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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, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday January 09 2018, @02:08PM (1 child)
Is it the cellphone that is causing all that, or is it the social media addiction that the phone is an umbilical cord to? Like Julian said downthread, a smartphone is a computer, and is as useful as a computer if you use it that way. If you don't use it that way, and only as a Pavlovian trigger, then its effects are going to be different.
Also, is it the cellphone that's making the owners unhealthy, or the mode of travel they choose and the exercise habits and diet they would have anyway? I live in NYC, and everybody walks around with their nose buried in their phones, but they're walking. When people go to the gym and get on the treadmill their noses are buried in their phones, but they're exercising. At restaurants everybody is looking at their phones instead of talking to their companions, but the restaurants could be McDonald's or that vegan place down the block.
Reading TFA, its author's grasp of the history of smartphones is weak. He thinks Steve Jobs invented them; as an investor in Apple that pleases me, but as a technologist who's been doing this whole thing for a long time now, it's laughably wrong. Also, his prose is florid, and overwrought. He's clearly a millenial who is creating a stir by bravely contradicting conventional wisdom. Except, it's only conventional wisdom for 22-yr olds who just graduated from college.
The larger question comes back to, as always, "Is technological progress good?" It's been posed in a million permutations: "Are we better off for having automobiles?" "Are we better off for having TV?" "Are we better off for having factory automation?" "Are we better off for travelling by airplanes?" It is, though, the same question. And the answer, which is the correct answer in all those cases and will remain the correct answer until the end of time, is, "It depends."
Would you have bled to death had the ambulance not rushed you to the emergency room? Yes. In that case, automobiles are good. Would your dog have been run over in the street if cars hadn't been invented? No. In that case, automobiles are bad. It depends.
Are smartphones, then, bad? It depends. Me, I use mine like Julian does and find it very useful. But I also don't use it as a social media umbilical cord, nor to jabber away with other people all day on the phone, nor to text infinitely, and so can also empathize with kurenai. It depends.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 09 2018, @06:44PM
yeah guns don't kill people, people do.
few people wish to take responsibility for their own actions, though. As a result, others that see this try to take the resposbility away from them.
we're in the stage of shaming people but before long we'll have to enact laws that maintain social order and think of the children etc, since most people and businesses cannot be trusted to self-police and self-monitor violations of good behavior.
We had (once upon a time) net neutraility to enforce what wasn't being honored; and the cell phones... well texting and driving was made illegal not because it is evil, but because people had to have the fear of punishment to consider not engaging in the distraction as willinging as they do. Fear of death and harm isn't doing it, and we see this repeatedly. it's why the gun control slogan doesn't work, either. it never happens to you, it always happens to someone else, and the laws are unfair etc.
(net neutrality only plays into that statement because it was enacted due to the failure of isps playing nice; people are generally not expected to self police without social constructs, but they are expected to obey the police--and thus the law)