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Internet addiction and the habit of book reading

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Re: Internet addiction and the habit of book reading

#211

Post by the_af »

ivansavz wrote: post #205

I'd like to share two hacks that have made a big difference for me: /1/ black-hole certain websites in /etc/hosts, see here for details https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29217297 /2/ making the computer read books to me using the text-to-speech feature. See here for instructions to setup keyboard shortcut for Mac OS users https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mApa60zJA8rgEm6T6GF0yIem... and this is the command line…

Re: 2, I find that listening to something (that is not music) while doing something else makes me zone out for one of the two activities.

I tried listening to podcasts/conferences while coding, or listening to a zoom meeting while reading my email or doing work, and it doesn't work. I tend to zone out on the listening. If it was audio, I must rewind and listen to it again. If it was a zoom call... oh, well, "what were you saying again?".

Re: Internet addiction and the habit of book reading

#213

Post by bogomipz »

The author states:

>'In an essay he published in The Guardian (which is by now removed from their website, following a massive Twitter campaign against the novelist mainly because of his opinion on techno-consumerism), titled “What’s Wrong with the Modern World?”,...'

I'm having trouble believing The Guardian would remove an article by a well-known author because of a Twitter campaign. However it does in fact appear to no longer exist on their site at least as far as having google search guradian.com. It's here in case anyone is interested:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130915070641/http://www.thegua...

And for a critique from the same time. This Observer article had some amusing points: https://observer.com/2013/10/bigmouth-strikes-again-what-in-...

Re: Internet addiction and the habit of book reading

#214

Post by Mezzie »

mFixman wrote: post #168
rlt wrote: post #107

Millennials and especially Gen Z are thought to have higher rates of depression and anxiety than previous generations. I would be very surprised if social media weren’t a factor. Despite making a career in tech I believe some of what we’re doing is very harmful to culture, mental and physical health, the environment, and democracy. At some point I would like to focus on mitigating these problems.

Why could social media be a factor and not video games or movie streaming? You are believing things without evidence and falling at the same old-person moral panic as "video games cause violence" or "D&D causes suicide".

Or, you know, any of the 50 billion other things that have changed in the past 20 years.

Plus it's questionable how much the issue is social media versus just that some things suck and we don't have the option to put our fingers in our ears and go 'la la la everything is fine' anymore. I used to be deeply depressed and angry over climate change; is social media to blame since that's part of what kept it in my head for so long, or maybe it's just a normal response to be depressed and mourn when you learn a bunch of things are dying?

Likewise, 20 years ago I would have been SURPRISED to wake up to news about a school shooting in my state, but now it was just 'yup, we were due.'

Tech and social media are definitely entwined with these changes, but I side eye the recent attempts to put all the responsibility on tech. It's shared responsibility in my opinion: Tech and its incentives are a problem, but there's also a lot of social rot that we can't ignore and that does tend to make people unhappy.

Re: Internet addiction and the habit of book reading

#215

Post by Mezzie »

jimmyvalmer wrote: post #152

The article quotes W. Zinsser: But I do know they [technological advances] won’t make writing twice as good. So wrong! There's no question Google has improved my writing, enabling "google-fu" which dials in the precise historical reference or literary turn-of-phrase I'm looking for.

Or research for fiction writers. It's SO MUCH easier to write decent fiction now.

Re: Internet addiction and the habit of book reading

#216

Post by kinghtown »

knaik94 wrote: post #68
betwixthewires wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand what you're saying. Still though, you drive to get places or for fun sometimes, some people do it for sport for a living, but you don't find yourself just compulsively driving 8 hours a day. There are people that do find themselves staring at a phone 8 hours a day. The word addiction might be thrown around a little too loosely than it should be, but there's definitely widespread addiction to social media…

Staring at a phone doing what? Swiping to refresh on social media for hours and hours at a time? Using a phone is like going to the library, what you do there is what actually matters. Checking social media can be thought of as asking a librarian what new books are in. If you're asking every minute of every hour for 8 hours, then I can see that being a problem. But that's not really how people use the phone. You chec…

“using a phone is like going to the library” lol

Re: Internet addiction and the habit of book reading

#217

Post by trompetenaccoun »

politelemon wrote: post #124
senortumnus wrote: post #22

HN represents a wellspring of deeper reading than is generally afforded by the current entertainment cruft portals of the web - reddit, FB, insta, USA today, financial times, etc etc down to the SEO hellholes of recipe sites, youtube product placement; you get the idea. Let's appreciate HN for the quality of reading material and its curb on our drift to the rest of the 'popular' web. And I don't think I'm alone in al…

> HN represents a wellspring of deeper reading than is generally afforded by the current entertainment cruft portals of the web - reddit, FB, insta, USA today, financial times, etc etc down to the SEO hellholes of recipe sites, youtube product placement; you get the idea. HN _thinks_ it represents a wellspring of deeper reading just like every other site mentioned also thinks. Same as the others it is a shallow echo…

Exactly. The parent comment is the funniest thing I've read since seeing someone on Reddit claim the same about that site a couple of days ago.

Re: Internet addiction and the habit of book reading

#218

Post by biophysboy »

the_af wrote: post #211
ivansavz wrote: post #205

I'd like to share two hacks that have made a big difference for me: /1/ black-hole certain websites in /etc/hosts, see here for details https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29217297 /2/ making the computer read books to me using the text-to-speech feature. See here for instructions to setup keyboard shortcut for Mac OS users https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mApa60zJA8rgEm6T6GF0yIem... and this is the command line…

Re: 2, I find that listening to something (that is not music) while doing something else makes me zone out for one of the two activities. I tried listening to podcasts/conferences while coding, or listening to a zoom meeting while reading my email or doing work, and it doesn't work. I tend to zone out on the listening. If it was audio, I must rewind and listen to it again. If it was a zoom call... oh, well, "what wer…

I’ve had the same experience, although it depends on the difficulty of the podcast and the difficulty of the task. I feel like I have an inner threshold.

Also, I’m convinced that multitasking obliterates your long term memory, in addition to stunting your short term memory.

Re: Internet addiction and the habit of book reading

#219

Post by snth »

zero_ wrote: post #130
kqr wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I used to read books all the time. I spent most of my waking hours as a teenager reading books. I’m 35 now and can barely hold attention on anything, I read maybe 3 books a year if I’m lucky. Even on Hacker News I almost exclusively read and comment on the comments, not the actual article unless I see someone says “have you read the article?” I used to be this way too. Then I just started reading again and now I ca…

Usually this kind of literature are however more similar to university textbooks for which I prefer to read them as PDFs on the iPad as my Kindle tends to mess up the formulas and figures if you get them in an Amazon Ebook format. Sometimes you get a PDF from Amazon to begin with, for which I find the the Kindle a subpar experience.

PDF is my favorite book format. I like the idea of reflowable text, but my experience is any book with pictures, tables, or math looks pretty terrible as an epub or kindle book. Books that would be suitable for Kindle (usually fiction), I find listening to as an audiobook much more convenient .
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