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Internet addiction and the habit of book reading

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Re: Internet addiction and the habit of book reading

#331

Post by stnmtn »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #321
lr4444lr wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you get absorbed in a movie or binge watch a TV show? If so, I suspect your attention ability is still intact. You just need to re-practice consciously directing it again. I still struggle with it too, but was able to "get lost" in a book again. It was key though to move my phone way out of the room, and was hard to get started.

I can't stand most modern media, the only way it's tolerable is by watching at 2x speed.

Dont' watch modern media. Dive into old films that stand the test of time. Anything by Godard, Kurosawa, Fellini, etc.

I have awful attention spans, but I find that if I challenge myself by watching stuff out my comfort zone, I'm able to pay attention to it so well. If I know it's a great work of art, I find myself paying attention to just about every single shot, the composition of the frame, etc. It's incredibly rewarding, and it definitely makes watching most modern content impossible now

(That being said, I absolutely loved Pig and The Green Knight from this year)

Re: Internet addiction and the habit of book reading

#332

Post by codeconscious »

mountainb wrote: post #149

The way to cure this is to develop a habit that severely limits undirected online browsing and socializing. Part of it is just an education of your own aesthetic sentiments. I read James Clear's "Atomic Habits" (not that this is a special book, I was just on another kick in which I really needed to improve my productivity and picked up a suggestion to use a physical counter of some kind to make a habit stick. I bough…

Thank you for this post.

> Over time, I stopped caring as much about the news and became more easily satisfied by very briefly reading summaries every few days.

Do you have any particular habits or resources for getting news summaries, or do you just check regular news site less frequently?

Re: Internet addiction and the habit of book reading

#333

Post by zozbot234 »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #326
zozbot234 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure where parent argued that we should not be concerned about police brutality, hate crimes, or the ongoing fraying of the social fabric which gets commonly internalized as a sense that "society is not validating my existence". Framing those issues are purely matters of race/gender/factional politics is just as harmful.

I'm also not sure where I argued that we should frame it as purely matters of race/gender/politics. Certainly there are other aspects and other lenses. But these are intersectional issues and race/gender/politics happen to be crucial lenses. I don't mean btw to straw man the comment by mentioning hate crimes/police brutality/etc. First of all, race shows up in much more mundane stuff like awkward conversations about…

> I'm also not sure where I argued that we should frame it as purely matters of race/gender/politics.

That's what people are doing when they "bring it up", effectively, whether they realize this or not. It's a populist, lazy, anti-intellectual framing which rejects deep engagement with object-level concerns as somehow being less meaningful than "acknowledging/validating my identity/daily experience". It's a rejection of real, actual politics as the domain of creative adaptation and compromise-- as if "sharing [one's] racialized daily existence" obviates the need for this kind of consistent, active, pro-social engagement. And it's bad regardless of who's doing it. It doesn't matter if the people involved wear MAGA hats or not, the underlying dynamics are pretty much equivalent.

Re: Internet addiction and the habit of book reading

#334

Post by dr_kiszonka »

smugglerFlynn wrote: post #198
mountainb wrote: post #149

The way to cure this is to develop a habit that severely limits undirected online browsing and socializing. Part of it is just an education of your own aesthetic sentiments. I read James Clear's "Atomic Habits" (not that this is a special book, I was just on another kick in which I really needed to improve my productivity and picked up a suggestion to use a physical counter of some kind to make a habit stick. I bough…

Atomic Habits is an excellent book, highly recommend it to anyone struggling to fix patterns of behavior. I’ve started to curate any environment I use to avoid unintentional triggers. For example, when you reach for your iPhone to open up Medium or Kindle, you are forced to see all the different notifications and home screen icons. If there is a social media app or Safari icon happen to be there, your craving to open…

Maybe Kindle app should have a notification dot until we read some number of pages on a given day?

Re: Internet addiction and the habit of book reading

#335

Post by unmole »

8ytecoder wrote: post #264
jimmygrapes wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that seems to have helped some of my friends who have experienced the same issue of not wanting to read anymore is to find one particular book or style they liked before and go deep into that author's backlog or similar styles. And to add to that, don't be afraid of reading pulpy fiction; you're not trying to impress anybody with what you're reading, you're doing it for yourself. Enjoy it. Read young adult…

May I suggest the Expanse series. It’s I think a good “split the difference” book series. Not too pulpy, not too intellectually straining that I’m struggling to hold my attention like a Neal Stephenson book either.

I wholeheartedly second this recommendation. After struggling to read last year, I picked up the Expanse series and managed to break my rut. And the final book was released last month so you won't have to go through the months of waiting like I did.

Re: Internet addiction and the habit of book reading

#336

Post by Zircom »

aero-glide2 wrote: post #81
Zircom wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought a Kindle and that was nice, but I'm terrible at remembering to bring it with me when I leave the house, and the (admittedly small) effort of having to connect it to my computer to load epubs onto it is enough friction to stop me from doing it in the first place a lot of the time. I usually obtain them from less than legal sources and buy a hardcopy if I like it. For awhile I was buying ebooks straight from t…

Last time I used a Kindle, you could just email a book to your Kindle email address and then the book would appear in the library. Much easier than physically connecting to copy books.

So Kindles don't support epubs, and for whatever inane, absurd reason Amazon does not let you use their send to Kindle function with their own ebook format azw3. You have to convert them to mobi if you wanna email them, which is missing some QOL features last time I checked, which was admittedly a looong time ago so maybe that's changed.

Re: Internet addiction and the habit of book reading

#337

Post by viceroyalbean »

christophilus wrote: post #197
viceroyalbean wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started reading Brandon Sanderson with this mindset and I'm loving it. Before I would only really read nonfiction but I would easily get distracted and didn't read much in practice. Now I'm reading like 100 pages a day and hopefully it improves my concentration. Even if it doesn't I'm really enjoying the books

Which books? I’ve only read his Wheel of Time books (the last 3 of the series). They were great, but I never picked up any of his other works.

I'm currently reading the Stormlight Archives series, planning on continuing with Mistborn when I'm done.

Re: Internet addiction and the habit of book reading

#338

Post by fouric »

easymodex wrote: post #329
fouric wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two suggestions: (1) Try learning a highly complex game like Dota 2. You can't alt-tab (well, you can, but you'll likely die fairly quickly), and the sheer number of things going on at once will require your full attention... but there are still many small things that you can succeed at that will keep it fun while you're learning. (2) Consider doing some "concentration training" where you engage in a non-media activi…

> Dota 2 Don't do that, highly addictive.

Only for specific personalities. I'm somewhat prone to Dota addiction, but 14 out of the 15 people I play with are not, and in both my case and that 15th person we've managed it with some difficulty.

For most people it won't be an issue - you're far more likely to not enjoy the game at all.

Re: Internet addiction and the habit of book reading

#339

Post by fouric »

Mezzie wrote: post #325
fouric wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How the hell do I explore that without spending 2 hours derailed by fun history facts? Answer: I do not. Actually, the answer is "train your brain". Nobody's forcing you to get distracted and start clicking/tapping on other things - you're taking the actions yourself. Now, of course, TikTok is designed to pull you in as much as possible, but ultimately it's still completely manageable. The maximum addictiveness of…

I was being facetious, but yes, this is the actual answer. Meditation helps me a lot, but the key to cutting out addictive habits for me has always been replacing them with something else, and nothing so far has quite scratched my intellectual itch like studying people online except grad school, and that doesn't count because that's part of what I was studying anyway. Usually, people are encouraged to do other things…

Sorry, I didn't pick up on your facetiousness!

Your approach of "replacement over removal" (of bad habits) is a solid one that I've had some success with myself! Better to distract yourself from the bad thing than just leave a void there...

And, you make a really good point about people who are actually interested in the Web, as opposed to just consuming a lot of content there. I'll have to give that some thought...

Re: Internet addiction and the habit of book reading

#340

Post by jeffe »

aw9f70gae wrote: post #242
toper-centage wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny you place games in the "bad" side of things, this hich need to be reduced. I group gaming with reading because the kind of games I play require a level of focus and engagement, and my brain rather spend hours scroll HN and Reddit. It really is an uphill battle.

What kind of games? I’d like to stop playing addictive games and start playing games that are better for my mind.

adding on some recs that aren't necessarily 'good for the mind' but great from a gaming as art perspective and not designed for addiction - co op: terraria, Deep Rock Galactic, and Magicka various interesting games: Subnautica, Transistor, noita, hyperlight drifter, control
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