511–520 of 706 posts
Can we have smartphone threads where everyone discloses whether they're an app developer or have another conflict of interest? Some of us know these kids are cash cows and are behaving like the anti-gun-regulation lobby of the tech world. I am not an app developer and derive no income from the sale or usage of smartphones or their software.
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I’m not a scientist in this field, but I would have been very surprised to have seen a difference in cognitive ability this quickly. I’ve always felt that we wouldn’t recover from the negative impacts of phone addiction very quickly, if ever, after several years of addiction to doom scrolling, social media feeds, and the short bursts of 10-second videos. I wish more real research in this field was being done, so that…
> I would have been very surprised to have seen a difference in cognitive ability this quickly Sleep deprivation is really, really bad for you. Here [0] is one example that tries to measure reaction times compared to drinking (in the context of driving). Being tired is pretty much being drunk. Here [1] is another on cognitive activity. It’s not surprising to me in the slightest (anecdotally, I suffer from bouts of in…
The first serious cognitive effect I've encountered is struggling to find a word I'm searching for (or recalling a person's name) in conversation. On the third day, I also start having significant vision impairment, reminiscent of hallucinogenic effects, where objects seem to be swaying slightly when I focus on them.
It also quite apparent to me that it is much harder to retain information learned after being up for a day or two.
I think I kind of owe my software development career to these early days as that is what inspired me. We didn’t have smartphones when I was at school and I guess things weren’t as optimised to be so addictive but we did have Facebook and Bebo.
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Yes, I think so. For one thing, reading on a phone is harder and leads to worse retention. The content you consume is likely to be shorter and less intellectually valuable. Maybe more importantly, doing anything on a phone seems to encourage a shorter attention span and switching over to other activities, such as tapping useless notifications and doomscrolling your way into anger, unhappiness, depression, anxiety etc…
Why would reading on a phone be any less intellectually valuable? A book is a book regardless. Just uninstall the social apps and/or turn off notifications if you are easily distracted. It's not rocket science (which incidentally you can learn on a phone if you wanted)
So we have a bunch of data that points to these conclusions, since I'm not sure precisely what I'm trying to prove here, I'll start with what I consider some key insights
- We know that attention spans are just massively shorter on phones than any other medium, the evidence from this comes from multiple disciplines and subjects - like pretty much any task you might do, when you do it on the phone you do it for a smaller period of time, on the web for example you always see higher bounce rates and shorter session times. Same with game/media engagement
- When it comes to reading we have a fair amount of research showing that memory and retention seem to suffer on screens in general, especially smaller screens; the gold standard is still reading from paper, and then handwriting notes about what you read
- It follows from the various above points that you're going to struggle to read and digest long, complex texts on a phone more than you would on a larger screen or in a paper book. And sure enough the type of behavior we see on phones is the consumption of bite-size content where it's difficult to express much in the way of complexity.
Disclosure: I work for a social media company. However I live in the UK. Most schools in the UK ban phones in school. The difference here is that in this study phones were taken away for 21 days, even after school. They lost access to the phone completely during that time. I am less convinced that we should wholesale ban phones for kids, because in the UK at least, there is no longer any culture of letting kids go ou…
When I see all these "phone ban" experiments, I always wonder, is the phone that's the issue, or is it the apps/websites tailored for engagement (a.k.a addiction)? Maybe instead of banning kids from using phones, they should consider banning companies from making their apps addictive on purpose.
I find all of these bans quite interesting because when I was at school we would be figuring out how to circumvent the web filters and would be building apps to hide the games we had open on Miniclip when a teacher walked past. I think I kind of owe my software development career to these early days as that is what inspired me. We didn’t have smartphones when I was at school and I guess things weren’t as optimised to…
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Uh-huh. You have a conjecture, you test it, and then you say "looks like reality didn't match our conjecture, the conjecture must be wrong." Except here they got a negative result and said "reality must be wrong". It's a determined effort to find specific results.
Not at all. Type II error is routinely the result of methodological flaws like insufficient sample size. It would be asinine to study the effects of parachutes on survivability of jumping from airplanes, hypothesizing that they would help, but conclude that the "conjecture must be wrong" because the sample size was 2 and it failed to reach statistical significance, or because the airplane was on the ground. Would you…
Can we have smartphone threads where everyone discloses whether they're an app developer or have another conflict of interest? Some of us know these kids are cash cows and are behaving like the anti-gun-regulation lobby of the tech world. I am not an app developer and derive no income from the sale or usage of smartphones or their software.
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I’m not sure if you have kids, but I’m not sure making the choice to ostracize your kids is one they’d thank you for later. And, certainly not all kids would. It very much depends on the kid / the impact said ostracism would have.
This is why it needs implementing systemically, and not ad hoc. If no one has social media, no one is being ostracised. If only one person opts out then yes, they risk being ostracised.
It took public shaming to start to reduce addiction to cigarettes, after we were able to show how bad they were for you.