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Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

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141–150 of 438 posts

Re: Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

#141

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You handed your 11 year old a smartphone? That’s brave. My parents handed me one when I was in 9th grade.

I hate to do a bit of snooping, but you list your birth year on your socials. We're of a pretty similar age; I also only got a smart phone in high school. I really do think the expectations from your friends when you're in your early teens in the current year, is that you have a smart phone. It's probably a major part of social life now, which would leave a kid pretty excluded. Not even touching the things in life th…

I list my birth year on my socials? Time to take that off, that’s unintentional. :P

But yes, I feel your sentiment is right. Although there has to be some moderation—I wouldn’t expose my children to the excess of social media. Internet addiction has messed enough with my life, the last thing I’d like to do is pass that on.

Re: Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Apple should add a similar distinction between transactional and marketing notifications as we have with email.

There's no way to flag spam / marketing. Uber for example occasionally sends marketing. But you can't really disable notifications. Instead, they (large companies) should just pay x cent per notification to Apple (not the user, because that would be seen as credit, eliminating the purpose)

I only install Uber when I want to catch an Uber. Helps with notifications, tracking, and avoids impulse usage.

Re: Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

#143
post #89

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As far as I can tell, someone has “digitised” the local buses by adding tracking and cashless payments to go along with the mobile app. They’ve also fragmented the services even more in the process since each bus company has their own version of the app (it’s just a skinning of the base app). It means I need to check back and forth between two apps to see which buses are on time. Naturally you can only buy a pass tha…

Oh, I was assuming a US-style school bus system where a separate yellow bus goes around and picks up the kids. It sounds like your kid rides a regular public transit bus to get to school? It's still unfair to have that system be inaccessible without a smartphone, but it's not as completely incomprehensible. It sounds like they definitely need better UX, and the buses around here very much accept cash still (or specia…

The one that she takes in particular is a school bus, in a weird kind of way. Seems that it’s run by a private company but it only services kids travelling to and from a couple of schools.

But yes, it’s not like the big yellow ones the rest of us know from The Simpsons.

Re: Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

#144
According to the media hysteria of any given moment, teens are always inundated with one new threat after another, and maybe they sometimes even really are, but they deserve a bit of credit for resilience, and in any case i'd call this one fairly mild in comparison to historical dangers.

Compared to past worries like military conscription (often deadly), mass state propaganda, and the crazy political cultures of decades past, the threat today from phones to teenagers is pretty tame and even gives them easy access to real information and data so much better than the past allowed for hammering down nonsense ideas and dishonest, manipulative claims. These latter two things have always been thrown at kids, today they finally have immediately accessible tools for digging deeper like never in human history.

Also, for when phones really do get tedious with an overload of corporate marketing and promotion garbage (Thanks so many of you high-paid BigTech/AdTech workers later commenting against online BigTech advertising right here on this very site!), you see, all modern devices have these little physical and digital buttons that let you set parameters to their behavior. Unbelievable as it seems, by pressing them in certain ways, it's possible to mute all sorts of notifications and prompts. My phone is right beside me all day, silent and discreet as an English butler unless I actively open it and seek sometimes, all because i set it to shut the fuck up with just a few moments of touch and clicking around. Any teen can usually do the same just as easily.

I know that many on HN will blather on about "disinformation", teen self esteem through social media and so forth as modern phone-related risks. However, much of this too is exaggerated or describes dangers lighter than the youth isolation of the past, which kids before mass digital communication had far fewer avenues for escaping from through access to their own personal interests and circles online.

If one thing truly is a danger to teens in modern phones and digital communications via social media spheres, its not so much too many notifications as it is the normalization of total 24-hour surveillance by faceless entities "serving your interests" and the inevitable data collection that makes young indiscretions now ever more literally unforgettable in the worst sense of the word.

Re: Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

#145
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know for sure but I can guess why it would be worse for teens. During your teenage years there’s a lot more FOMO as you are trying to establish yourself in your peer group and the social hierarchy in general. This must-check-that-notification then compelled them to react to it, which generates more notifications in a feedback loop. Compare that to now, when I’m in my mid 30s, if an app generates too many noti…

I think as parents, our job is to help teach them that this FOMO is fake and unnecessary, that the perceived "social hierarchy" is meaningless and nobody will care about it after high school is over. So they don't have to wait until they are 30 to figure it out on their own.

I completely disagree. It's important to teach them to time-box and have the self discipline to try and control these things - but participation in the social structures of peers and society during the formative adult years is crucial to developing the social skills of being an adult. To dismiss them as meaningless is very naive.

Arguing that the social heirarchy is meaningless is utter nonsense because our work structures, family structures, political structures, friend structures, distribution structures, financial systems AND ENTIRE CULTURE is built upon social hierarchies, and while you might argue that the social heirarchy at high school is meaningless once highschool is over, the skills gained in navigating it will persist through the persons entire adulthood.

Re: Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You handed your 11 year old a smartphone? That’s brave. My parents handed me one when I was in 9th grade.

Not only that, he's using my Google account, so it's managed as one of my devices :) With full access to unrestricted YouTube premium, Google Play, etc. He's only got limits with respect to the time he spends on the phone or PC. So far hasn't discovered or been interested in "naughty" content. I was forced to live in the "middle ages", communist Romania with no TV, no electricity, go to bed at candle's light, half an…

That’s fair enough.

Re: Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But some of it, mostly associated with my kids schooling, is very hard to avoid. 10 emails per week about some school portal with 'an important message' that ends up being nonsense but you're not able to block it because one day an actually important message might show up. > Tech should serve us This problem isn't really the tech, it's the people behind these messages. Complain to them. You shouldn't be getting "OM…

> That decision is being made by a person who you should be able to find and share your concern with. Good point, and it generalizes to pretty much all the social problems "created by" tech. The technology is fine . Behind each misuse is a person or a group that commissioned said tech, and/or is applying it in malicious ways. Focusing on ills of technology, while ignoring the people wielding it for wrong, is just a d…

> Behind each misuse is a person or a group that commissioned said tech

How many cases of misuse implicates a structural flaw in a larger system? It's absurd to point the finger, over and over, at this or that "malicious" person. It's exhausting! They somehow keep getting incentivized to appear.

Re: Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

#149
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber is terrible at it.

Uber Eats. I need the notifications for a taxi not marketing for groceries during the week

iirc you can manage the notifications more granularly on the Uber website

Re: Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

#150

I run my phone on DND all day, everyday and block notifications from almost all apps. The amount of garbage we have vying for our attention on an hourly basis is overwhelming sometimes. The worst is the apps where you do want notifications on, like your food delivery apps so you know when your food is at the door, but those companies take that as an invite to send you daily marketing notifications and it all feels li…

Uber and Lyft do this too. They’re taking a page from the LinkedIn playbook and creating new categories of notifications, which you then have to hunt down and disable. There isn’t one unified settings area for all notifications, which makes this extra tricky.
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