Smartphones: C or D?

welcome back to 2016?

welcome back brother

now you gotta upgrade to the se and you're golden

tris i love to say i hate to say i told you so so i told you so

godspeed, young man

sellout

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves.

it's tough out there for a millennial

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/

There’s not a single exception. All screen activities are linked to less happiness, and all nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness. Eighth-graders who spend 10 or more hours a week on social media are 56 percent more likely to say they’re unhappy than those who devote less time to social media. Admittedly, 10 hours a week is a lot. But those who spend six to nine hours a week on social media are still 47 percent more likely to say they are unhappy than those who use social media even less. The opposite is true of in-person interactions. Those who spend an above-average amount of time with their friends in person are 20 percent less likely to say they’re unhappy than those who hang out for a below-average amount of time.

...

Social-networking sites like Facebook promise to connect us to friends. But the portrait of iGen teens emerging from the data is one of a lonely, dislocated generation. Teens who visit social-networking sites every day but see their friends in person less frequently are the most likely to agree with the statements “A lot of times I feel lonely,” “I often feel left out of things,” and “I often wish I had more good friends.” Teens’ feelings of loneliness spiked in 2013 and have remained high since.

This doesn’t always mean that, on an individual level, kids who spend more time online are lonelier than kids who spend less time online. Teens who spend more time on social media also spend more time with their friends in person, on average—highly social teens are more social in both venues, and less social teens are less so. But at the generational level, when teens spend more time on smartphones and less time on in-person social interactions, loneliness is more common.

So is depression. Once again, the effect of screen activities is unmistakable: The more time teens spend looking at screens, the more likely they are to report symptoms of depression. Eighth-graders who are heavy users of social media increase their risk of depression by 27 percent, while those who play sports, go to religious services, or even do homework more than the average teen cut their risk significantly.

Teens who spend three hours a day or more on electronic devices are 35 percent more likely to have a risk factor for suicide, such as making a suicide plan. (That’s much more than the risk related to, say, watching TV.) One piece of data that indirectly but stunningly captures kids’ growing isolation, for good and for bad: Since 2007, the homicide rate among teens has declined, but the suicide rate has increased. As teens have started spending less time together, they have become less likely to kill one another, and more likely to kill themselves. In 2011, for the first time in 24 years, the teen suicide rate was higher than the teen homicide rate.

Other parts of the article show that teens, since 2012, became less likely to do things in person, cutting their risk factor for drugs and alcohol and things like that but significantly increasing their feelings of isolation and depression and their suicide risk. This squares with my impression of the climate of the social internet, which veers from braggy faux positivity to withering irony to the straight up poison proffered by trolls. The internet feels like home so much of the time that it is jarring to take a step back and think about what it really is, or has become, and how alienating that is.

scary stuff, isn't correlation mistaken for causality tho?

The article is more rigorous than the headline suggests. They say that the mechanism by which smartphones are related to these things is unclear. They are definitely related to less sleep and worse sleep quality which alone could explain at least some of the mental health outcomes.

The charts in this article of different mental health indicators show profound discontinuities starting in 2012, when the gadgets became omnipresent. Anecdotally, I totally feel like these things have transformed social life in ways that are more profound than usually recognized. Whether this means they are altogether harmful idk, i suspect there are serious harms and this data seems to support that.

I don't buy it. American children have plenty of reasons to be increasingly isolated and depressed since 2012. Without comparisons to epidemiological data from other countries (e.g. japan is fucked up!) I don't know if I buy any screen-time-is-terrible doomsaying. "Screen time" and electronic interaction has been consuming a greater proportion of American waking moments for five generations. We accidentally elected a crappy Andrew Jackson knock-off, but we also elected Obama twice. We put a man on the moon and built the Internet (so that a Brit could invent the Web - can't win 'em all). Wake me when these kids are bigger assholes than Boomers.

people tend to get really defensive about stuff like this, if I were a therapist I'd tent my fingers and then scribble meaningfully in my notepad

but to that our current society's use of social media is equivalent to the family watching Ed Sullivan because it's both technically "screen time" is a false equivalency

smells like bullshit to me, we're a lot better / more open about diagnosing mental illness now. & tbh "the internet" is a step up from dropping spit hangers on people at the mall or the other low level criminal-ish stuff we used to do to "hang out" before smartphones

The problem isn't that they are assholes, the problem is they've been roped into an insidious kind of digital addiction before their brains were fully developed, an immersive environment that promises them connection and social approbation but that is also, fundamentally, a front for data mining and targeted advertising.

Xp Thomas

I feel like the internet is less dangerous, but worse -- as in weirder and more alienating -- than smoking cigarettes outside the skatepark. We have these stupid half experiences now.

I could be wrong. I don't want to seem like an alarmist, and I've made a lot of friends through the internet, discovered a lot of music, etc. But there has to be drawbacks to living this way, especially for young people.

you're right, ums, it is a false equivalency, the families that grew up watching Ed Sullivan together also breathed in unhealthy amounts of lead from diesel motor exhaust, and the kids glued to snapchat on their phones are getting to endure the hottest summers the planet has seen in millenia

Treeship it is practically your job to be an alarmist

I haven't had a smartphone since i lost it 3 years ago. Missed it for the first couple of weeks but never replaced it. I'm on the internet a lot as I'm a developer and i take my laptop with me most places, so I'm not 'off the grid' in any way.

There does feel something different about now to when I lost my phone. A feeling of people doing battle with their enemies on their phones, the Trump effect seems to have magnified it so its difficult to disentangle from that too. People seem as addicted to Trump as they are to phones and/or internet. But when I get on the bus in the middle of the day its full of pensioners on their phones casually advocating for mass internment of people.

Last time I visited my parents my mums smartphone buzzed with some kind of notification seemingly every 3 minutes.

people tend to get really defensive about stuff like this

not so much defensive as suspicious. each generation likes to assume that this time the latest thing that has captivated the young really is to be our downfall, makes life more exciting if you're not just another grain of sand.

I understand that but we are conducting a mass experiment wrt how we interact with the world, not saying there's not accusation alarmism but writing off everything with the old "THEY SAID THE SAME THING ABOUT ELVIS" seems disingenuous

yeah i see what you're saying - i guess i'd still lean towards scepticism but obv trends have some negative effects. i just tend to think society is a bit like a huge game of whack-a-mole, very hard to assess the pluses and minuses all at once.

As a parent of a near teen, can confirm screen stress. She is smart enough to know when to disconnect, but also aware enough to know what she is missing. She and her friends (and I assume all tweens/teens) treat texting (for example) as a never ending game, which makes them hyper attuned to all phone noises/buzzes/alerts. At the same time, you should see how hard it is for them to actually communicate, to get together or get stuff done. Which leads to more time on or by the phone, waiting for friends to get back to her, if they respond at all. Leads to lots of anxious idling and less in person interaction, which is not healthy.

Are adults guilty of some of this, too? Sure. And did we survive stuff like this? Yeah. But the immediacy and omniscence and limitlessness of smart phones makes things worse, imo.

this will be the first generation that is unable to adapt to the technology invented by their parents that their parents didn't grow up with

side note: remember these

https://www.amazon.com/Yealink-Black-Foot-Handset-Cord/dp/B00M8EDBLQ

i must be old cuz i remember when the atlantic articles were all about how the kids were fucking too much

Based on discussions with students and my cousin's oldest children, I think one part of the article is true in my experience: this generation is less...obsessed? with Friday and Saturday nights as social rituals. Until fairly recently, even I struggled with the high school and college ethos that demanded I Do Something on weekend nights.

in the uk at least i think the stats all show a big reduction in drinking/drugs

can't help but feel we failed them

young people no longer able to afford drinks and drugs iirc

Self diagnosing polls being treated as reliable scientific information are certainly the worst thing in the universe with the possible exception of articles by humans

is that article using 'screen time' and 'social media' interchangeably?

I finally read that article instead of just commenting on it... it is scary and makes me consider what I can do to spend less time online. Anyway, apart from the correlations between screen time and feeling unhappy, the portrait (which of course needs to be expanded upon with data from other countries etc etc) of a generation doing fewer things IRL was pretty convincing:

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/08/WEL_Twenge_iGen_Web_GraphsBlock_Revised/c42ed8709.jpg

for personal purposes I find it a good reminder that doing stuff with friends and family irl makes me happy

sadly most of those points describe me as a teen in the late 90s, but I don't think being glued to the computer was completely to blame

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/05/smartphone-addiction-silicon-valley-dystopia

the good part is that probably it would be possible to design our way out of this

Thanks for the article treeship

the good part is that probably it would be possible to design our way out of this

yes but in who's interest would this be accomplished?

I thought niels was being thoroughly sarcastic

oh ha.

there's an app for that

Between 2010 and 2016, the number of adolescents who experienced at least one major depressive episode leapt by 60%, according to a nationwide survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The 2016 survey of 17,000 kids found that about 13% of them had a major depressive episode, compared to 8% of the kids surveyed in 2010. Suicide deaths among people age 10 to 19 have also risen sharply, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Young women are suffering most; a CDC report released earlier this year showed suicide among teen girls has reached 40-year highs. All this followed a period during the late-1990s and early 2000s when rates of adolescent depression and suicide mostly held steady or declined.

Using data collected between 2010 and 2015 from more than 500,000 adolescents nationwide, Twenge’s study found kids who spent three hours or more a day on smartphones or other electronic devices were 34% more likely to suffer at least one suicide-related outcome—including feeling hopeless or seriously considering suicide—than kids who used devices two hours a day or less. Among kids who used electronic devices five or more hours a day, 48% had at least one suicide-related outcome.

As always...which comes before which

I think the fact that they all left notes saying "heckin worlb ur doin me a sad" speaks for itself

another one to add to the reading list

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/your-smartphone-is-making-you-stupid/article37511900/

https://beta.images.theglobeandmail.com/1fb/news/national/article37511448.ece/BINARY/w780/punch-cartoon.jpg
A caption reads: "These two figures are not communicating with one another. The lady is receiving an amatory message, and the gentleman some racing results."

Yes, people are always put off by the strange power of new technologies. Socrates thought writing would melt the brains of Athenian youths by undermining their ability to memorize. Erasmus cursed the "swarm of new books" plaguing post-Gutenberg Europe. In its infancy, TV was derided as a "vast wasteland."

But while previous generations may have cried wolf about new media, "it's different this time," Mr. Harris says. Unlike TVs and desktop computers, which are typically relegated to a den or home office, smartphones go with us everywhere. And they know us. The stories that pop up in your iPhone newsfeed and your social media apps are selected by algorithms to grab your eye.

Smartphones are "literally using the power of billion-dollar computers to figure out what to feed you," Mr. Harris said. That's why you can't look away.

Socrates was wrong about writing and Erasmus was wrong about books. But after all, the boy who cried wolf was eaten in the end. And in smartphones, our brains may have finally met their match.

"It's Homo sapiens minds against the most powerful supercomputers and billions of dollars …. It's like bringing a knife to a space laser fight," Mr. Harris said. "We're going to look back and say, 'Why on earth did we do this?'"

...

These companies have persuaded us to give over so much of our lives by exploiting a handful of human frailties. One of them is called novelty bias. It means our brains are suckers for the new. As the McGill neuroscientist Daniel Levitin explains, we're wired this way to survive. In the infancy of our species, novelty bias kept us alert to dubious red berries and the growls of sabre-toothed tigers. But now it makes us twig helplessly to Facebook notifications and the buzz of incoming e-mail. That's why social media apps nag you to turn notifications on. They know that once the icons start flashing onto your lock screen, you won't be able to ignore them. It's also why Facebook switched the colour of its notifications from a mild blue to attention-grabbing red.

App designers know that nagging works. In Persuasive Technology, one of the most quietly influential books to come out of Silicon Valley in the past two decades, the Stanford psychologist B.J. Fogg predicted that computers could and would take massive advantage of our susceptibility to prodding. "People get tired of saying no; everyone has a moment of weakness when it's easier to comply than to resist," he wrote. Published in 2002, Prof. Fogg's book now seems eerily prescient.

The makers of smartphone apps rightly believe that part of the reason we're so curious about those notifications is that people are desperately insecure and crave positive feedback with a kneejerk desperation. Matt Mayberry, who works at a California startup called Dopamine Labs, says it's common knowledge in the industry that Instagram exploits this craving by strategically withholding "likes" from certain users. If the photo-sharing app decides you need to use the service more often, it'll show only a fraction of the likes you've received on a given post at first, hoping you'll be disappointed with your haul and check back again in a minute or two. "They're tying in to your greatest insecurities," Mr. Mayberry said.

Some of the mental quirks smartphones exploit are obvious, others counterintuitive. The principle of "variable rewards" falls into the second camp. Discovered by the psychologist B.F. Skinner and his acolytes in a series of experiments on rats and pigeons, it predicts that creatures are likelier to seek out a reward if they aren't sure how often it will be doled out. Pigeons, for example, were found to peck a button for food more frequently if the food was dispensed inconsistently rather than reliably each time, the Columbia University law professor Tim Wu recounts in his recent book The Attention Merchants. So it is with social media apps: Though four out of five Facebook posts may be inane, the "bottomless," automatically refreshing feed always promises a good quip or bit of telling gossip just below the threshold of the screen, accessible with the rhythmic flick of thumb on glass. Likewise the hungry need to check email with every inbox buzz.

...

In the smartphone era, that figure can only have grown. Our brains just aren't built for the geysers of information our devices train at them. Inevitably, we end up paying attention to all kinds of things that aren't valuable or interesting, just because they flash up on our iPhone screens.

"Our attentional systems evolved over tens of thousands of years when the world was much slower," Dr. Levitin explained in an interview.

All that distraction adds up to a loss of raw brain power. Workers at a British company who multitasked on electronic media – a decent proxy for frequent smartphone use – were found in a 2014 study to lose about the same quantity of IQ as people who had smoked cannabis or lost a night's sleep.

bad writing and overlong imo, but I think we can all agree by now that smartphones are very, very dud