Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 516 posts

Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

#221

Post by maemilius »

dwighttk wrote: post #174
wlesieutre wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this playing out right now with Apple's phones, which get continuously bigger and shinier and brighter with every new generation. Then they give us "Screen Time" and Tim Cook talks about giving people the tools to be aware of how much they're using their phones and to make their own decisions about it. If drug companies said "We're discontinuing Advil for your headaches and replacing all painkillers with small…

Perhaps I just don’t have smartphone addiction, but (if I do) there is something different between this “addiction” and others. There are no withdrawal symptoms for me. I feel the compulsion to pick it up and look at it, but if I don’t have my phone, after reaching for it in my pocket and not finding it a few times I just stop. I don’t feel a need to go find a phone or feel rotten because I don’t have one. And these…

I'm in the same boat as you. One thing I've learned over the last few years is that the problem with "phone addition" has more to do with the lack of boredom than any physical effects.

The really short version is that there's some science that suggests that periods of boredom increase creativity. By constantly keeping active with your phone, we're losing this "boredom time".

Personally, I've made a habit of occasionally just doing nothing every now and then. Put the phone away; don't listen to anything. It's actually great for my commute home (I take a bus). I can just sit/stand and not do anything and just relax for a few minutes on the way home.

Personally, I think the biggest problem here isn't that kids are spending a lot of time looking at their screens. It's that parents _aren't_ spending a lot of time engaging with their kids about the content.

When a screen is used to distract a child - or anyone,really - instead of engage them, that's where the problem arises.

Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

#222

Post by trynumber9 »

naravara wrote: post #157
trynumber9 wrote: post #3

> There is a looming issue Ms. Stecher sees in the future: Her husband, who is 39, loves video games and thinks they can be educational and entertaining. She does not. I'm still peeved so many people hate video games categorically. Age of Empires & Civilization got me into history as a kid and I checked out dozens of books as a result. Plus, the reason I ended up wanting to learn more about computers was to make game…

>Age of Empires & Civilization got me into history as a kid and I checked out dozens of books as a result. So this is kind of a problem. LOTS of people of our generation learned a lot of our history from games like Age of Empires and Civilization. But these sources of information aren't neutral. They had biases baked into their narratives by the simple structure of game design. The notion of "nations" or "civilizatio…

Of course they weren't accurate, that's why I went to the library to learn more. But they transformed learning about history and geography from something tedious into something I would do on my own, in free time. Self-motivated learning, I think, is something special.

Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

#223

Post by Wowfunhappy »

humanrebar wrote: post #149
sys_64738 wrote: post #120

This is no different than when people were buying TVs for the first time in 1956. Those closest to the tech display the greatest fears. In the 1980s there was hysteria that video games would turn kids into social pariahs due to the bad effects from violence and gore. But shooting a cluster of pixels in 1984 is trivial compared to running the bloods and guts of realism of a PS4. But not much is said anymore. I think i…

Keep going back. Novels used to be unhealthy: https://op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/when-novels-wer... More recently, parents used to complain about teenage girls locking themselves in their rooms to talk on the phone with their friends.

The fact that parents have had somewhat silly concerns about past technologies does not discount current concerns.

I truly believe that the new crop of "psychologically optimized" mobile games and apps have crossed a line in this regard. Books, movies, comics etc were of course designed to be appealing and enjoyable, but were not specifically designed to consume as much of your time as they possibly could.

Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

#224

Post by whycombinater »

andrewla wrote: post #207
whycombinater wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a data scientist nor a psychologist nor an addiction expert nor ... But I've played some games. I am 137% confident that some form of "level up" (roguelikes, MMOs, MOBAs, FTL) is an extremely strong addiction factor. League of Legends, that free game whose net worth is among the highest of all time. In real life, you study->grades->job->promote->takeoverworld. Or liftweights->liftmoreweights->liftmoreweights.…

> But I've played some games. I am 137% confident that some form of "level up" ... is an extremely strong addiction factor. Try playing more unsuccessful games. You'll find that most boring, unaddictive, terrible games that you'll never play more than once have the same leveling up mechanic.

Well sure, we can say there's a prerequisite amount of fun to be had in the first place. Addiction is for pleasure not pain, at least for the average person. Something must not be so off-putting that you don't have a chance to get addicted. For example, a cigarette that caught your mouth on fire would probably not be smoked again. The fact that some (or even most, may be your point) games set your mouth on fire does not mean the addiction factor isn't there. It just means they're more boring than they are addictive in that critical early stage.

Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

#225

Post by gattr »

Tehchops wrote: post #30

I think it's less about the screen time, and more about what's on the screen. Echoing some of the existing comments: Games and sites today are vastly different than they were 20 years ago. Games like Civilization, Quake, Diablo, C&C, Mortal Kombat, Tony Hawk etc... were definitely addictive. But modern games like Fortnite and Clash of Clans are not engineered the same way. They are specifically designed to function l…

I remember reading an analysis saying it's the "persistence" features in games that have the strongest potential for addition. E.g. you could play Counter-Strike all night, but the only thing you bring out is your improved skills. Unlike MMORPGs and similar where you "develop the character" and "accumulate equipment" (these days, also for real money).

Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

#226

Post by 51lver »

mindslight wrote: post #205

Calling it "screen time" is missing the elephant in the room. The largest part of the problem is that the software we're directly interacting with has been designed by companies with interests directly contrary to ours! Social interaction will inherently set off more chemical rewards, but it is the tuning of the feedback loop (optimizing for micro-interactions) that keeps us glued. Emacs/mutt/libreoffice/python/kodi…

Maybe someday FOSS "veganism" will catch on.

Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

#227

Post by rchaud »

tspike wrote: post #188
Tehchops wrote: post #30

I think it's less about the screen time, and more about what's on the screen. Echoing some of the existing comments: Games and sites today are vastly different than they were 20 years ago. Games like Civilization, Quake, Diablo, C&C, Mortal Kombat, Tony Hawk etc... were definitely addictive. But modern games like Fortnite and Clash of Clans are not engineered the same way. They are specifically designed to function l…

Yes. It's irritating to me to hear screen time constantly discussed as a monolith. For example, I have no issue with my son playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild. He gets to poke around and experiment and explore and it has sparked a lot of imaginative play, curiosity and interesting conversations. Likewise, it's fine if he wants to watch the videos we've taken of our family, it helps him to remember relatives we don't g…

Advertising to kids happens through Youtube and Instagram, not those ugly Adsense iframes that can be spotted a mile away and at this point fall under "banner blindness" for a lot of users.

I'm not a gamer so I don't know much about Zelda, but the sort of hypnotic hold some Youtube/Insta personalities have on kids is astonishing. They will parrot their talking points, talk about them relentlessly with friends and buy whatever they're shilling, be it makeup, game guides, phone skins, what have you.

Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

#228

Post by wott »

skolos wrote: post #18
wefarrell wrote: post #11

There is always a tendency to blame the addiction on the substance, but it's usually symptomatic of something deeper. In this case I think it's happening because parents don't have as much time to spend with their children as they have in past generations and screens are a convenient way of keeping a child occupied in a safe way.

In past generations parents spent much less time with kids than now. Kids were mostly roaming streets. Now society frowns upon letting kids be outside nonsupervised, hence the substitution - screens indoors. Edit: Today parents spent twice as much time with kids as 50 years ago. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/11/27/parents-...

I wonder what the results would be if they included grand-parents (and similar close relatives) in the count of time spent. Because parents are not the only close adults being able to provide a 'parental' role of supervision and care; and families have gotten more and more split along the years, with an always more isolated parent(s)-child(ren) nucleus.

Speaking of isolation, father's time may rise, mother's time may rise as well, and yet the time spent with parents may decrease too: think of the multiplication of single mothers (and to a lesser degree single fathers).

Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

#229

Post by crwalker »

We need to develop a reflexive (yes, unthinking) ethical response to digital technology, one that's built from common-sense analysis of the long-term side effects, and train it into our kids (and others we care about).

As an analogy, "don't eat that: it's dirty" is not a proposition that's meant to be analyzed on a case by case basis, it's meant to be applied automatically to the entire world excepting a few very clear circumstances. It's a good heuristic.

I don't know what the digital equivalents will be, but would love to hear suggestions.

"Don't follow the likes"

"You're the product"

"Don't post anything unless you want it in the NYT"

"Whose phone is that? (Google's)"

-- edit (spelling)

Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

#230

Post by VectorLock »

mindslight wrote: post #205

Calling it "screen time" is missing the elephant in the room. The largest part of the problem is that the software we're directly interacting with has been designed by companies with interests directly contrary to ours! Social interaction will inherently set off more chemical rewards, but it is the tuning of the feedback loop (optimizing for micro-interactions) that keeps us glued. Emacs/mutt/libreoffice/python/kodi…

This is the conclusion that a lot of people on HN seem to be reaching. Now how do we go about filtering out the 'bad screen' while allowing the 'good screen?'
Post reply on HN