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Your smartphone is making you stupid, antisocial and unhealthy
A decade ago, smart devices promised to change the way we think and interact, and they have – but not by making us smarter. Eric Andrew-Gee explores the growing body of scientific evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds.
[...] The evidence for this goes beyond the carping of Luddites. It's there, cold and hard, in a growing body of research by psychiatrists, neuroscientists, marketers and public health experts. What these people say – and what their research shows – is that smartphones are causing real damage to our minds and relationships, measurable in seconds shaved off the average attention span, reduced brain power, declines in work-life balance and hours less of family time.
They have impaired our ability to remember. They make it more difficult to daydream and think creatively. They make us more vulnerable to anxiety. They make parents ignore their children. And they are addictive, if not in the contested clinical sense then for all intents and purposes.
[...] 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.
Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/your-smartphone-is-making-you-stupid/article37511900/
I am left wondering. Is it the devices? Certain apps? Or ourselves?
Ed's (FP) Note: I seem to remember BBC's More or Less radio program (available online still, I'm sure) addressing the "attention span" claim, and debunking it, mostly by virtue of it being a bit too intangible to measure. However, even if it is only confirmation bias, there's a good chance we've noticed some of the traits mentioned in the article in others, perhaps in ourselves too.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by jelizondo on Tuesday January 09 2018, @05:13AM (4 children)
Mostly, I agree with you and my comment is not against your opinion, but against the way these devices are manufactured and marketed.
A “regular” computer is something I can build from parts, even if some of those parts are buggy (i.e. Meltdown or Spectre) or infect by some TLA, I get to choose the parts, the operating system and the applications.
None of this is true on those devices. One is subject to the manufacturer’s crap and then the phone company crap, pre-loaded and protected against deletion. And yes, I had a device with Cyanogen and I loved it, but most devices are hard to root and then you might not get full use of the hardware because alternatives are lacking on drivers or features.
I’d love to have a pocket computer with similar features to my regular desktop, being able to install Debian or Mint or whatever I feel like, and to change it whenever I want. Only it is not generally available. Now if you have some secret source for such devices, please share.
(Score: 2) by julian on Tuesday January 09 2018, @05:31AM (2 children)
The nature of these devices, being highly miniaturized and integrated, makes modularity difficult if not impossible. When it comes to software, you do have a choice for the main operating system. You'd probably want something like Replicant [wikipedia.org]. So choose hardware that supports what you want to accomplish. If you contest that the baseband OS is still proprietary, then your problem is with the infrastructure our society has created to run the cellular phone network. I share the concerns, but the overall benefits are worth the costs to me. For people like RMS, they are not. We all get to choose.
You can always buy one of these devices and use it without a cellular connection. It's functionally no different from a laptop.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 09 2018, @03:16PM (1 child)
Except you can't. Adding a SIM card does not magically make a phone able to connect to networks, it even says so in the name SIM=subscriber identity module. It's just the info who to bill and who the powers that be are spying.
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Thursday January 11 2018, @02:19AM
They work fine on Wifi, with or without a SIM. So basically just like a small tablet, except you could call 911 in a pinch.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday January 09 2018, @07:57AM
Are you forced to buy the phones through the phone companies? At least in Germany, you can buy them in a normal electronics shop, without a contract.
Of course then you'll have to pay the whole cost directly, instead of having it hidden in the communication fees.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.