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'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

theguardian.com

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Re: 'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

#301

Post by peoplewindow »

intended wrote: post #285
peoplewindow wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely this. The recent "fake news", "omg people are brainwashed by social media" hysteria is coming almost entirely from the parts of the traditional media that are keenest on having a monopoly over political influence. Observe that the Guardian burns money at a catastrophic rate and run begging boxes on every article ... because they prioritise influence over profit. They can't stand the idea of hiding their wr…

What the ....? Any good journalist worth their salt like any good teacher wants to make sure the most people are informed with good information and they do the best job to inform. How did that become “wanting influence”. And if being good Doesn’t make an impact - which it increasingly doesn’t- then only crap will remain.

Hah! If that's true then why do rich billionaires so often buy money-losing newspapers? Because they like burning dollars?

And why are there so often easily caught factual errors in news articles that just happen to fit the journalists agenda? Here's a good example from this weekend:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-41521671/100-women-amy-cu...

The BBC is running some vacuous "top 100 inspiring and aspirational women" series. They really like Amy Cuddy. She's typically described as a psychologist who shows people how to create changes in their own biochemistry by "power posing". Search her name and in the first page of results you'll find an article by Slate (written by scientists, not a journalist) that reveals her to be a fraud: her research doesn't replicate and she knows it doesn't. The effect she promotes doesn't exist at all. But she continues to milk the media and TED Talk circuit by promoting these feel-good ideas as if they were based in science.

It takes all of 10 seconds to discover that Cuddy is a fraud. Yet the BBC is promoting her repeatedly. Why? Because the articles are written by a feminist who likes the idea of Cuddy as an example of a successful and inspiring female scientist. No desire to inform need intrude!

Sorry, if you really believe journalist's priority is to neutrally inform with good information then you can't read many newspapers. I'll give you a tip: newspapers don't employ fact checkers.

Re: 'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

#302

Post by folksinger »

VOBOSHI wrote: post #235
coldtea wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't buy the idea that smartphones are extinguishing the life of the mind. That's might be because of thinking of first order effects only. > Sure, smartphones provide access to almost unlimited trash. But they also provide access to Wikipedia, perhaps the most successful encyclopedia ever developed by humans. Well, who said access to Wikipedia is something good in itself? For one, it might (and I say it does) r…

Access to all kinds of information is good. It will always be up to the individual to investigate and draw up conclusions. People who state that they can just look something up on Wiki and be knowledgeable (or gasp experts!) will have been ignorant 10 years ago, 100 years ago etc. If they wouldn't have had Wikipedia or a newspaper, they'd have had religion (or anything else) to allow feeling knowledgeable. Also, I di…

Do you think the average public library contains a better or worse ratio of good to bad knowledge than Google?

How about a library at a world-class university?

How about the magazines on display at the grocery store checkout line?

Re: 'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

#303

Post by ben_w »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #253
walterstucco wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At one point you stop watching TV, because there are no more new things to watch, you stop reading novels because they aren't novel anymore, you stop going to the bar because there's a fixed amount of alcohol you can consume, it costs money, the bar has opening hours. Smartphone follows you everywhere, all the time.

A smartphone has only so much battery. It's best suited for frequent but short uses. If you want to replace TV, novels and bars with social media, your best bet is still the PC.

Fortunately PCs make it easy to block websites.

#hosts file

0.0.0.0 twitter.com

0.0.0.0 facebook.com

etc.

Re: 'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

#304

Post by BoiledCabbage »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #153
apatters wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's not the smartphone that's the problem. The smartphone is just the delivery system. It's remarkable how well some of Richard Stallman's quotes have aged. "With software, either the users control the program, or the program controls the users..." The idea of a program controlling its users must have seemed very esoteric when that quote was first penned in 1985, at a time when home PCs (let alone ones with GU…

Thank you for this. Putting Stallman’s quote in context helps me see how forward his thinking is and how important the distribution of power and consent can be in software. I see a parallel with food companies spending money on researching and marketing foods that are more addictive and more profitable. Yes, people do “want” addictive foods, but that’s not the type of want we want empowered; rather it is a hook into…

I was one who thought Stallman was just weird and obsessive way back when. I can't same I'm a devout follower, but I admit I was wrong about him.

He had incredible foresight and was absolutely, insanely ahead of his time. He was providing solutions for problems 30 years before we could even realize we had them.

Re: 'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

#305

Post by folksinger »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #194
jansho wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But they also provide access to Wikipedia [etc] But let's be honest, most smartphone users spend their time confined in a limited number of domains: social media, games, shopping etc. In that sense, we can be called a bit zombie in the head.

If we're going to be totally honest, then first, let's call social media primarily talking to your friends and family . Which is one of the most deeply and fundamentally human things you can do. And it is also critical to doing anything together with other people. The Internet has lifted constraints of time and geography from communication - which is why you see people on IM in situations where, without the phone, th…

Is an ad-subsidized and for-profit business deeply and fundamentally required to talk to your friends and family?

If interacting with friends and family is what is important, is Facebook the best way to do so?

Re: 'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

#306

Post by jessaustin »

chrisco255 wrote: post #24

Does anyone think that Hacker News fits the bill of addictiveness? Or is HN different than Facebook/Reddit/Twitter for some reason?

The main difference is that the people who run it aren't getting rich directly from harming its users. That's why we don't see a constant stream of new features that make our experience worse.

Re: 'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

#307

Post by hk__2 »

nerdponx wrote: post #251
barrkel wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I somewhat agree with your examples, except Wikipedia. It has no business being much more than a server farm and software tweaker. That's not something that needs large ongoing investment by many people. http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/09/21/wikipedia-keeping-it-fr...

Servers are expensive.

In 2016, the Foundation got over $70M in revenue and spent $2M of that in Web hosting. Processing all those donations cost them more than hosting Wikipedia.

Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/43/Wikim...

Re: 'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

#308

Post by folksinger »

jansho wrote: post #262
Chathamization wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course I can only speak from personal experience. But in my experience, long personal e-mail (several paragraphs) from friends to catch up used to be relatively common, and now they've all but disappeared (I don't think I've gotten any in the past couple of years). Likewise, long chats of the old AIM/MSN variety - spend an hour or two chatting with a friend sharing ideas and news with them - seems much rarer than…

This is true for me too. It's funny that we can now literally connect to thousands of people in social media, but through likes and short comments. Sometimes I get the impression that long threads of discussion is not encouraged, that it's polite to just keep it short and sweet (example, when Instagram introduced the "like comment" button, I sometimes find myself using it rather than thanking directly.) So our connec…

Where as we have F=m•a in physical reality, in hyperreality it seems as though the rule is inverted, F=m÷a.

It seems the less "mass" a message contains the more "force" it seems to exert. A long response is ignored and carries with it very little persuasive power compared to the pithy response of a mere binary form of approval.

Re: 'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

#309

Post by jeffdavis »

joe_fishfish wrote: post #185
jeffdavis wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Capitalism is an accelerant for addictive behavior" I'm not sure that what we have would be described as capitalism any more. If you buy FB stock, are they using that to build new machines that pay dividends over time? You can make an analogy involving software, sure, but it really seems quite different to me. The way I think about it is this: if we all had amnesia and forgot that company XYZ existed, would it still…

How much amnesia are we talking about? Google's core feature of being the best web search engine fits into your "advertise a bit and rebuild the customer base" criterion imo.

If google only had 10% of the search traffic it wouldn't just be smaller, it would be as irrelevant as Bing. So they would somehow need to advertise their way into a dominant position again, which is much harder than advertising just to bootstrap and aquire some custoners.

Re: 'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

#310

Post by walterstucco »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #253
walterstucco wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At one point you stop watching TV, because there are no more new things to watch, you stop reading novels because they aren't novel anymore, you stop going to the bar because there's a fixed amount of alcohol you can consume, it costs money, the bar has opening hours. Smartphone follows you everywhere, all the time.

A smartphone has only so much battery. It's best suited for frequent but short uses. If you want to replace TV, novels and bars with social media, your best bet is still the PC.

There's a flaw in the original comment, and I wanted to make it clear through a provocation.

You don't replace social media with books, there are books I never get bored by, I've read Dune almost 20 times, and I'm sure I will read it again sooner or later.

Social media content is based on engagement, not on enjoyment.

You don't enjoy the content, you enjoy scrolling through the content at the point that once posted, the content is lost, unless it gain real traction, you won't be able to find it again.

Books never run out of battery, when you watch TV you are not actively skipping through ad, you passively ignore them.

Think about it: when was the last time that you interrupted reading a book for watching the TV or a movie?

But how many time you've watched your phone while doing something else?

The addictive nature of the "you might miss it" content is the real danger and it's what the article talks about.

We are at a point in history where going to a bar and drink it's healthier for you mental health than staying home with your phone.

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