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The growing body of evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds

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Re: The growing body of evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds

#161

Post by jf »

peatmoss wrote: post #108

I've been wondering about the new cellular Apple Watch. In particular, I wonder if I could get away with just having that, and use it to train myself out of idly reading the news during periods of micro-boredom. The main thing keeping me from trying it as an experiment, is that I use my phone primarily for mobility (transit schedules, Car2go, ReachNow, lyft, bikeshare, etc.). And it appears that the majority of the s…

I bought a Series 3 Apple Watch with LTE for this exact reason. I'm on day 5 of going phone-less and while it isn't a seamless transition, I expect to go without a phone for the foreseeable future.

What works without a phone: - SMS/iMessages - Phone calls via AirPods - Checking weather reports - Turn-by-turn navigation - Setting timers - Getting my focus back

What I wish worked without a phone: - Updating contacts

Other:

I've been having an issue with my Outlook calendar not updating on the watch, though I'm not sure what the root cause of that issue might be. I'm going to try connecting my iPhone directly to Exchange.

I have the Lyft app on my watch, and it is supposed to work without the phone nearby. I haven't had a chance to test it yet though.

When I find myself missing an app, I remember how liberating it was when I spent 3 months living in Rwanda without the need to carry a wallet, keys, or phone.

Re: The growing body of evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds

#162

Post by neveroffensive »

Take anything to it's extreme and it will be bad for you. The key to social media, just like gambling, drugs, or food, is to not abuse it to the point where it becomes an integral part of your life.

I can understand why people would feel bad about their role in creating modern social media, it's basically crack. But new potential addictions are created every day, that's just the inevitable nature of the human mind and society. You can't feel bad because people enjoy what you've create too much.

Re: The growing body of evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds

#163

Post by digitalsanctum »

I was ready to go back to a flip phone because I was aware of how many times a day I checked my phone because of FOMO or whatever. Then I found out I could get my phone subsidized by my employer and that was enough to keep me using a smart phone.

Now I feel only slightly better that I'm not paying for my bad habit and still guilty about the addiiction and associated "damage to my mind".

Re: The growing body of evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds

#164

Post by rdiddly »

Danihan wrote: post #10
_m8fo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious to why you think not having a smartphone constitutes a punishment.

Because you could have the answer to nearly any question at your fingertips, and yet it's arbitrarily taken away? How is it not a punishment?

It's not a punishment, because...

1) having answers at your fingertips is not that great, and

2) said answers are surrounded in many cases by a sea of useless opportunistic crap deployed by people whose aims are literally hostile to you.

"Punishment" is being dramatic anyway, and sounds a tad narcissistic. No problem in the world is quite so outrageous and unjust as the minor inconvenience that happens to a narcissist. I mean how am I gonna read about all the genocides without my smartphone? IT'S SO UNFAIR!!

I spent four decades being punished by having no smartphone. Do I lament all the answers at my fingertips that I never got? Hardly. I brag about it just like I'm doing right now, because it made me into something better, someone who doesn't need a spell-checker, someone who knows a gerund from a participle, an integral from a derivative, a list from an array, AND my ass from my elbow. Someone who spent his childhood playing outside or studying and not worrying about what some distant asshole thought of me.

And instead of having cheap, instant, abundant answers, I was instead able to wonder first and guess and theorize about those answers. Practicing the act of inquiry. Maybe I'd look them up in a book later, or maybe just forget the hell out of them like the trivial and unnecessary mind-clutter that they were. Which is the beauty of idle questions sometimes. Regardless, it's the same outcome as a smartphone user after having looked it up. If asked again in 6 months they'll have to look it up again. Those answers are like the SUV you've never taken off-road that you only use to go to big-box stores in the suburbs. (To buy stuff that's only slightly less unneeded than the SUV.)

The more cheaply and easily things are available to you, the less special and valuable (or in the case of knowledge, memorable) they are.

Re: The growing body of evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds

#165

Post by giggles_giggles »

radlad wrote: post #123
dv_dt wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand your worry, but your TI calculator was a tinkerer niche that was similar to the openness and simplicity of early home computers. Different niches proliferate, grow, and wane all the time. After you and TI calcs, probably came a generations of web programming tinkerers, and hobby makers and minecrafters. People who are interested in programming will hopefully find their own starting niches. Hopefully we d…

> probably came a generations of web programming tinkerers Neopets allowed "pet pages" containing HTML when I was 10 years old, and this was my first foray into programming.

My girlfriend, otherwise non-technical, still maintains one of these.

There's this huge tribal knowledge built up around copy-paste CSS hacks to enable things like tab navigation all on one page with no JS. It's actually pretty wild some of the stuff these folks do, especially since almost none of them have any technical knowledge and it's all trial-and-error and sharing what works through the forums.

The amount of hackery they do for their forum guild pages (hosted as pet pages) and such almost blows my mind more than the fact that Neopets is still around and somewhat active after all these years.

Re: The growing body of evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds

#166

Post by Rudism »

SamPutnam wrote: post #99

I stopped using a smartphone 2 months ago, switching to a flipphone with wi-fi calling. When I made the switch, the employees in the mobile store acted as if they had lost one of their own and outwardly displayed the 7 stages of grief for my old phone as I returned it for something without a touch screen... 1. Shock & Denial - ...I was asked if I was 'sure about this' more than 10 times during the transfer and repeat…

What device did you switch to? I tried making the same switch a couple years ago but couldn't stick to it, mainly due to missing GPS/maps (and secondly due to dumbphones making lousy mp3 players, and not being able to serve as wifi hotspots for mobile data on the rare occasions that I do want to do internet stuff on the go).

Re: The growing body of evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds

#167

Post by SubuSS »

I like how so many comments here are looking down on candy crush (or fb or whatever) but are totally ok with 'self improvement' / 'learning' etc.

IMO - The latter is also mental clutter: There is a limit to # of information that will be useful - it is best to collect information relevant to your current pursuits now and leave the rest of the world for later (to an extent: you probably want to keep tabs on the overall sitch though). Bingeing on HN or other useful sites all day instead of focussing on your current goals is almost the same - a different dopamine hit, that's all.

Re: The growing body of evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds

#168

Post by BeetleB »

cryptoz wrote: post #131
BeetleB wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Give a child access to a smartphone for years. It will change their brain, it will become a part of them (as far as they are concerned) as it will be predictable, reactive, entertaining, etc. You are describing a drug. Besides, we're not talking about taking them away for good. Just while they are in school. When I was a kid, people were into Gameboys. Yet no one took it as a punishment when schools did not allow th…

> You are describing a drug. Yeah, so is the article. > Chris Marcellino, who helped develop the iPhone's push notifications at Apple, told The Guardian last fall that smartphones hook people using the same neural pathways as gambling and drugs. > Besides, we're not talking about taking them away for good. Just while they are in school. I didn't say for good. Even during that length of time, it could be seen as a pun…

>I'm just saying it's important to recognize that taking away something like a smartphone could be a punishing experience for a person.

So, if my kid is addicted to drugs and I restrict him from having them for a few hours to wean him off, I am punishing him?

I don't know what a "punishing experience" means. If it is a punishment, the actor (parent, school, etc) has to have the intent of punishing. Just because the recipient believes something is punishment does not make it so.

Re: The growing body of evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds

#169

Post by igravious »

dragonwriter wrote: post #107
ictoan wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the article, it did mention Socrates warned about writing. Maybe Plato did say it as well. Anyways, your point was brought up in the article. Did you read the article?

> If you read the article, it did mention Socrates warned about writing. Maybe Plato did say it as well. All the saying attributed to Socrates are by way of Plato's writing in which Socrates is used as a mouthpiece, and are more properly attributed to Plato. So, the references are probably to the same thing.

This is absolutely strictly correct but I think (in the Phaedrus) it's accepted that the injunction against writing thing is Socrates' idea (because Plato's work survives to this day in written form – Plato wrote stuff down) but that the injunction against art/theatre/drama (is it?) is all Plato's and is to be found in the Republic, the reason being that that which is representational is twice removed from the truth or something like that.

But you probably already know all this. So for the benefit of others.

Re: The growing body of evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds

#170

Post by powrtoch »

An article about a "growing body of evidence" that fails to link to a single study. Great.

"Smartphone use takes about the same cognitive toll as losing a full night's sleep"

Would love to see this study, since it sounds completely implausible (but really important if true). Without looking at the research, the only reasonable course of action is to assume it's false.

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