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Apple shareholders push for study of phone addiction in children

bloomberg.com

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Re: Apple shareholders push for study of phone addiction in children

#161

Post by ngcazz »

sparewalking wrote: post #150
andrei_says_ wrote: post #6

I think this is a very good sign. It is my hope that Apple is able to pioneer tools which make it possible to interrupt addiction forming (dark) patterns. Addressing this on the device/os level (vs possibly legislation) could be very effective. Right now this is a lawless territory and creating + exploiting addiction at the cost of depleting millions of people’s cognitive resources as free is very profitable. The lon…

The real result will be that kids will be educated by devices instead being educated by their parents.

... not necessarily a bad thing, if approached thoughtfully -- computers and smartphones are such fundamental parts of everyday life, it makes sense that an element of didacticism is embedded in how they're designed.

Re: Apple shareholders push for study of phone addiction in children

#162

Post by jmngomes »

gpmcadam wrote: post #145
hilyen wrote: post #73

They should be pushing for a study on neck injury / muscle strain on smart phone use. Millennials and the next gen after are going to pay dearly from injuries from bending their necks/heads down for years and years looking at their phones.

Do you have a source for smartphone usage having any impact on neck or muscle strain, versus non-smartphone usage, and why it would disproportionately affect millennials?

There are widely available sources and studies on the subject of how bad posture is destructive to the human skeleton...

Re: Apple shareholders push for study of phone addiction in children

#163

Post by freeflight »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #141
rock_hard wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that I rather hand my kids a tablet or smartphone then putting them in front of a TV or game console. What I sometimes miss from the conversation is that there is a lot of good things one can do with such device...and yes, also some bad ones...just like with a scissors or a lighter. It’s on parents to teach their kids how the world functions and how to integrate into it...always has, always will! And the late…

I generally agree about tablets vs. TV -- except it's easy to find some terrible content on YouTube very quickly. Don't underestimate how impressionable kids are--even teens--by some cool YouTube stars who set bad examples.

Which begs the question: If the interactions with the tablet boil down to just passively consuming content, like on YouTube, are they really that different to TVs?

As enjoyable as YouTube and similar streaming services are, they are pretty much still TVs, just with millions upon millions of different channels to chose from.

Re: Apple shareholders push for study of phone addiction in children

#164

Post by mistercow »

icebraining wrote: post #137
mistercow wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids have other ways of obtaining games than their parents buying them. And most kids have more than one parent. And that one example prevents you from understanding my entire comment?

With parental controls, kids do not have other ways of obtaining games, unless it's something like a browser game, and then it won't be recorded either. So your comment seems to be based on an impossible premise.

A. As far as I can tell, the Switch parental controls let you set age rating categories, not restrict the device to only specific games.

B. How would that be an argument against my main point, that new technology is giving parents too much control over their kids' lives?

Re: Apple shareholders push for study of phone addiction in children

#165

Post by sirclueless »

b-zee wrote: post #154
majewsky wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an old theme. See e.g. the fairy tale Rapunzel.

Could you elaborate? I fail to see the connection.

I suppose it's a sort of shallow reference to keeping a child locked up in a tower away from the world. Not sure it's a great comparison since the woman raising Rapunzel disowns her when she discovers she's been sleeping with a prince, and blinds him. But they find each other by her voice, her tears heal his eyes, and he takes her back to his kingdom. So I guess the moral is if you keep your innocent child locked away from the world the only people who will make an effort to find them are gallant princes.

Re: Apple shareholders push for study of phone addiction in children

#166

Post by narrowtux »

tlrobinson wrote: post #79
brightball wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the biggest difference is the style of games. Switch games are much more comprehensive like Zelda. iPad games are geared towards button mashing and showing ads for other games that do the exact same thing. A switch game will be $30-60. An iPad game will be “free”. Subjecting your kids to advertising driven games which aim to have them play much as possible to drive revenues is noticeably different. I’ve taken awa…

I don't have kids so I haven't looked into it, but I assumed there would be more games with educational value on iOS than Nintendo. Is curating your kid's apps to only allow such games an option?

You can disable the App Store in iOS as well, if I were a parent, I would choose a few good games but disable the App Store for my kid's devices.

Re: Apple shareholders push for study of phone addiction in children

#167

Post by whywhywhywhy »

scotty79 wrote: post #112
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too, but back then, computers required much more intellectual work to get some satisfaction out of them. Today, you can just consume intensively on an iPad, and never learn anything about computers.

I have a childhood friend who played as much on the computer as I did. He even wrote some simple games himself (as I did) but he is not a software developer now and I am. You can give hundred kids lego technic and most of them won't become engineers.

Not everyone who is capable of becoming an engineer sees it as something they actually want to spend their lives doing but the skills children develop with toys like Technic are still valuable and have applications beyond just engineering.

Re: Apple shareholders push for study of phone addiction in children

#168

Post by pmarreck »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #89
quickthrower2 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with doing all of these studies? Aren't you glad we know about the harmful effects of tobacco smoke, UV light, radiation, too much sugar etc.?

If using a computer is addictive, what is the response? I am concerned with any action that takes a child's privacy or liberty from them. I haven't heard a proposed solution that does neither, and most do both. Someone with the absolute best intentions it's likely to take seriously harmful actions when privacy and liberty are disrespected.

Children have little of either privacy or liberty because they are still in the process of learning how best to utilize their privacy and liberty under the guidance of a parent.

Now, if you were to empirically argue (with data/evidence) on the importance of privacy and liberty in children, that’s a different story, but since when was parenting driven by science? :O

Re: Apple shareholders push for study of phone addiction in children

#169

Post by pmarreck »

decebalus1 wrote: post #44
dragonsky67 wrote: post #10

1950's Can we have a study of Comic Book addiction in Children. 1960's Can we have a study of Television addiction in Children. 1970's Can we have a study of Dungeons and Dragons addiction in children 1980's Can we have a study of Console game addiction in Children. 1990's Can we have a study of Computer game addiction in Children. 2000's Can we have a study of Internet addiction in Children. 2010's Can we have a stu…

Yeah, no. The moment content creators realized they can engineer addiction by borrowing ideas from the gambling industry and often innovating in this area, we have a problem. Especially when more and more companies profit from 'habit forming'. Read up on why Dong Nguyen pulled Flappy Bird off the app store and why Steve Jobs was a low-tech parent. I agree, we shouldn't think of the children, we should probably think…

> Read up on why Dong Nguyen pulled Flappy Bird off the app store

And yet, pandora was already out of the box, and that game spawned a million knockoffs

Re: Apple shareholders push for study of phone addiction in children

#170

Post by pmarreck »

rickycook wrote: post #117
ashleyn wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soudns like a parenting mishap to me.

to be honest, this happened to me and i don’t blame my parents at all. looking back on it, how were they to understand the difference between wow and everything else i played? it’s all the same to them. we had frequent fights about how long i spent playing, when they’d ask me to do things in the middle of a raid (multi player coop thing; up to 40 players back then). in my head, it was incredibly important to me. now,…

Raiding at least taught teamwork... Some of the best people I knew in WoW ended up being very successful in their own right... for example the guy who was THE best raid-leader ever ended up managing a chain of stores
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