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Doomscrolling ourselves to death

edwest.co.uk

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Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#81

Post by snazz »

recursive-call wrote: post #64
throw93839394 wrote: post #9

> hiding my smartphone from myself. I have shoved my smartphone behind wardrobes and under beds. I have shut it up in cupboards. > One particularly desperate ... strategy I developed was to kick my phone haphazardly across the room so it would lodge under some unknown piece of furniture So over privileged people buy $1500 iphones, only to kick them across room, to hide? I do not think reading yet another master piece…

Whenever I see people doing this kind of thing, I always think “if they were serious, they would downgrade their internet service plan”. Watch how fast the “addiction” leaves them when they’re paying by the MB

I’ve been looking for an MVNO cell phone plan in the U.S. that offers data at a max speed of 512 kbps (or something similar that is fast enough for most legitimate uses, but a little painful), and I haven’t found anything. Seems like an opportunity. However, I can waste plenty of time on sites like this one, and it is functional on a 16 kbps connection.

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#82

Post by giarc »

Here's my n of 2 story, but my young kids read all the time and it's likely for two reasons. My wife and I read, and still read to them every night, and second, they both have Kobo Clara Colour e-readers. They love graphic novels and the colour screen keeps them engaged (we had black and white e-readers before and it just wasn't the same). We get 100% of our books from the public library and they probably read 5-20 graphic novels a week. Best $120 investment we've made.

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#83

Post by sdf4j »

doginasuit wrote: post #55

I don't read less, but I do read fewer books. It is hard to find a book that is the best source for what I want know about, and that changes too frequently now to outlive the time it takes to read a book. This is what you'd expect in a world where the sheer volume of things that are important to know about has grown beyond a sustainable capacity. What has taken their place, for better or for worse, are various inform…

If something changes frequently, is it important to know? is the change inevitable or artificial?

I’ve learned to appreciate lasting things and ideas.

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#84

Post by tripleee »

doginasuit wrote: post #55

I don't read less, but I do read fewer books. It is hard to find a book that is the best source for what I want know about, and that changes too frequently now to outlive the time it takes to read a book. This is what you'd expect in a world where the sheer volume of things that are important to know about has grown beyond a sustainable capacity. What has taken their place, for better or for worse, are various inform…

AI has come for those blog posts and news articles. There's very little incentive for people to invest in quality content anymore - I'm seeing things like this more with many others just quietly stopping: https://exploringjs.com/

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#85

Post by Sharlin »

doginasuit wrote: post #55

I don't read less, but I do read fewer books. It is hard to find a book that is the best source for what I want know about, and that changes too frequently now to outlive the time it takes to read a book. This is what you'd expect in a world where the sheer volume of things that are important to know about has grown beyond a sustainable capacity. What has taken their place, for better or for worse, are various inform…

Fiction doesn’t age in the same way.

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#86

Post by codingdave »

adithyassekhar wrote: post #41
coffeefirst wrote: post #11

I can tell, usually within a few minutes of meeting them, who’s really into social media. There’s a little bit of frenetic emotional dysregulation, and then they say the weirdest stuff to me. I don’t think you could have made a similar argument about heavy trash tv watchers. They may have had less to talk about, you may have found them less interesting, but it didn’t literally alter their personalities. We have a big…

Do you have examples? Asking for a friend.

"Asking for a friend" is a great example.

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#89

Post by pj_mukh »

Escapado wrote: post #69

On a personal level I have become more anxious and it has become more difficult to deal with my tendency to procrastinate the more screen time I have and the more I am exposed to social media. I have in essence deleted the vast majority of my social media accounts years ago, but stayed a passive and rather anonymous consumer on Reddit, X and YouTube. A few weeks ago I blocked them too. I would say in totality I read…

One of the most insidious realities of the introduction of AI is that we've taken our eye off of tech's original sin - the algorithmic feed forensically designed to hijack the brain. I don't see how it's any different than opium and why the regulations should be any different. Even the problem of "AI slop" is mostly that it invades the algorithms, weaponizing them even more.

I'm not a huge fan of heavy-handed regulation, but some clinical regulation like making "Explore" tabs or feeds irrelevant to your social networks, opt-in by default would have such a Pareto improvement to all our brains.

Instead we are getting endless whinging over water usage in data centers ironically flooding our algorithmic feeds.

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#90

Post by Flere-Imsaho »

dag11 wrote: post #27
samuraijack wrote: post #8

Sorry for being pedantic but content like “I took a bath full of Diet Coke and Mentos” is not doom scrolling. Is it low quality use of your time, sure, but it’s not doom scrolling

I've noticed a usage shift in the last few years. In 2020, "doomscrolling" originally meant to be stuck scrolling at all the doom-y posts we were bombarded with as the world fell apart around us. As things "stabilized" in the last few years, I've noticed that everyone and myself still tends to use "doomscrolling" even just for when we're stuck, locked in place, scrolling low quality content. I figure in ten years whe…

I use the phrase "brain rot" for the low quality stuff that I scroll through. I do really hope that we retain the original meaning of "doom scrolling", as I think it's still as relevant today as the COVID days.
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