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Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens

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Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens

#171

Post by marcosdumay »

karatestomp wrote: post #46
mchusma wrote: post #9

Average adult will spend 34 years with a miracle portal into infinite knowledge and possibility.

Hardly. Scratch most topics past the surface level and if you're lucky the Web can find you the book you need. Usually though you'll need to find the best book the Web can find you, then use that book and/or correspondence with experts to find the ones you actually need. The problem seems to be a mix of tons of stuff just not being on the Web yet, even decades in (some of it's in ebooks, though, yes, but a whole lot…

"A screen" is not "the web".

That book will probably be in a screen too, since it's way too hard to carry it around on paper.

Even "correspondence with experts" will be on a screen.

Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens

#172

Post by saiya-jin »

rietta wrote: post #153
literalanyone wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish this was discussed more often. As a parent, I am constantly bombarded with people telling me I should limit my kids' "screen time." Generational skepticism of new technology is played out. Can we move on yet?

I SURE am glad my parents didn't limit my screen time as a kid. I taught myself how to program from age 14 spending countless, countless late night hours staring at the DOS computer screen programming whatever caught my fancy. My career would look so much worse if my parents had forbade me from using the computer.

careers to many of us are far from being the most important things in our abysmally short lives

Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens

#173

Post by rorykoehler »

jedberg wrote: post #134
rorykoehler wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno why we can't just hand select any video from youtube for youtube kids? I don't need youtube algos to recommend bullshit to my kids and I don't need youtube to control what i show to my kids.

You can create a playlist if you want to hand curate a list. But the whole reason I use streaming services is so I can pay someone else to curate the content for me.

I can't put a playlist into YouTube kids. I tried.

Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens

#174

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

osrec wrote: post #106
martindbp wrote: post #2

Well, personally I don't sit staring at a screen, I watch movies, play games, talk to people, build stuff and learn new things. You wouldn't say reading a book is "staring at paper" would you?

Funnily enough, I remember talking to a historian who said centuries ago, reading a book was considered "mindless entertainment", much as we think about our smartphones now. Eventually, reading evolved into being considered something generally "smart" people did.

I hung out with some Vietnamese Zen buddhist monks on a monastery for a few days, and I was surprised to find that they viewed most fictional novels as mindless entertainment as well. Books with obvious educational value and religious texts were fine of course, but spending a few hours reading a novel would be lumped into the same general category as spending a few hours binging a Netflix show, so they did it sparingly.

Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens

#175

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

matwood wrote: post #83
dvtrn wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll have you know this is a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine household, and we are on our 12th rewatch of the Dominion War, tyvm.

I'm going through TNG right now, and the stories still hold up very well. There are a lot more useful lessons in them than I remember when watching as a kid. I really do like the humankind aspirational nature of the show also.

I went through TNG again a while ago and I was struck by how much I'd forgotten, and how I'd kind of lost my way in terms of my beliefs. I grew up wanting to be like Picard, and watching them again reminded me of that.

Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens

#176

Post by jccc »

martindbp wrote: post #2

Well, personally I don't sit staring at a screen, I watch movies, play games, talk to people, build stuff and learn new things. You wouldn't say reading a book is "staring at paper" would you?

This is an excellent point (sincerely), but in addition there is quite a bit of difference in what is required of a reader "staring at paper" vs. many of the couch potatoes staring at their various screens.

Probably HN is packed with better than average active users of screens than the general population.

Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens

#177

Post by gibolt »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #82
karatestomp wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardly. Scratch most topics past the surface level and if you're lucky the Web can find you the book you need. Usually though you'll need to find the best book the Web can find you, then use that book and/or correspondence with experts to find the ones you actually need. The problem seems to be a mix of tons of stuff just not being on the Web yet, even decades in (some of it's in ebooks, though, yes, but a whole lot…

I'm not sure about that. The topics I want to dig into I usually find it's harder to get the level of depth I want on a topic in book form than I do than to find videos on YouTube. Some random examples: - I'm interested in turbine engines, AgentJayZ has a while host of videos taking real turbine engines apart, talking about obscure features like compressor variable valve vanes etc. - Plumbing, almost everything I've…

What a great point. If I want to know how to do something physical, or learn how a piece of hardware works, YouTube is the place.

Since it is Google, how awesome would it be if videos also had related web searches attached to them, instead of just related videos. How-tos could have links to the original manual, the most detailed maintenance manuals, or patents and blogs detailing the physics behind how that thing works. Probably not going to happen and would only be for power users, but it could be so powerful.

Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens

#179

Post by throwaway_USD »

martindbp wrote: post #2

Well, personally I don't sit staring at a screen, I watch movies, play games, talk to people, build stuff and learn new things. You wouldn't say reading a book is "staring at paper" would you?

>You wouldn't say reading a book is "staring at paper" would you?

Actually there is a colloquialism for that since the early 1900's: "Nose in a book"

To your point no one actually has their nose in the book.

Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens

#180

Post by saalweachter »

ipnon wrote: post #39

"If children get outside enough, it doesn't matter how much they study they do. They don't become myopic," said Ian Morgan, researcher at Australian National University.[0] "Researchers say kids and teens need to get sunlight during the critical years of their development while their eyeballs are still growing. "The mechanics of how sunlight protects their eyes are not clearly understood. One theory suggests that sun…

I'm sure there is a correlation, maybe even a strong one, but I have quite a bit of anecdata to suggest it is not true in all cases.

(I grew up on a farm, and spent a helluva lot of time outside, and needed glasses long before my family had a computer; my father would have spent even more time outside than I did, and likewise is pretty nearsighted.)

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