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Turning away from smartphones: 'We need to go places and touch things'

theguardian.com

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Re: Turning away from smartphones: 'We need to go places and touch things'

#41

Post by eimrine »

mrweasel wrote: post #11

Someone pointed out in a similar discussion: "It's not the phone itself that they issue, it's the content." Yesterday there was a debate locally about screen time, both for adults and children, and how much is to much. It's always about the phone, the iPad or the TV, never about the content. At this point I'm leaning more towards, well, we tried social media, streaming, online gaming and funny meme site and our monke…

> It's not the phone itself that they issue, it's the content.

There is such a thing as a teabag. Despite of a good tea has a perfect ability to be fit into these ones, there is a reason why nobody sells a really good tea in the teabags.

Re: Turning away from smartphones: 'We need to go places and touch things'

#42

Post by alamortsubite »

redeeman wrote: post #9
mrjh wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've never picked up your phone to do one thing and half an hour later found yourself trawling through Instagram, having forgotten what you originally meant to do with your "just a tool", you are in a tiny minority of incredibly focused people. The majority of us, through no fault of our own, find these 'tools' regularly sucking us into a vortex of distractions and time-wasting. The struggle against cheap dopami…

> you are in a tiny minority of incredibly focused people. oh please... > The majority of us, through no fault of our own it is called "personal accountability", I know its very hated on in the modern world, but please... > The struggle against cheap dopamine hits is real Yeah.. try go back 500 years or 1000 years and explain your struggles to the people there.

We all have different personalities. I'm one of those focused people who sometimes forgets to even bring my phone along with me when I leave the house. My gf seems to have some serious catching-up to do on her FB horse diva group any time she picks up her phone. She might benefit from some kind of barrier, and I could do a better job of keeping in touch with old friends. Let's not bury our heads in the sand.

Re: Turning away from smartphones: 'We need to go places and touch things'

#43

Post by eimrine »

grugagag wrote: post #22
evrimoztamur wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean, I can definitely doom scroll my banking app!

For a few times until you figure out some patters, then you check your bank app once in a while knowing what to look for wasting the least amount of time.

What a brilliant observation!

Re: Turning away from smartphones: 'We need to go places and touch things'

#44

Post by boffinAudio »

mrweasel wrote: post #11

Someone pointed out in a similar discussion: "It's not the phone itself that they issue, it's the content." Yesterday there was a debate locally about screen time, both for adults and children, and how much is to much. It's always about the phone, the iPad or the TV, never about the content. At this point I'm leaning more towards, well, we tried social media, streaming, online gaming and funny meme site and our monke…

> "It's not the phone itself that they issue, it's the content."

I take strong issue with this position.

(Disclaimer: I make professional broadcast and media-related devices and have an opinion, decades in the making, on what has been done with mobile phones vis a vis, making other devices redundant.)

It is the phone itself.

The phone itself has usurped the user of all agency, and responsibility, for their content.

>Ad companies

There is one entity responsible for this mess, and one entity only: the OS vendor.

If the OS vendor had not become "ad companies" and were still responsibly stewarding the operating system in proper directions, we wouldn't have the issue of ad agencies with their doom scrolling statistics.

>ban attention stealing algorithms

Its not the algorithm - its the raw, fundamental means by which the user has control over the device, and the media it produces. Nobody knows what a file system is, or why to organize it, or how to standardly distinguish between shared and private media - because the OS is no longer the primary interface to doing these things.

The 'ad agency' is, or rather the web interface it has built, to usurp the device, and give it a different 'application' than one intended to promulgate user agency.

The phone, in operation, is the problem. When we decided to replace a filesystem with a live stream of uploaded content, in a fashion which immediately removes the locality of the media from control by the user, we opened up the door to todays hellish landscape.

We should revisit the issue of what "is" an operating system vendor, and why they need to be woken up from their slumber to take over the application blackhole that is sucking life from our users.

>doom scrolling your banking app

I shouldn't be using a banking app. An app is only necessary because the bank uses a completely different operating system than I do.

Imagine your data stays where you need it to stay - on your device - and the bank has access to it when it needs to service you, the customer - as opposed to the current scenario, where the customer data is owned entirely by the bank and you need permission to access it.

The distinction between these two bases of operation are made by the operating system vendors. It has been 'easier' to API-all-the-things than make smarter interfaces, imho. That laziness has given us the monster.

Re: Turning away from smartphones: 'We need to go places and touch things'

#45

Post by everdrive »

nightowl_games wrote: post #38
everdrive wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is correct. If imagine if all you had was a desktop which was shut down between sessions. Just needing to walk to a different room, boot up your desktop, and sign in -- a minor ~1 minute of inconvenience would prevent much of this compulsive using. When the barriers are low enough, people cannot help themselves.

Standing desk only. No sitting and browsing. That was a huge change for me.

Every so often, I end up selling my laptop to diminish the convenience of my computer usage. Usually, I end up eventually reneging and buying a new (used) one.

Re: Turning away from smartphones: 'We need to go places and touch things'

#46

Post by mark_l_watson »

WhackyIdeas wrote: post #30

After what happened with Adobe, Microsoft and Sonos this past week, I have decided to try limit my use of American products. Don’t get me wrong, I love the USA - I have tonnes of family there and I have met some super nice people on my months long holidays there too… But. There is just too much poison coming out of Silicon Valley in my view. Awful choices in pursuit of our personal information, ‘Recall’ demonstrates…

Real. I am a long term Linux user (first downloaded Slackware over a 2400 baud modem - you can ask your grandparents what that is) and in principle I would like to do what you have done, basically do a “100% Richard Stallman” but my productivity is higher when using specific tools on macOS/iPadOS/iOS.

I fight back a bit by leaving my iPhone at home unless I want to take pictures. Instead my Apple Watch is my main driver when I am out in the world. It is fairly unobtrusive, in spite of the mountain of distributed tech behind it.

BTW, I don’t think you sound extreme at all. After reading good books like Privacy is Power and The Surveillance Capitalism, you approach sounds real to me.

Re: Turning away from smartphones: 'We need to go places and touch things'

#47

Post by goda90 »

mrweasel wrote: post #11

Someone pointed out in a similar discussion: "It's not the phone itself that they issue, it's the content." Yesterday there was a debate locally about screen time, both for adults and children, and how much is to much. It's always about the phone, the iPad or the TV, never about the content. At this point I'm leaning more towards, well, we tried social media, streaming, online gaming and funny meme site and our monke…

I've been daydreaming about a new Android launcher to make doom scrolling less immediate and attractive. It'll give quick and immediate access to "tool" apps. Maps, calculator, bank, etc, and access to direct messaging(for me, chatting with people isn't a negative like other social media). But then it'll have a "I need to distraction" button or something. This will first suggest working on a task from a to-do list. Then it can offer some educational tidbit/language practice/etc to be your distraction. If you absolutely must access the doom scrolling apps, it'll put it behind a 30 second timer and be configurable to limit total time and such.

Re: Turning away from smartphones: 'We need to go places and touch things'

#48

Post by silent_cal »

mrweasel wrote: post #11

Someone pointed out in a similar discussion: "It's not the phone itself that they issue, it's the content." Yesterday there was a debate locally about screen time, both for adults and children, and how much is to much. It's always about the phone, the iPad or the TV, never about the content. At this point I'm leaning more towards, well, we tried social media, streaming, online gaming and funny meme site and our monke…

"...we may witness shameless intrusion into the privacy of well-known people according to the slogan “Everyone is entitled to know everything.” But this is a false slogan of a false era; far greater in value is the forfeited right of people not to know, not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life has no need for this excessive and burdening flow of information."

- Solzhenitsyn

Re: Turning away from smartphones: 'We need to go places and touch things'

#49

Post by cableshaft »

mrweasel wrote: post #11

Someone pointed out in a similar discussion: "It's not the phone itself that they issue, it's the content." Yesterday there was a debate locally about screen time, both for adults and children, and how much is to much. It's always about the phone, the iPad or the TV, never about the content. At this point I'm leaning more towards, well, we tried social media, streaming, online gaming and funny meme site and our monke…

My main problem is that smartphones are geared way too much towards consuming content and not enough towards producing content (except for pictures and videos and short twitter-like comments, i.e. easily consumable crap).

For coding, 3d modeling, writing books, composing music, etc, it's really not that great.

When I was in junior high I got one of those TI-Calculators, like 10 years before the iPhone first came out. Yes I had games installed on it, but it also had a programming environment (TI-BASIC) that let me make games directly on the device. And so I did, at any opportunity, even in the middle of classes where it didn't make sense to have a calculator out. I made action games, RPG games, text-based fighting games, etc.

So by the time I got to college, I already well understood the basics of programming and could make fairly complicated programs.

Same with the computers we had, I learned Q-Basic on them and HTML and was making games and webpages on there as well.

But these phones and tablets try really hard to make it so we just consume content all day long instead of producing content. I tried coding and writing stories on these devices (even with a keyboard attachment) and the experience just isn't that great, I just end up back on the desktop/laptop.

But a lot of kids don't spend hardly any time on computers anymore, just phone and tablets, so they're stuck with these devices they can't really learn and master too well, where everything they might want to make has to be done with a supplemental computer they might not even own, so instead they mostly just mindlessly consume garbage content.

I understand I was an outlier as a kid and most other kids weren't making games on their calculators, but if we thought of these devices more as "how can we facilitate people making their own tools on here" I still think there would be enough kids that would be naturally curious enough to learn how to do that and help create the next generation of builders.

And I don't mean just software developers making tools for this (there are already a bunch of attempts at this), Apple needs to think like this and build their devices with this in mind or else it will just have too many restrictions.

And we wouldn't have to be so obsessed with limiting children's access to these devices, since they could be spending that time making really cool things on it.

Re: Turning away from smartphones: 'We need to go places and touch things'

#50

Post by eimrine »

alamortsubite wrote: post #35
WhackyIdeas wrote: post #30

After what happened with Adobe, Microsoft and Sonos this past week, I have decided to try limit my use of American products. Don’t get me wrong, I love the USA - I have tonnes of family there and I have met some super nice people on my months long holidays there too… But. There is just too much poison coming out of Silicon Valley in my view. Awful choices in pursuit of our personal information, ‘Recall’ demonstrates…

It's called late stage capitalism and the scary thing is I think we still have a way to go. Check out the explosion of PE into our healthcare system recently if you really want to feel some goosebumps.

Wait a minute, why being a private equity for some healthcare institutes is bad?
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