provide access to Wikipedia, perhaps the most successful encyclopedia ever developed by humans. They can show you newspapers from across the planet. They let you read Latin histories of the Norman conquest of Southern Italy in the middle ages. [0] C'mon folks, this is…
That's might be because of thinking of first order effects only.
>Sure, smartphones provide access to almost unlimited trash. But they also provide access to Wikipedia, perhaps the most successful encyclopedia ever developed by humans.
Well, who said access to Wikipedia is something good in itself? For one, it might (and I say it does) reduce the number of deeper study on a subject, because of "I can look it up in Wikipedia". So, people that get interested in something don't need to build a deeper connection with their subject, buy books, follow it over time, connect with other people studying it, as a basic (and often crude) summary is always at small distance, and is perceived as enough.
What's worse, there's a whole new entitlement and arrogance about topics, from people who have just cursory experience with them from Wikipedia or some other such source, and feed as qualified on them as actual people who've studied them/experts. Wikipedia feeds the "Read 1 lemma for 5 minutes expert".
It's even worse when the source of their knowledge is not Wikipedia, but random web BS pages -- from conspiracy theories to homeopathy pages to alternative diets, to plain old bad journalist/click-baits.
>They can show you newspapers from across the planet. They let you read Latin histories of the Norman conquest of Southern Italy in the middle ages.
Both quite irrelevant to the discussion (which is about mass effects), as only a tiny outlier group will ever read those anyway.
It's not the internet/smartphone that is the real problem though. It's that as a civilization we've relinquished control to structures whose only motives are profit-making.
Their "we're changing the world" lip-service always has that ("to make more money") proviso -- not "for the better".
> We believe that societies must protect, cherish and nurture humans’ attentional capabilities. This does not mean giving up searching for improvements: that shall always be useful. Rather, we assert that attentional capabilities are a finite, precious and rare asset. In the digital economy, attention is approached as a commodity to be exchanged on the market place, or to be channelled in work processes. But this instrumental approach to attention neglects the social and political dimensions of it, i.e., the fact that the ability and the right to focus our own attention is a critical and necessary condition for autonomy, responsibility, reflexivity, plurality, engaged presence, and a sense of meaning. To the same extent that organs should not be exchanged on the market place, our attentional capabilities deserve protective treatment. Respect for attention should be linked to fundamental rights such as privacy and bodily integrity, as attentional capability is an inherent element of the relational self for the role it plays in the development of language, empathy, and collaboration. We believe that, in addition to offering informed choices, the default settings and other designed aspects of our technologies should respect and protect attentional capabilities.
(The report was co-authored by Luciano Floridi, who is supervising James Williams' PhD at Oxford.)
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/sites/digital-age...