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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: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday January 09 2018, @07:53AM (2 children)
I've got a feature phone. In theory it can go to the internet, but that functionality is broken. Apparently I could get an update that fixes it, but only using Windows. But I don't need that functionality urgently enough (it would sometimes be nice for checking bus timetables in advance). It's nice to have a camera and sound recording device with me all the time, though. Besides the functionality that I mostly have the phone for, making phone calls.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 09 2018, @06:37PM (1 child)
why are they called feature phones?
what features do they have if you just described a considerable lack of features?
It seems that it makes phone calls, but that you cannot connect it to a computer to transfer the camera pictures and sounds you might record with it though.
So what you have is a 'mobile phone'? i guess that's a feature in that it is mobile, but it doesn't merit an adjective to make that stand out--it already does, hence the "mobile".
but let me guess its just what the marketing called it because its not a $700 smart phone.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday January 09 2018, @07:50PM
Because they already were called that before smartphone existed.
Features that the dumb phones that preceded them did not have. Which includes the camera and recording functions, a built-in calendar, games, and also true internet connectivity (as I wrote, it is broken for my phone, but in principle it would work).
Of course I can. With a standard USB cable. Or I can insert an SD card and use that to store the data on, just like with a standard camera.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.