I don't buy the idea that smartphones are extinguishing the life of the mind.
Sure, smartphones provide access to almost unlimited trash. But they also provide access to Wikipedia, perhaps the most successful encyclopedia ever developed by humans. They can show you newspapers from across the planet. They let you read Latin histories of the Norman conquest of Southern Italy in the middle ages. [0] C'mon folks, this is stuff you might otherwise seek for years in bookstores or never even hear of. Thanks to the Internet and powerful phones you can pop up the link below and read it in bed. The information is within reach of anyone with a decent cell phone.
The effects of the Internet on human society have been profound but the ultimate outcome is not foreordained. Humans have survived some pretty nasty stuff over the millennia and we'll no doubt get through this as well. It's time to stop the hand-wringing and focus on making the Internet help humans in the way many of its original founders conceived. [1]
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 GUIs) were exotic: the first Mac had launched only a year ago. By the time I first heard of Stallman's ideas in the '90s, I was surrounded by PCs with GUIs, but still didn't get it.
Now here we are, 30 years later. The first thing most of us do when we wake up is roll over, grab our phone, and look at some software. The existential costs of the non-free software are so high that we read new stories about them in the media every week, and the tech revolution's architects are banning the products they built from their own homes.
For the less frequently cited ending to Stallman's quote is this: "...If the program controls the users, and the developer controls the program, then the program is an instrument of unjust power."
> The first thing most of us do when we wake up is roll over, grab our phone, and look at some software
The danger of computers becoming like humans is not as great as the danger of humans becoming like computers.
-- Konrad Zuse
I recall Joseph Weizenbaum mentioning something like that in an interview before his death, too, about the difference between using technology to empower people, or to exploit them.
But hey, Wikipedia so what do they know... ask the mediocre for permission to learn from the great at your own peril, that's my motto.
Joseph Weizenbaum's book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment To Calculation (https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Power-Human-Reason-Calculati...) is worth a read. Weizenbaum had written ELIZA, the original "chatbot", a decade earlier (in 1966), and was worried by how much people imputed "thought" to its simple programming.
The book addresses this same topic: to what extent is computer "thought" like human "thought", and what are the dangers of equating these concepts? Like any book about AI written in the 70's, there are some things that are obviously out of date or wrong, but overall it holds up quite well. There's also a section on "compulsive programmers" that may cause some self-reflection among this crowd: https://www.sac.edu/AcademicProgs/Business/ComputerScience/P...
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 addiction and transfer of power by inducing an addiction.
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.
The problem here is not the smartphone per se, but our increasing dependence on it and the "outsourcing" of our thinking and desires to our smartphone.
Imagine the follow scenario:
* Need to get to a place? Just ask Google Maps, no need to think.
* Need to decide what and where to eat? Don't need to think, just use an app that optimizes for health/variety/preferences/budget and you don't even need to leave the house, just it delivered right to your doorstep.
* Need to think deeply about something? Just Google for the right articles. No need to waste time thinking.
* Feeling bored? Just consume a game, song, movie, Reddit/Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/etc.
* Don't know what to do next week? Have an app that auto-suggests what you can do based on your preferences, your friends' schedules, activities in your city, past user ratings for an event, etc. Taking this further, have an AI virtual assistant that plans your entire year's activities.
* Need to date someone? Use an AI virtual assistant (built with the latest in Natural Language Processing and AI technology that optimizes for the right words to use, the correct responses, the best times to send a message, the best jokes to be using, the best emotions to elicit) that has already done all the swiping on Tinder/OKCupid and done all the texting conversations to set you up on a date.
When this point in the future arrives, without a smartphone, you would become almost feel like an empty shell (or even suicidal). Your very existence becomes tied in to the smartphone. Your daily whims/desires becomes dependent on the smartphone.
If you were given a life sentence: give up an arm or a leg, or give up the right to own or use a smartphone for life. I think increasingly in time, people would rather give up an arm or a leg than give up a smartphone for life.
The question then becomes: Do you own a smartphone, or does the smartphone own you?
I don't think all of these are a problem per se. The problem is (and probably always was) people with empty minds. Sure, now they can fill it more easily with junk, but the whole point of technology is to make life easier after all.
If you're learning or working on something you love and you want to have more time to do, its a perfectly reasonable choice to outsource "what I'm I going to eat next" or "how do you I get from A to B". The problem is not having anything that you love to learn/work on.
In my opinion you are conflating two roles for technology. I quote from the article itself:
"Finally, Eyal confided the lengths he goes to protect his own family. He has installed in his house an outlet timer connected to a router that cuts off access to the internet at a set time every day. “The idea is to remember that we are not powerless,” he said. “We are in control.”"
There is a vast difference between "making things possible" and "making life easier". Same as between a spaceship and a remote TV control. I'd even go as far as to say, that such consumer-oriented interpretation of the role of technology is one of the reasons, why the world is such a mess in 2017.
The point is, smartphones are not magically holding people back, who would otherwise be creative and do cool stuff. In fact, it's pretty much the opposite, as even the constant stream of shit Internet content eventually exposes you to e.g. DIY tutorials in precisely your favourite area. Nevertheless, some people have less of intellectual lives than others, and (as GP argues and I agree with) whatever the reason, it's unlikely technology is to blame for that.
They (or, rather, the software they connect to) are holding me back from precisely that. If there was no social media, the novel I’m writing would have been done a year ago.
I’m teetotal, so I only go to the pub to socialise. That in turn requires several friends to want to go at the same time.
TV, fortunely for me, is not something I find addictive. I don’t own a TV, and the number of shows I care about seeing online or with friends is, on average, about 1h per week.
Reading more novels would be a good thing for me at this point. Long-form prose requires focus for several hours; exactly the mental state I want to have.
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.
if You can get bored of novels with all their formats and styles and character arcs and high complexity why can’t you get bored of scrolling through empty one-or-two line updates of people’s lives that you know don’t r fleet reality? It’s basically a worse novel that also makes you feel bad for reading it.
That's the point: if you get bored by a book, you stop reading the book, if you get bored by infinite scrollable content, you keep scrolling looking for less boring content, that never shows up.
It's the same effect that gambling has on the brain.
You keep playing, even though you keep losing.
That's the danger and that's why books, the TV, movies, radios (music in general) and other form of entertainment are not equally dangerous, because usually you are able to stop before it gets too far.
I disagree about categorizing TV as "the safer half" of the comparison, in the same section as books or movies. If anything, TV is an earlier iteration of the same stuff.
Flipping through the circular loop of cable TV channels predates scrolling and refreshing webpages, but people exhibited the same addictive novelty-seeking. It was so common it became a cliche to say things like "N channels and nothing [good] on."
In addition, they share same emphasis on advertisements as a funding stream, whereas movies and books are typically paid for up-front.
I think I may need to explain: TV is passive, you either watch it or not
The engagement in social networks comes from being actively participating
"Your opinion matters" they say
No, they don't
But the fact that you can argue with someone on the internet believing someone is finally listening to all the important things you have to say, keeps you there refreshing over and over
it's "someone is wrong on the internet" [1]
And it's highly addictive, especially for those people who feel powerless
Same reason people eat candy and happy meals, get fat and die young of an obesity induced heart attack. It’s rubbish, but rubbish which makes you feel good when you consume it and miss it when you don’t.
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.
> 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?
I don't think this example proves your point. For me, a book engages ~100% of my cognitive resources; a movie also engages a large amount. Therefore, those activities can't be done simultaneously with other stuff if I'm to enjoy them or benefit from them. OTOH, social media usually engages less than 50% of my brain power, so it's a perfect thing to do simultaneously with other things that barely engage my brain and otherwise would bore me out of my mind. Hence: yes, it's reasonable to watch your phone while doing something else.
For me, social media does use all available mental resources. I timed “a quick look at twitter“ once, and when I looked at the clock after what felt like 5 minuets, I found I’d spent 40 minutes absorbed in irrelevant minutae. I can’t tell you a single tweet I read in that time.
And yet more books are being written now than at any other time in human history. Perhaps you are just making excuses. It is far easier to blame externalities than taking responsibility.
> I’m actively seeking ways to block those sites, precisely in order to take responsibility.
Umm - don't go to them?
Or - if you need to get rid of the app (and you can't because provider-ware) - root the phone, and then delete it. If your phone is close-to-near impossible to root, get a different phone. Get a phone for phone use only, and drop everything else.
Seriously - the only thing holding you back is you. I don't say this to be flippant; I think we all struggle with it in some manner or another. I know I do now, and have in the past. For instance, I used to be very addicted to /. and Fark - eventually, I stopped going to them, and haven't been back. TBH, Hacker News will probably end up in the same bin sooner or later, as I see things going this route; I try to head it off beforehand. I don't blame anyone but myself.
So just do whatever you have to do to drop it - cold turkey, as it could be called...
“don’t go to them” would only work if they weren’t problematically addictive in the first place.
I am using all the easy technological tricks I know, at least the ones that don’t actively prevent me getting a job (found a better iOS content blocker since last message): After this novel is done, my intention is to go back to being an iOS developer, so I need to rearrange my brain to not care about the social sacharin soda that is every comment section with a voting mechanism and many without — cold turkey in my position would be like giving a minor drug addict (dopamine is totally a drug) a job finding drug dealers, with no oversight.
What I need, and have no idea how to achieve, is to stop caring what text on the internet says. If I could do that, I wouldn’t even feel a need to respond to you, I certainly wouldn’t feel this strange and unhelpful “arg, why don’t they understand!” anger-lite that tells me to not even try to be better by deleting this reply.
Now, if you have any suggestions based on psychology, I’m interested. I know too little about psychology to rewrite my mind to be the person I want to be.
If the program controls the users, and the developer controls the program, then the program is an instrument of unjust power.
I'd modify this statement as the program can potentially be an instrument of unjust power.
I like to believe that the opposite of this will most likely occur. What if such a program manipulates people's minds towards the good, what if it can turn terrorists against terrorism.
Whenever we think of something outside our brain taking control of our lives, we only think of negative outcomes. Why not positive ones ? Sure distraction is bad, but how bad ?
I don't buy the argument that the short doses of of social media engagement is equivalent to consuming heroin or smoking. It is an addiction for sure, but why is addiction bad ? All through history, we have always looked for means of getting high - from alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana and what not. Ever since we discovered that we can get high, we have embarked on finding new means that can give us that high. Why do people want to be rich ? So that they can show off. Showing off is an addiction. Social media is just making that addiction available to every one. To use some silicon valley terminology, social media is democratizing showing off and we are just getting started :).
I say this because, Whenever we friends got together for a beer or a social hangout, most of the conversation, at least 50% drift around to showing off. So I've realized that social media has just become an extension of our behavior. It has become just a tool to express our collective narcissism. The root cause of the addiction is not social media, it's our own self.
I am generalizing, and there are many many exceptions to the above stated collective behavior.
I think you’re fundamentally failing to interact with the scale of the problems arising from the attention economy, basically handwaving with the word “just”.
Even if I were to grant—though I don’t—your claim that addiction isn’t necessarily bad, it wouldn’t follow that it’s perfectly fine for businesses to boundlessly seek more effective ways to capture more human attention more of the time. ”Just” run the simulation in your head, and gradually turn up parameters such as:
- amount/quality of information about how the human brain works
- % of humans addicted to addicting-by-design software experiences
- number of unethical people who realize the financial and political opportunity a pathologically distracted electorate presents
And then maybe take another look at what’s happening in our world today.
True, but I don't think social media addiction is as bad as addiction to tobacco, heroin etc.I will look into specific data points about the points that you have raised.
I think you’re drawing a very poor analogy, and missing the forest for the trees because of it. Addiction is a useful term here, but comparisons to drug addictions aren’t very instructive. Addictions to ingested substances have natural gating factors that simply do not exist in what we’re calling “the attention economy”. If you want to draw the drug comparison, you’ll need to include an assumption that the most addictive, most destructive drugs are freely/cheaply available in effectively infinite supply to everyone all the time. Which is a fundamentally different conversation.
Control at the time of the quote is not at all what you interpret it to be now. Control for RMS was control on how you can modify the software or share it. It had very little to do with mind control per se. Context matters.
Couldnt agree more with that you said. Desktops/laptops are very different mechanisms for delivering content. Its alot harder to be the one in control when using a smartphone because of how closed off the app ecosystem is. Its very difficult to mod the software on phones compared to on a desktop/laptop. Cellphones are instruments of control. Laptops and computers are instruments of creation.
I don’t know. I think the Stallman quote can be read in two ways. Either the control is about free software (which is what I suppose he meant). In this case it would mean that if you can not read and modify the source code of your program then you are its instrument. I can't agree with this. For me there is little difference in end result for most users between not being able and not being capable of modifying the software.
The other way to read this would be about how the program is used. If my morning starts with my phone telling me it is not going to rain and i go out into a downpour without an umbrella then I put too much confidence into the algorithm. This could get much worse though.
If the software has a free license, then someone can fork it, and provide an alternative that's less abusive.
Of course, unless you're making the modifications personally, you'll need to trust the developers behind the new project. But at least their work is free software too. That means it can be audited publicly, so for instance you can always find out why their news feed algorithm shows you some stories and not others. And if they get too abusive, someone might come along and fork them.
In this sense free software's main benefit is that it lowers (though doesn't eliminate) switching costs. Businesses have been well aware of this advantage since Microsoft's abuses in the '90s, and that's a big reason much of the software in use today is free. Consumers, though, haven't learned this lesson yet.
Now, I certainly don't think free software is the complete and only solution. It strikes me that the bigger issue is trust and where we place it. For most of human history the face we looked at when we first woke up was of the person we loved most in the world. Now it's Apple or Google, who by their nature as publicly traded companies actually _can_ be trusted to act in a certain manner, but certainly not in a manner that puts our best interests first.
Your comment contains great content, but it’s also fairly non sequitur. It appears that you didn’t read the article, and instead are responding to the (silly/stupid) headline.
The concerns addressed in the article make it much more difficult to take the posture you’re taking here.
Thanks. I just want to say I did read it. It has a number of concerns that are mixed together in a way that's not entirely consistent, compelling, or even especially new.
Consider the idea that democracy is being destroyed because people are helpless addicts of social media. You can make a plausible argument that American society and democracy are going through a troubled spell. But it's a big step to say that's all or even largely the fault of social media. It's true that Facebook makes it easier to develop echo chambers that group people by political persuasion. But hey, there's emerging poll evidence that American conservatives and liberals don't even want to marry each other. [0] There are many other causes at work here like failing education systems, economic dislocation, the capturing of the the political system by moneyed interests, etc. That's not even considering real political disputes over things like health care, immigration, and crime. Plus many of the disturbing trends we see now predate social media.
Also, the article essentially dismisses fake news and trolls ("symptoms of a deeper problem"). The fact that you can't verify sources easily is not a symptom. It's a fundamental problem with the Internet today that is not all that different from the dark money problem in American politics.
Overall this article reads like a variation of Nick Carr's "The Shallows" which I read and quite enjoyed. However, I don't think the threat to our intellects is as dire as he says. In the current article it's even a little surprising to me that tech people discount the possibility that something will come along that really upsets the apple cart at Facebook and Google. These are pretty new companies after all and they were the first to get really big on the Internet. This is not the end of the story, especially if the Internet breaks up into essentially national blocks.
Speaking of the fake news, Internet and the social media are at the same time THE BEST way to verify information.
How would one go to independently verify some news article in 80s? There was no quick way to do it, and consequently nobody did it, people just expected it's true if it's in the newspapers (and often it wasn't).
Now you just need to google a little or google search the image and the problem solved - or even better, surround yourself with others paranoid enough to do the googling on every piece of info. There was no a single fake news in my feeds (and it's not just US news but our local, even more untrustworthy, ones), that within a few hours someone didn't reply with "fake" and a link to prove it. You just need to follow and friend with intelligent people from the both sides of political spectrum and let them filter out the noise for you. And also you need to discipline yourself not to over-emotionally jump to the conclusions - arguably this is the hardest part and also the main reason social networks are considered harmful: you can respond immediately, so responses are much more emotionally driven, people never bother thinking of all the angles.
I think, fundamentally, this ability of people to get information from outside the traditional news media may be the whole reason the press are so alarmed. Previously, the press had huge sway over what people thought and that certainly hasn't been good for democracy over here in the UK (I'm not sure the last time a party managed to gain power here without Murdoch's backing). You don't see so much concern about that, or about mainstream publications repeating fake news, or journalists starting and spreading bullshit on social media - even though an awful lot of the successful viral fakes I've seen on Twitter lately were started and/or spread by reputable journalists. Their criticism is aimed squarely at the new technology undermining their established power base.
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 writing behind a paywall because they see their mission as to influence first, and make money second. What's more they always have, the Guardian has never made a profit (it was subsidised by unrelated businesses until recently).
My trust in the media has steadily declined over the years and what's killed my trust has been the times I've fact checked articles and discovered they're lying to me. Sometimes I felt it was deliberate and other times it clearly represented colossal laziness on the part of the journalists.
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:
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.
I did the recommended 10 seconds of Google-ing, and was completely unsurprised to find out that the example you draw is far more sophisticated and far less straightforward as you are attempting to make it.
Given that fact, I’m left wondering what the motivations for your comment are. Especially given the nature of your target, and the thinly veiled usage of the word “feminist” as an epithet.
> Speaking of the fake news, Internet and the social media are at the same time THE BEST way to verify information.
The problem is that Google results are often misleading or incorrect themselves. This is as expected. The sole purpose of Google is to maximize shareholder value. It would be silly to expect it to optimise for any other metric like the fairness or accuracy of results.
True, but there's a lot of people out there that have genuine knowledge about whatever the subject is, and if you wait a few days usually you'll be able to find multiple sources to verify or dismiss any claim.
The main problem is how much time and effort one is willing to invest into debunking the fake news stories? For the most of people answer is: not any, if possible. Even I will look at maybe 2-3 pages of google results and twitter feeds and give up, presume it's true. It's the same problem as computer security: it's all about the balance between the goal and convenience. It's just not convenient to double-check every fact that you read, you'd just do that whole day long or go crazy, so we choose to trust them...
>The fact that you can't verify sources easily is not a symptom. It's a fundamental problem with the Internet today
Verifying sources is easier than ever. In the 80s it was a major time investment to verify anything. Today, if your source is available in written form - whether that's a newspaper, a research paper or a book - I can more likely than not start reading it within five minutes.
Fake news and trolling are much more a symptom of cheap and easy publishing, and the exposure they can get in today's attention economy. Outrage spreads faster than you can fact-check it
> Verifying sources is easier than ever. In the 80s it was a major time investment to verify anything. Today, if your source is available in written form - whether that's a newspaper, a research paper or a book - I can more likely than not start reading it within five minutes.
This makes me wonder how much of the information from the old media (newspapers, TV programs, books or radio shows) was ever actually true before the internet. Has anyone tried to verify a bunch of news stories from the olden days, to figure out who was lying and how common misinformation was?
What I mean is that you can't tell easily tell where 'information' is coming from, not that it's hard to verify the information itself.
Facebook, Twitter, and other social media are easy to game. A recent study claimed that up to 44M Twitter accounts were likely bots--even Twitter grants that many of the accounts are fake. [0] This is kind of like the email spam problem but harder because besides some genuinely difficult technical problems it raises a lot of tricky issues about things like free speech that we're still working through. It's also not just a social media problem. "Cheap and easy publishing" was a design goal of the World Wide Web.
>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) reduce the number of deeper study on a subject, because of "I can look it up in Wikipedia". So, people that get interested in something don't need to build a deeper connection with their subject, buy books, follow it over time, connect with other people studying it, as a basic (and often crude) summary is always at small distance, and is perceived as enough.
What's worse, there's a whole new entitlement and arrogance about topics, from people who have just cursory experience with them from Wikipedia or some other such source, and feed as qualified on them as actual people who've studied them/experts. Wikipedia feeds the "Read 1 lemma for 5 minutes expert".
It's even worse when the source of their knowledge is not Wikipedia, but random web BS pages -- from conspiracy theories to homeopathy pages to alternative diets, to plain old bad journalist/click-baits.
>They can show you newspapers from across the planet. They let you read Latin histories of the Norman conquest of Southern Italy in the middle ages.
Both quite irrelevant to the discussion (which is about mass effects), as only a tiny outlier group will ever read those anyway.
It's not the internet/smartphone that is the real problem though. It's that as a civilization we've relinquished control to structures whose only motives are profit-making.
Their "we're changing the world" lip-service always has that ("to make more money") proviso -- not "for the better".
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 disagree that reading a book is a REQUIREMENT for study. It can be beneficial, but it's just another tool.
There are a lot of wrongs on this planet, unfortunately.
>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.
They would -- but they wouldn't be able to pass their ignorance as knowledge in most fields. Easy access has been known to devalue things -- it's simple economics.
>Also, I disagree that reading a book is a REQUIREMENT for study. It can be beneficial, but it's just another tool.
Reading a book might not be, but reading extensively is.
Skimping through online articles and wikipedia-surfing is not that.
"I don't buy the idea that smartphones are extinguishing the life of the mind.
Sure, smartphones provide access to almost unlimited trash. But they also provide access to Wikipedia, perhaps the most successful encyclopedia ever developed by humans."
This is not really a valid argument. The mere _potential_ to read medieval Latin, or even classical Greek, on your smartphone says very little about the actual overall effect of people having smartphones.
I suspect a lot more smartphone time is spent on Snapchat filters than Homer.
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, the time would be wasted. They're making more efficient use of their time.
As for shopping, I don't see anything wrong with acquiring resources needed for various things in your life.
Social media is primarily intended for talking to friends and family. As others have pointed out in this thread, the reality for most people is closer to mindless browsing and addiction. That's because the systems are designed to 'hook' people that way. I'm not suggesting in any way that social media, shopping etc are bad (I use them all the time) but as the Internet is literally at our fingertips now, I do think that we need to be more cautious of unintended consequences, for individuals (particularly vulnerable ones like children) and for society as a whole. We're already seeing some of them today.
So the question to ask now is, regardless if you're solutionist/ Luddite/ neutral/ etc, how do we tackle this? Do we need to tone down some of the 'hook' features? Do we need to totally discourage unethical tactics like dark patterns? What can we do to educate/push people towards a healthier Internet diet, to have enough will to protect themselves from being psychologically hacked? This is an entirely new design philosophy, maybe not so good for big tech corps, but can potentially push the Internet to the next level.
That's because the systems are designed to 'hook' people that way
No they aren't. Nobody sat down and said "how do we design Instagram to be maximally addictive". They just said, hey, look, I made some neat photo filters and someone else said, hey, love the filters, it'd be neat if I could share these photos with my friends. Badaboom, a social network.
The fact that so many people spend so many hours on Instagram is nothing to do with the software itself and everything to do with how people use it. To be brutally honest here, in my experience it's 90% girls who obsess over Instagram. I know very few men who use Instagram at all, let alone post regularly. Women use it so much because the posts they configure the app to show them consist mostly of girls boosting each others self confidence by telling each other how beautiful or successful they look in each photo. Equally important - what's not there: no politics, re-sharing of links that someone might expect you to read or care about, and in general nothing that would require any mental effort at all.
Nobody designed Instagram to be full of trivial ego pumping, it's a neutral photo sharing tool. There are no dark patterns, whatever they're meant to be, unless you believe that the absence of a "share this link" feature is a dark pattern. It just so happens that this is how many people choose to use the tool.
In the same vein, nobody designed Twitter to be mentally less taxing than other social media sites, it was just that due to technical limits SMS restricted your character count, and Twitter inherited that limit, and limiting the size of a post sets a very low but very consistent quality bar on tweets, such that people who would have been intimidated by blogging full sized articles can now engage in online discussion without feeling out-competed.
And why not? The attitude you display here shows a great feeling of superiority: people don't like Twitter or Instagram because they like the culture on these networks, instead it's because they've been "addicted" by "dark patterns" beyond their comprehension of control, in some sort of vast Silicon Valley conspiracy that is mysteriously unsupported by any sort of paper trail or emails showing discussion of these malign intentions.
Please, grow up and just let people enjoy communicating in whatever way makes them feel good.
>No they aren't. Nobody sat down and said "how do we design Instagram to be maximally addictive".
you have no idea what you are talking about and everything you're saying is invalid. The companies noted in your post are run by and dependent on advertising. The number of users on the platform, their ability to lure users back to the platform and the amount of time spent within the platform is kkey to making money and is essential to keeping their stock price up.
Sorry, this is a strawman response. I was pretty clear about my concern for unfortunate unintended consequences; nobody is saying that there's a Silicon Valley conspiracy in action! Incidentally, I agree with your points on the benefits of social media. And it's awesome that we have so much engaging content today, but please explain if it's really OK for kids to get hooked on YouTube etc five hours a day. The solution is not to ban or demonise, but how we can educate people to have more control in their use of technology. Even Nir Eyal recognises this and implements tech restrictions in his own household. It's like gambling - sure we have self control, but let's be honest, gambling companies work very hard to make it addictive (I specifically used the term "psychologically hacked" earlier).
That's a natural response to be expected from companies, user engagement is tied to company health/profitability/etc so it makes sense to maximise it as much as possible. But earlier when I called for a new design philosophy, I am hoping that tech companies can be better than that. Because you are right, nearly all of them start with a genuine belief that their tool can help people, or at the very least, it's cool and yo let's spread the word. The tools still work, like Facebook still functions as a platform to connect relatives and old classmates, but it has also become so much more than that: it's a news platform, it's a media engine, it's a publisher, it's an ad-clicking farm and so on. The tools have evolved into systems, which other forces (commercial companies, political groups etc) have learnt to leverage for their own benefit. They have become complex and life-evading enough that they can't be called neutral anymore, despite the company's best intentions. And I'll go as far as to say that these companies have some accountability.
As a daily Instagram user, I do take offence with your comment regarding Instagram and girls - you are caricaturing a lot. It's not just high-fiving about body confidence and taking random selfies...
I was pretty clear about my concern for unfortunate unintended consequences
The part of your post I quoted literally says "the systems are designed to hook people". It also says "Do we need to totally discourage unethical tactics like dark patterns".
Don't try to wriggle out of it. The words "design" and "tactics" mean deliberate intended action, agency. My post is not a strawman: it responds to exactly what you were saying. Perhaps on reflection you think that position was too extreme: OK then.
please explain if it's really OK for kids to get hooked on YouTube etc five hours a day
Sure. They're kids. What would you rather they do? Play football for five hours a day, like my grandparent's generation did? Read story books - the ultimate form of passive media consumption? At least on YouTube they might be learning something more useful than how to kick a ball around, and who knows, might even be inspired to create something themselves.
I think a lot of the complaints about social media and YouTube overlook that point. It's easy to complain. What's your proposed better alternative?
As a daily Instagram user, I do take offence with your comment regarding Instagram and girls
Alright, be offended, my lived experience does not care. All the girls I know use Instagram all the time. None of the guys do. I realise there are exceptions, it's a huge network. But I know from discussions with other men that they've had the same observation as me. If you find that fact offensive, too bad!
> "Nobody sat down and said "how do we design Instagram to be maximally addictive"."
The evidence points to the contrary. Why would you not want to make, as another commenter put it, a social network site as 'sticky' as possible? You have to understand how sites like Instagram make money, using methods which rely on keeping engagement high. It's the so-called 'Attention Economy'.
Here's one article describing how Instagram's approach to generating revenue has evolved over time:
The article you link to just says they make money through advertising. Yes, and?
Your argument is 'their business relies on their users being happy and using their service a lot' which is an empty statement: it's true of all businesses. It's not a sign of addictiveness or anything like that.
You're missing the key part of my argument. There are businesses built around offering products and services that have no need to maintain your attention, for example I'll go to the supermarket when I'm hungry, and I'll go to the barbers when I need a haircut. The difference with the players in the attention economy (including social media sites, news sites, basically almost any site where the main form of income is advertising) is that they rely on getting and keeping your attention on their site. If you can't see the gamification aspects of sites like Instagram as examples of that, I don't know what else I can say that will help you see it.
You could argue that theatre, cinema and opera also rely on getting and keeping your attention. Nobody says they're addictive or "gamified".
The reason I have trouble seeing the "gamification" aspects of Instagram is that there are none. This idea that a photo sharing site is designed to be like a drug exists in your head - every argument you make easily applies to many other kinds of business that nobody considers addictive.
> "You could argue that theatre, cinema and opera also rely on getting and keeping your attention. Nobody says they're addictive or "gamified"."
Theatre, cinema and opera are experiences that are best appreciated in small doses. Television, on the other hand, is something I'd class as addictive. Wouldn't you?
> "The reason I have trouble seeing the "gamification" aspects of Instagram is that there are none. This idea that a photo sharing site is designed to be like a drug exists in your head - every argument you make easily applies to many other kinds of business that nobody considers addictive."
You have to separate the intention from the result. Did the creators of Instagram intend to create, as you put it, "a drug"? No. However, they did intend to make it a popular platform for advertisers, and advertisers are clearly interested in getting as many eyeballs on their products as they can, and the more the creators of Instagram can do to make their site sticky and drive engagement, the more their company will grow. Whilst their users are of strategic importance, their most important customers are advertisers. Increasing the userbase only makes sense if there's a corresponding increase in advertising revenue, they can't run on good will.
To give an example of a feature that increases the stickiness of Instagram (note that I didn't use "drug", that was your term), I'd suggest Instagram Stories (a feature inspired by Snapchat).
The idea being, you have to use the app every day otherwise you might miss something. Previously, you could dip in and out of Instagram and not miss anything. With Stories, that's no longer the case. Also, as well as viewing the stories of others, creating your own 24 hour story also encourages much more use of the service. What's opera's equivalent of Instagram Stories?
Let's move away from Instagram for a second to consider other players in the attention economy. News organisations are most definitely in this space as well. The rise of sensationalist, clickbait news articles, even by news institutions that were previously above such behaviour, is a clear indication that we're in an era where attention is something that's harder to earn. Have you noticed this trend or would you like some examples?
Television, on the other hand, is something I'd class as addictive. Wouldn't you?
This is clearly where we differ. No, I wouldn't. The word addiction has specific meaning. The fact that lots of people enjoy something a lot does not make that thing addictive. I am surrounded by people who have TV sets and who do not spend much time watching TV at all. I myself have a TV set and feel no particular cravings to watch it, ever. When I choose to, an hour or so is sufficient and then I may well not watch any for weeks. I consider this normal behaviour.
I think you're far too liberal with the use of the word addiction.
What's opera's equivalent of Instagram Stories?
Heh, how about the fact that it's very expensive and only occurs at specific times of day, meaning you have to structure your entire day around getting to it by the start? You've never seen someone literally running down the street because they're late for the opera or theatre? Running to the dealers for their fix!
No no, that's a very forced analogy. Opera isn't addictive even though some people can spend hours on what seems to me a very pointless activity. Instagram Stories is a great example of why Instagram is not designed to be addictive - it's simply a reaction to the success of Snapchat, i.e. a very strong message from users that they value transiency and don't actually always want their photos to go into a never ending history accessible to all, for ogling and possible exploitation years later.
Given the highly transient nature of photos usually posted to Instagram feeds, the desire for them to disappear after a while makes perfect sense from the perspective of the uploader. The fact that this gives downloaders limited time is - once more - not a deliberate attempt to addict people to anything but rather a natural consequence of the users own requirements.
Addiction is usually linked to substance abuse or similar.
Other forms of "addiction" are difficult to cleanly disentangle from people simply liking things for their own reasons, acting on their own free will. That's how you get things like TV being described as "addictive" though I never heard of anyone going into prostitution so they could afford their cable bill. Perhaps there are stories of it happening somewhere, but such a story would be rare and shocking, whereas prostitution for feeding a drug habit is unremarkable.
But let me turn it around. How do you define it? Above I've seen people claim that anything that has advertising in it must by nature be "addictive" but that would cover 20th century newspapers, and again, I never heard anyone describe them as addictive or display uncontrollable cravings for newspapers.
The article itself lists people directly who have worked on items and code meant to addict and make sites “sticky”.
If that’s not enough - go look at gamification.
Back when WoW launched I was impressed. They distilled the then amorphous knowledge of UI and game psych and upped the ante.
At that time friends and i imagined what maximally addictive games would be. How we would use more malicious techniques from behavioral science and habit formation to keep people in game for longed.
Then came TF and the hats/freemium model (Korea/SEA/China ).
And from there to now, the worst of those ideas have been applied and evolved.
Sites very definitely design themselves to trigger and keep people on site.
> 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.
I disagree. Pre-social media, people would talk with friends and family using e-mail and programs like AIM, and there would actually be deep and meaningful conversations. This has been supplanted by social media, which is often simple banal comments on an article/rant that someone threw up for everyone to see.
If someone told you 15 years ago that people would stop having conversations by e-mail and communicate by LiveJournal posts/comments instead, it would have seemed like a hilariously terrible idea, but that's more or less where we are.
> I disagree. Pre-social media, people would talk with friends and family using e-mail and programs like AIM, and there would actually be deep and meaningful conversations.
The issue isn’t the depth of conversations- the issue is the availability of addictive alternatives.
I’m on a phone surrounded by family - who I will see only a few more times in my life.
And that’s entirely because of my choices.
But by that criteria being in bad relations, junk food, bingeing, gambling addictions are all “choice”.
They are not.
These tools are designed to be as addictive possible within the confines of law - laws made to prevent even worse excesses.
If you have Joe Schmoe, vs me and my ability to data mine their lives, to put reminders that “hey you are on your streak! Log on again!” While they are on the pot, to “leverage” their network to get more people onto the game and then put them on leader boards “to catch those people with competitive impulses”; to gamify their life and to put triggers to run dopamine and seratonin triggers - then joe schmoe doesn’t have a snowballs chance in hell.
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 before (where it wasn't uncommon to have them every few days).
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 connecting is more like lines crossing over briefly, but never more than that. Sometimes this is fun - because where else can you encounter other people different from you - and sometimes it's just a little sad.
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.
Social media is both 'talking to friends and family', and 'posturing in front of near-strangers'. The latter might also be a latent human thing, but overall I don't it contributes as much to wellbeing as the first.
It's not, but it's what we have. Phones are controlled by private for-profit companies too (with different business, though). And the post is funded by taxes.
Point being, the business models are not inherent to communication mediums, but due to history, those mediums are provided through the particular business models we have.
It is not what we have. We have many other options beyond even the other technologies you've listed. Businesses and products are not prerequisite for interacting with friends and family.
What about simply having a conversation in person, mediated only by spoken language? What if you never moved away from your family and could stop by for dinner a few times a week?
There are many possibilities beyond just accepting the dictations of a few product managers in Silicon Valley!
Loads of them. And not just Wikipedia articles, longwinded articles from every other source under the sun. Usually ones on sites with minimal CSS and Javascript, because they use less data than the alternatives.
Admittedly a lot of people would probably just stick to browsing Facebook or Twitter most of the time, but even then, they'll look up tons of small facts and trivia pieces through Google whenever they don't know something too. In the olden days, that wasn't possible. Even less people looked up stuff they were curious about, since it meant either having to go home and online (before phones) or bringing out the encyclopedia (before computers in general).
More on my laptop but that's only because I work on a laptop and have to look up (mostly) work-related stuff.
I read a lot of 18th/19th century lit. Wikipedia is like having footnotes for anything you are reading. I use it regularly, almost exclusively on my iPhone.
The thing is that people like you are just a little minority respect to the whole. The vastly majority is destroing their screens by tapping here and there on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat....
If you looked a bit closer on their screens (easy to do in public transit), you'd see that they're mostly a) reading stuff, b) talking with friends, c) sending cool stuff to their friends. All standard ways of spending time with other people, except with the constraints of time and space lifted.
Do you work for Facebook? It's OK if you do. It's OK if you don't accept what they do. It's OK if you don't love your job. We need to go out into the world and destroy parts of it just to survive.
From 'The Way I Am', sung by Merle Haggard and many more:
The reason I asked is because it seems like you might have a lot of your identity and self-worth dependent on a moral acceptance of social media. It seems like you might be subconsciously denying the negative impact that these technologies have on both individuals and society at large.
Or not! Maybe you are fully accepting and fully aware and it is I who is missing the extra pieces to the puzzle!
Nah, my identity isn't particularly tied to social media. I just feel those problems are blown hugely out of proportion and/or just non-issues[0].
But maybe both of us are right, just right about different population groups? Maybe I happen to mostly see the use of social media I'd consider reasonable, and this biases my perception? Bubbles are strong in physical world too.
--
[0] - The kind of "smartphones make us antisocial on trains", except they don't, because before smartphones it was walkmans, and before walkmans it was newspapers.
You make a good point about Walkmans and newspapers... As McLuhan would point out, the Narcissus trance is present in all media technologies! That doesn't meet we should give in to the alluring trance of the Siren.
It is true that newspapermen created the Spanish-American war out of thin air as well, but we learned our lessons about the unethical use of mass print media. Irony of ironies in the name Pulitzer Prize!
I just want to make sure we're not blind to the downsides of this new "liberating" technology. It has had plenty of defenders and has swept up billions of people in its grasp.
Perhaps feeling depressed by staged photos of a friend on vacation posted to Facebook is one thing but threats of nuclear war on Twitter are a much more serious matter!
I'm on my phone now. I do most of my reading and technical stuff on my phone, even when I'm home. Why? I have it on me, it's a mini computer with a camera.
Sure, smartphones provide access to almost unlimited trash. But they also provide access to Wikipedia, perhaps the most successful encyclopedia ever developed by humans. They can show you newspapers from across the planet. They let you read Latin histories of the Norman conquest of Southern Italy in the middle ages. [0] C'mon folks, this is stuff you might otherwise seek for years in bookstores or never even hear of. Thanks to the Internet and powerful phones you can pop up the link below and read it in bed. The information is within reach of anyone with a decent cell phone.
The effects of the Internet on human society have been profound but the ultimate outcome is not foreordained. Humans have survived some pretty nasty stuff over the millennia and we'll no doubt get through this as well. It's time to stop the hand-wringing and focus on making the Internet help humans in the way many of its original founders conceived. [1]
[0] Gaufredus Malaterra, http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/malaterra.html
[1] https://webfoundation.org/2014/12/recognise-the-internet-as-...