61–70 of 77 posts
Luddites and neoludites and similar Amish type will expand their foothold into different cultures. I personally am going to be adjusting my usage as it is impacting my life and negative ways. I've already added timers and limits and will soon be going to grayscale only. What I do hope for which does not yet exist is the ability to use voice GPT at selective moments with a finger tap of an ear bud. I have noticed a gr…
As an example education (at least for me, I'm 54yo) we are told to study something interesting, follow dreams, get good at something academic. Then access to every tool and resource taken away and we are told to go make a living. No fancy tools or studios, the time and environment to do something interesting is taken away. It is replaced with drudgery and cheap entertainment. Think Disney, Hollywood movies, pro sports/gambling, other prepackaged activities, and cellphones.
Government, large/medium corporations, startups have zero incentive to help. Enough people get through the education system to fill what jobs are needed and the rest can [modern equivalent to flipping burgers] and look at their phones.
Excuse my writing. The education system did not work out for me and my family works with our hands. I enjoy working with my hands. I am one of the lucky ones. I tried mainstream and it is miserable. I am glad for the tech industry and the internet and the like. We need to do better for those that are not working for management in what is essentially the company town. It will be a better more enjoyable world if we can.
Makespaces? More funding and expanded mandates for public libraries. Extending what education means and how long people can be involved. I don't know what.
I do love the analogy of a donut which becomes heavier as you reach closer to overconsumption, though. A while back I got tired of all the noise on youtube and installed an extension called "unhook tube" which makes all the recommended videos in the sidebar just disappear. I wonder if there'd be a way to impliment an extension for instagram/facebook and the other 'scrollers', where the longer you use it, the more difficult it becomes to scroll, and the longer it takes for posts to load. It'd be like the benefit of having a fickle water heater, in that it keeps you from staying in the shower too long once the water gets too cold. In terms of facilitating moderation, this seems like the easiest solution.
We'll forever be addicted to the shared global (or interplanetary at some point) information network, but the phone itself won't be needed forever. I don't think there's a way to get a human to not want to know what other people think about stuff or to more generally get information for free in real time. This plus access to computational power is a pretty good combo. If the interface is a brain chip or a phone or wh…
People complain all the time about "being addicted to our phones" but my memory of the world pre-smartphone was that newspapers and magazines were everywhere and frankly...I'm not really seeing the difference - in quality or content. Because while "the newspaper" was always considered respectable...that's ignoring the endless mounds of gossip magazines, fashion magazines, lifestyle...basically every category which ha…
May I add... Television!
> Americans spend more than 4 hours a day on their phones, and more than half say they are addicted to their cell phone. More like seven hours per day: https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/average-screen-time-on-iphon... As long as phone screens continue to be perfect for handheld entertainment and phone apps continue to be designed for infinite thoughtless consumption, then the answer will remain "yes". I 1000% blame soc…
I'm not a smartphone user, so I ask out of curiosity:
Do people really have no agency anymore? No self-discipline?
I've read this statement that it's "the machine's fault" in numerous versions but I'm puzzled by it. If you don't like the screen, why don't you just turn it off, or toss it in the bin?
Kind of funny how for decades people were wishing for some sort of Star Trek device that put the world's knowledge literally in your pocket. Now that we have it...
During my ventures into public space it is impossible not to notice this "knowledge", and that so much as to even note the character of it.
I would personally use another word. Perhaps "pastime", "mindless entertainment", that sort of thing. What I observe is generally people browsing through photo stacks, video stacks, audio tracks, or comment stacks. Always browsing, never resting, as if even the concept of reflection is non-existant. So how, I must ask rhetorically, should any "knowledge" enter into the scene?
I never, ever see anything resembling "knowledge work" except for those fellow commuters who use their laptops. Or the extreme minority who read non-fiction books (those are not observed every week -- not even every month -- as students who are the only class of people who are both numerous and have to read non-fiction now read this stuff off-screen on their laptop in stead).
I feel the trouble with comparing social media to cigarettes is that cigarettes are kind of their own self-contained "thing". For instance, while you can smoke a cigarette on your own and focus your entire attention towards it, it's kind of technically impossible to use social media alone, even if there's no one else in the room with you. The "content" isn't pre-packaged and finite, it's constant and living, fueled b…
I am lucky that I have mostly made a living doing things in the real world and in "virtual spaces". I have the resources to do the things I enjoy without much commercial involvement. It is getting harder to do this in real life. When I need some bolts to build something Homedepot (I have a very dim view of homedepot) prices are insane. The nearest good fastener store is over and hour away. Online sources are amazing but now I have to wade through online empty calories to deal with real life shit.
More options in every area would be helpful but we cannot expect corporations or government to help. They make money making real life difficult and selling us online content when we are to tired to do anything else. I despair sometimes but the real world is incredible and ... well whatever. Maybe one day ...
We'll forever be addicted to the shared global (or interplanetary at some point) information network, but the phone itself won't be needed forever. I don't think there's a way to get a human to not want to know what other people think about stuff or to more generally get information for free in real time. This plus access to computational power is a pretty good combo. If the interface is a brain chip or a phone or wh…
People complain all the time about "being addicted to our phones" but my memory of the world pre-smartphone was that newspapers and magazines were everywhere and frankly...I'm not really seeing the difference - in quality or content. Because while "the newspaper" was always considered respectable...that's ignoring the endless mounds of gossip magazines, fashion magazines, lifestyle...basically every category which ha…
This was also the last days of interesting Popular Mechanics and Scientific American.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://brendenmulligan.com/in-1950-i-doubt-anyone-ever-chec... >I just wanted to share the above photo of a subway car from 1947 where every single person, even though they’re in a confined space together, aren’t paying any attention to each other because they’re reading media on a newspaper. The recent version of this is, of course, cellphones and iPads, yet the same people out there who hate change continue to cry…
Slight difference is that: 1) everybody read pretty much the same content. And not highly curated personalized content. So if you did strike a conversation with someone you’d have some common ground. 2) When starting said conversation the newspaper didn’t keep vibrating in your fingers or making sounds begging your attention back to it and you didn’t experience the FOMO of not giving said attention to it. In other wo…
There is great content but you have to dig and sometimes I am just to tired from real life.
> Americans spend more than 4 hours a day on their phones, and more than half say they are addicted to their cell phone. More like seven hours per day: https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/average-screen-time-on-iphon... As long as phone screens continue to be perfect for handheld entertainment and phone apps continue to be designed for infinite thoughtless consumption, then the answer will remain "yes". I 1000% blame soc…
> I 1000% blame social media companies for intentionally designing their apps I'm not a smartphone user, so I ask out of curiosity: Do people really have no agency anymore? No self-discipline? I've read this statement that it's "the machine's fault" in numerous versions but I'm puzzled by it. If you don't like the screen, why don't you just turn it off, or toss it in the bin?