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Comment by forinti | Hacker News Reader

But cellphones and these endless scrolling social apps that get our attention aren't really the same thing as books or even newspapers. They just seem to suck your ability to focus out of you and don't really give you back anything.

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Sorry, that's not true at all. My phone provides the same services to me digitally that the analog world provided. It just does it more efficiently. I can read a book, keep in touch, learn a new skill, or research a topic all from the same device. That's an insane amount of value and I won't panic over using it because we didn't in the old days.

This is not completely unlike saying "drugs can help me focus and boost my creativity". Sure, it can, and a diminishing and statistically insignificant minority use it exclusively for that. As to the rest of us... we're just junkies.

I don't think it's fair to blame phones for most people being near average.

90% of what 90% of people say just doesn't matter. So it doesn't matter if they're staring at their phones instead of talking about their weekend plans or their cousin's weddings, or any other tidbit of nothing that occupies their public vocalizations.

Nobody blames phones for most people being average. Phones are not the problem at all.

The problem is the companies that shape their services provided through the phone to be optimized towards abusing well-documented behavioral characteristics of 'average people'.

I for one read books on my phone at the park. How’s that any different from reading a paperback book at the park?

There's no real difference in that situation, but people don't generally read paperback books when out to dinner with friends, while driving on the highway, while walking on a crowded sidewalk, during a movie at the theater, during class at school or in a meeting at work... which are all common situations where I regularly see people glued to their phones.

Why do you assume that people are wasting their time when they’re on their phones?

I wasn't necessarily implying that what people are doing on their phones in those various situations is a waste of time, but trying to showcase the sheer distractive power of smartphones vs traditional media.

I have to admit to two of those :)

Four. >.>

But then, when I was in college, I'd read paperbacks while riding a bike to class.

That's nonsense. My wife is always glued to her phone checking twitter/facebook/etc. and is way more informed than back in the bad old days when you had to get all your information from a handful of biased corporate newspapers.

He didn't say it gives you less information. He said they suck your ability to focus. That's not nonsense. I can see this happening with myself.

Twitter sound bites have slowly weakened my attention span for more long form articles. You can easily see this by looking at what sites are popular (Buzzfeed) and which are struggling to stay alive (rip Grantland)

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