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Comment by repsilat | Hacker News Reader

Because this thread always needs someone to say the obvious truth: "Screen time" isn't the most useful concept. Maybe it was in the TV days (though with diverse programming it may not have been), but with phones/tablets/laptops it's as broad a label as "technology company".

Are we talking about chatting with friends? Doing work? Watching a show? Playing a game? Reading the news? A novel? Meeting with people? Organising transport? Finding a place to eat?

There is a diversity of rectangles, and for each rectangle there is a diversity of uses.

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All of us with seldom exception use our glowing rectangles as addictive dopamine drips that exploit our innate desire to scavenge for information that ends up disconnecting us from the world and, likely, things we actually find fulfilling. And we watch our own children suffer the exact same way and wonder what can actually be done about it.

There was a submission this morning or yesterday about "if we could live our lives over" where many HNers were lamenting how they felt like they were wasting their precious hours. How many of those people would say that their screen time wasn't contributing? Or that it was actually fulfilling?

Not sure who here relates to the idea of spending the bulk of their screen time organizing transport and planning dinner parties or whatever. Or the idea of "no, I actually do like how much time I spend on <vice> and I'm trying to get those numbers up even higher."

For some reason whenever this topic comes up, we have people playing coy with what "screen time" could possibly be referring to. "What, you're saying it's bad to use my iPhone to Facetime my dying father?"

It's not essential to your argument, but the whole "dopamine drip" thing is not helping. Using ancient disproven 1970s neuroscience tropes here in such a broadly incorrect way just makes me dismiss your potentially legit reasoning.

I took it as a metaphor. The argument makes perfect sense in that light.

Engage with the argument rather than its presentation, and you might just move the conversation forward.

People who try to call things addictive without evidence do real damage. Governments then take up this "addictive" label and make things illegal. Screens are not addictive. That word has a real meaning. Op in this context tried to justify the use of addiction by some folktale neuroscience from ages past.

I agreed with him that maybe there's something to not always looking at screens. But I strongly disgree with you. I was attacking a dangerous part of the argument.

I’m not sure why I should think that any of that is unique to screens.

Everything is bad in excess but not everything is equally bad.

I think this is a strange thing to hear from being a bit older. 30-40 years ago, most people did not spend their time reading the paper and watching TV.

There was vastly more time spent interacting directly with friends and family as well as hobbies and interests that were not consuming media. It was much more common for people to stop by, often unannounced and hang out and talk for several hours. Just talking in person was very popular. Also, people spent much more time on errands and house tasks. It was very rare to have landscapers or housekeepers. This was before dishwashers and people rarely ate out. So cooking and cleaning were common. Super cheap goods from China had not yet arrived so maintenance on things around the house was more common than replacement.

This isn’t at all to be taken as things were better, or worse, it is simply to relay that people did a lot more than consume media and communicate electronically.

Most people certainly sat the entire evening in front of the TV 30 years ago. Even today old people sit over 7 hours a day in front of the TV since they haven't adapted to newer media yet.

https://www.statista.com/chart/15224/daily-tv-consumption-by...

For history you can see that about 30-40 years ago people watched 7 hours of TV per day, then it went up to 9 and now it goes down again as people start using computers instead. I don't think this is a bad development switching from TV to computers.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/when-...

When I was a kid we didn't have a TV, but that doesn't mean we spent all day talking.

My dad spent his time reading the newspaper or Dick Francis murder mysteries, my mom spent her time either on the phone talking to people or laying cards. (Like Windows Solitaire but with actual cards).

When I wasn't fighting with my sisters I spent my time reading Donald Duck comics or playing Lego on my own.

Sure, we can pretend that we spent so much quality time with another all the time before screens came along, I'm just not sure it's actually true.

Reductionism is fun.

"90% of waking hours spent activating tendons in response to electrical impulses".

Right. Did people clutch pearls over "paper time" when they would wake up and read a newspaper, stare at papers all day at work/school, a magazine during their lunch break, and read a book before falling asleep?

The difference between newspapers and internet news is that the newspaper for a given day is finite.

Once one has read whatever articles they were interested in for that day, that's it. No refreshing multiple times per day, no reading long comment threads, no frustration about said comment threads ("how can people be so wrong on the internet, must reply"), no live updates on stories, and more time to think instead of mindlessly consuming more information that's of lower quality.

Clearly you've never been a New Yorker subscriber.

I'm not sure I follow you here, can you elaborate on what you mean?

The New Yorker has long form articles that take longer to read than the typical daily newspaper article, sure, but I'm not sure how that makes it non finite or more engaging than daily newspapers.

Every subscriber has an endless stack like this in one or more rooms of their home or apartment: https://www.google.com/search?q=stack+of+unread+new+yorkers&...

They don't throw them out because they really intend to finish them one day.

Most daily newspapers have plenty stuff to read for hours, and often come with extras with even more stuff to read.

Some people, I’d venture a guess at 1/100 people, can and do use printed text compulsively. Other people, I’d venture a guess at closer to at least 9/10 people, can and do use screens compulsively.

This topic comes up a lot and I am always astounded at how people so candidly compare screens to books. Many people I meet in my day to day life do not have the concentration required to read a novel. Maybe its time to put my glowing rectangle down.

It wasn't a novel for everyone. For others, it was Sports Illustrated or a comic book or the crossword or Reader's Digest.

Or, if they weren't reading, they'd flip on the TV and watch whatever was on for four hours, then brush their teeth, then Johnny Carson in bed. It's not like the average American was spending their evening sculpting before the internet.

Isn't this just because screens now do more?

Even before screens, some people talked on the phone compulsively, some played chess compulsively, some sat in their basement building things out of legos compulsively. Now it's possible to do all those things via a single screen. When looked at in this way, a screen is basically just a tool that takes on the form of many different physical objects rather than something nefarious.

Why, in the 1700s, they did.

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/media’s-first-moral-pan...

https://didyouknowfacts.com/facts/as-novels-became-more-prom...

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Novel-Reading-Pani...

Some went so far as to ban reading for certain groups.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_during_the_slave_per...

It's easy to think that because we can't see exactly what people are doing on their phone (we physically only see them staring at a glowing screen unless we stand behind them and snoop) we default to saying exactly what we see: People staring at glowing rectangular screens. This sort of thinking about cell phone use is incredibly lazy.

When I'm reading a book, I'm not just staring at a binding of paper. When I'm listening to music, I'm not just sticking earbuds into my ears and staring blankly at the wall. Has the author ever used a phone before? Or are they just glowing rectangles to them?

Yep, I have an iPad which I use purely for drawing. Technically it counts as screen time but the activity is really no different to drawing on paper. Unless perhaps you are studying eye strain

Exactly, my first reaction to this was “90% of waking hours spent staring at atoms.” I can describe life in even more absurd ways if I try, but what’s the point?

Well one point is that information exchanged through a screen is always mediated (in contrast to the physical world). Screens have a form factor, screens usually have a third party organising the content that is being exchanged. Screens are flat surfaces. You operate through screens in a sort of purely functional input-output rather than spontaneous way.

So the screen being a technological and commercial artifact, imposes a lot of rules on how we interact through it, sort of like an API. And that's noteworthy compared to the time before we were interacting through screens.

Every medium of interaction, even human to human has rules and limitations on the interaction.

In-person human to human interaction also has some significant negatives. It's very low bandwidth as information must be transmitted mostly via voice which is lossy and prone to misinterpretation on either end. Attempts to terminate interactions early may have negative effects on future ability open an interaction with that individual. The in-person protocol also forces you to transmit visual sidechannel information, including biometric details. Other individuals can and will judge you throughout the interaction based on these biometric details.

We have an amazingly beautiful world, from lush forests to deep blue oceans, with billions of wonderful humans, yet we choose to spend the vast majority of time on a virtual world we’ve created.

Technically, that virtual world is still part of this world. Wonderful humans created those virtual worlds where you can probably find more wonderful humans.

That’s how you’ve interpreted the light that has bounced onto your retina.

Ultimately we all live in the virtual worlds we create in our minds through interpreting our senses, it’s not immediately obvious to me why I should generally prefer one over the other.

True, but isn’t that why vendors that track screen time also offer a means of categorizing it? At least Apple does, I’m fairly certain Android does.

I’d be interested in seeing this extended to “listening time” as well since I probably use my headphones and speakers more than I use the glowing rectangles.

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