Social media may prevent users from reaping creative rewards of profound boredom
bath.ac.uk
bath.ac.uk
I think boredom is a real force that pushes ourselves to the edge, to hopefully make a change in life, like going out to see real people.
Social media creates this cozy, safe place to keep your mind occupied, letting life pass without realizing it.
> Every entertainment is equally at fault
Never bored, and yet never really entertained or satisfied.
On that topic, I've luckily managed to make reddit boring that I open it, scroll for a minute or so, and close it again: I unsubscribed from the "interesting" subreddits like politics or tifu or askreddit.
But also, yeah. If you need someone to watch you do X so you can enjoy X, maybe you don't like X all that much in the first place.
Social media in a nutshell
"Nobody is bored, everything is boring." -- K-Punk
TV had time.. you may be able to store it but you'd need tapes .. still space and efforts constraints
today your hard drive and infinite connection create an infinite pit
I also believe our brains love, just like muscles love exercise, prioritizing, you feel better when you made a smart decision. the feeling of never having to choose, skip through many videos, pausing them, in any order tickle the gluttony in us but then you get stuck and rot
But social media has no downtime and is engineered to be addictive. A casino will lose it's appeal once you've run out of liquidity. Social media has next to no prohibiting qualities.
HN has no friending or a way to link yourself to any other user, no actual customizable profiles (a tiny "about me" textbox aside), no images anywhere, no way to DM users, and most people don't use their real names either.
There are only two "social" parts of HN. First is that the links to the articles are posted (and voted on) by users. And the second part is just the fancy comment section around those posts. Most big news websites have a comment section on their articles too, and those might even be more full-featured than HN (e.g., I am pretty sure quite a few of those allow setting a profile picture).
To put it simply, I believe social network and social media are two different things. You can have them both together (e.g., twitter), or separately. I would consider the initial Snapchat app to be a social network, but they added a dash of social media later on (with the "around me" feature, stories, etc). And HN would fall under the opposite of the original Snapchat app - social media, but without much social netowork.
Sidenote: I am not an expert on this and didn't spend time researching it. What I wrote above is a purely subjective take on how I personally understand those terms, and how they apply to the topic at hand.
Somewhat and it is quite addictive too but the quality is way better and there is even an option to turn limit your time spent on HN (no procastination flag/option). HN is not employing dirty techniques to keep user enganged with dumbed down content, people are just commenting out on articles, it’s more like a community
So that leaves me with HN. I like HN because topics I encounter here are not nonsensical or political. There are no memes, gifs or cheap jokes here. I find myself in awe of the knowledge people have here. I am forced to read stuff here rather than fast paced casual browsing. As a meme reads, "On Internet, typing is fun and reading is hard" but HN is exact opposite of that for me.
But deep inside my heart, I know HN is also a social media in many ways and I need to cut down the time I spend on this. I am addicted to this. I realized browsing HN is essentially a coping mechanism for my depression and lifelong failures. HN gives me a false sense of "look I am not wasting my time in frivolous stuff". HH helps me escape from harsh realities of my life in much the same ways drinking helps people cope with their life. In subtle ways, HN has polluted my mind and corrupted my ability to think in realistic ways.
If you want to cut down on time spent on HN, on F-Droid there is an app called Glider. Its a typical HN client. It has a feature/button called Catch Up, where it gives you top posts by week/month, similar to how you can filter things on reddit and typically reddit clients.
I highly recommend experimenting with batching time spent on certain sites to once a week and once a month, that is, 5 or 6 visits a month, and get a high level overview of what happened (instead of multiple visits daily, which interrupts your flow). Then limit yourself to only look at the top 5 top-level comments (and not go into comment rabbit holes). Same for reddit, or skip reddit if you can, its mostly noise. Skip other social media sites too.
On the flip side, without HN, my life would be totally different. I likely would not have pursued the much higher paying job I have now. My enthusiasm for technology and software would not be as high, seeing the many ways tech is used here. I would not be aware of meditation, notion, chatgpt, ml, postgres, cloud, rust go, wait but why, the inner platform effect, and so much else. For better or worse, HN shapes my outlook on the world. Is knowing all this worth the time spent, or is seeking knowledge simply addictive? I don't know.
You're 'search engine prompting' needs some work, next time try "tédio Brazil song" :p
I’m fascinated by this narrative on the “real” people outside. I wonder how having more people working remote could change that cultural landscape, and how much time it will take for people to go over the dichotomy of “real” vs “online”.
There are wonderful people with tons of insight and many things to share in the “outside” world. But thing is, they are also online and will share their life philosophy or their new hiking gears in reddit threads as well.
Went to a cafe last week and after a bunch of talk with the owner, he went to ask for my Twitter account and who I was following in the same cultural sphere. And it’s not like we stopped being real the moment we moved our focus to what happens online.
I understand why riding a bicycle or meeting other people is better than staying home.
But you could also go to the restaurant and go shopping. How is that form of consumption better or more real?
In contrast, I'd say social media is not the cause but the reaction to such things. I mean, we all saw particular people get genuinely addicted to scrolling Facebook in the early years of the service, but that rarely totally ostracized them from their previous social circles, it might have even grown them! But now with things like twitch streamers on a schedule, ready to be your friend Friday night, and customized YouTube feeds of endless hours of documentaries and Twitter and even HN. The opportunity is there. Someone who's already staying in can get that fix, anyone who's avoiding anything can do it perfectly. It's a cycle of control. It's soooooo much easier to sit and stare and laugh and maybe even engage than it is to text a group, see if anyone else is in the perfect intersection of bored and not tired and enough income to go to dinner.
We all got dripfed this stuff by force and sheer survival for the last couple years, and I understand it's hard to rip the tubes out of your arm.
If you are deeply engaged in musing, despite the solitary situation, you are not really bored, are you? At least I wouldn't call it being bored. You've got something to do, and you're well occupied by it. It's just thinking time to me. Such a situation I'd never characterize as boring (unless it lasts a ridiculous time, which reminds me of _Chess Story_).
What I think of as "boredom" is more like being in a sporadic lecture, doing assignments that are lengthy and thoughtless, being locked in a traffic jam, etc. Something that takes time, repulses attention, but has sufficient consequence that compels your concentration. And I don't think those are helpful in the profoundness of anything.
So, if the premise is "social media may prevent users from reaping creative rewards of time to profoundly think", I'd agree. But "profound boredom"? I just couldn't get behind this terminology.
All this mental gymnastic to produce the attention grabbing headline that something bad can be good for you, when that something bad is actually something good, but rehashed into the category of something bad. Of course, that thing which is good for you has not changed; we always knew that if you spend time thinking deeply, you might gain some insights or ideas. It's just a shuffling of terminologies, which conveniently helps market their findings.
By the same thought process, a human being can have 8 limbs, because here are the "normal humans", and there we have Billy the Octopus, who we re-categorize as a "Octopusian human". So, it's safe to say that some human can have 8 limbs.
It's like the gerrymandering of definitions.
And yes, this site is of quality content, but it is still the same opiate.
Everytime there's some article about Netflix, Facebook, or the like there's a bunch of people telling everyone they quit and how their life is better, etc.
Many times the article isn't even about quitting social media, just some controversy. I wonder if some percentage of those people are right-wing and wait for a chance to jump in so they can harm companies they disagree with.
One of the ways to achieve that is to make people at the center of app. The user chooses avatar from multiple avatars on main screen and view their updates. Once they have viewed someone's update they can go back do it for other, it becomes boring very fast and discourages app usage. No social media company is going to do this but something of this sort needs to happen.
If anyone is interested, I wrote about why feeds are bad and how you can reduce your dependence on them. https://suketk.com/feeds-considered-harmful
And that is better because the demand side is an active, the knowledge side is the sort of passive. So mediocre knowledge wouldn't have the money backed ads power to outperform the better knowledge or solution.
I have noticed doing this has massively reduced the amount of time I spend there.
[1] https://mashable.com/article/set-twitter-timeline-most-recen...
So the hypothesis is based on 15 people, in one region of the world, in a very specific circumstance. The authors admit the research is limited, but if you don’t read deeply into the press release you might come away thinking this finding—if you can call it that—is much more solid than the actual survey methodology would support.
> basically anything can be proven at n=15
Nothing was proven. The paper is literally a philosophical discussion about Heidegger leaning on a survey. If you think that proves anything, I have a bridge to sell you. It's a data point, nothing more and nothing less. It's an interesting perspective worth thinking about and investigating further.
> Dr Hill said the research sampled 15 participants of varying age, occupational and education backgrounds in England and the Republic of Ireland, who had been put on furlough or asked to work from home. He said the survey was relatively limited and that it also would be valuable to examine, for example, the role that material conditions and social class played in people’s experience of boredom.
> “We think these initial findings will resonate with so many people’s experiences of the pandemic and their use of social media to alleviate boredom, and we would like to see this research taken further,” he said.
Finally I remembered I wanted to read Fathers and Sons (Turgenev). Here's a great question: why am I here and not reading that? BRB.
Is there historical evidence, from before social media or computers existed, that boredom made people productive or creative? I am worried about my kids never ever being bored, and the points in the article are tempting to believe, but when I think about history, I’m sure people were more lots more bored but not sure they were creatively doing any better than what we see today.
Latest example: I had to take all my vacation time this year or else I'd lose it. I got so bored that I built this over the past weeks: https://github.com/kstenerud/kbnf
Basically, your hobby projects are probably more freeing and unbounded, but are they more _creative_ than the work you’re be doing in your paid time ?
I now have to actively lock myself out of certain services and do daily meditation sessions to somewhat counteract those distractions.
They're just too easy to indulge in.
I've mostly stopped doing music and writing prose because of it, and I'm slowly getting back into the groove.
It might true that we are have more creative output today than we did 100 years ago, while also being true that social media stifles us from reaching our full creative potential.
On the other hand, when looking back at what I was doing a decade or two ago, they were dumber, clunkier and just less interesting things overall. My personal take is that the barrier to invest time into something is now a lot higher, but the results are to me much more fulfilling and impacting.
Doing stuff out of pure boredom wasn’t as efficient and engaging as doing stuff that I long thought about and actively create time to execute on.
Anything you do to alleviate or prevent boredom that is not creative can be said to 'prevent reaping creative rewards' of boredom. Not just social media (or any media consumption, really) but also sports or calling a friend or helping in a soup kitchen. If you didn't do it, you'd feel boredom, and might pick up something creative instead.
All of those examples are better uses of time than passively consuming "Social Media"
People participate in social media. Think of all the creative content that exists. In your example you compared a two way phone call with only one part of social media.
"Helping in a Soup Kitchen is obviously more productive than doom-scrolling."
Though subjective, I agree with you. However without social media how many 14 year olds were helping at soup kitchens instead of watching TV, playing video games, or outside playing. You implied that social media was impacting selfless benevolent acts.
This could even get complicated where I show that young people use social media in a positive way to call out social issues or make people aware of volunteer events.
"All of those examples are better uses of time than passively consuming "Social Media"
Again, social media doesn't have to be passive, your comment that I'm replying to and this reply show that.
I believe you are letting your cynicism impact your view of social media
Still, when I see this line it's like a protection from from being wrong.
"I'm not an expert but...." basically prevents judgement since they qualified their statement
Like it or not the memeification of a study like this compressed in to a couple of headlines which float off into the field of engagement on their own - that phenomenanon is a thing and would not happen if the bullet points didn't tap into a confirmation bias of pre existing wider interest in the topic being advanced in some small way through surfacing the conversation and I question if this holds true whatever the originating details might be. I certainly don't have a clear answer.
It's many different experiences, that users are cut between, exposed to. Where-as calling a friend every hour doesnt make sense & would get repetitive, one can just drop into the feed of experiences whenever they want.
Your point remains, certainly. But I do think there's a kind of unbridled access to novelty & other-peoples-creativeness that is indeed remarkably blunting when compared to most personal lives & options we'd have.
What useful things are you talking about and is their evidence of their decline?
- talking with strangers at the grocery store
- working on my novel
- building things in my garage
- antagonizing institutions that I think have crossed a line
And those things are meaningful to me in ways that being on social media is not.
As for whether such activities trickle up into some kind of high level aggregate good, I don't know, but it's not hard to guess at how they might.
However in what situation prior to the internet would a person be forced to be bored. Waiting at the DMV? I guess what I'm saying is it's pretty rare that someone wouldn't have an escape from bordem, even before phones.
Now my nitpicks
- How long do you wait for gas? It's also an activity (assuming you aren't using full service)
-Camping is an activity
Sure you can come up with a scenarios where people are forced to be bored. Like waiting in a doctors office that you went to by yourself and they don't offer any reading material. Seems rare.
Let me offer another one: solitary confinement, what happens to people left alone with their own thoughts? They often go crazy.
What? People used to wait all the time. Meeting friends? “See you at 8 at the mall, east corner” and your friend would arrive at 8:13 while you were there since 7:46pm, unable to walk away for fear of missing the evening completely. So people smoked! A LOT!
And sometimes you would miss the appointment, have no way to reach the person, and spend the whole evening by yourself in the city, having also missed the movie time.
"Next time on.."
"Tonight at 11, what will your kid gay"
Also people used to watch so much TV is was a regular news item (youtube that). Remember the saying "TV will rot your brain".
Yes, more stuff on your phone, easier access but these are levels what threshold did it pass to become an issue?
Is it true though ?
I have the feeling people say this the same way they assume living in a high population density area gives you option to never be lonely.
I’d argue having stuff to read/watch is orthogonal to being bored, it’s not a state of mind you can fill with any random crap in your feed.
After a game of soccer with your friends you probably feel better both physically and mentally than after scrolling through twitter. The latter is more like reality tv combined with the worst news channel available.
I was wondering how much social media filling in all spare time keeps people from tinkering and inventing and making progress.
Though, I suspect the tinkers are still spending a lot of time tinkering - and only the people who have nothing better to do are spending most of their time on social media.
[0] Griffiths, M. D. (2012). Facebook addiction: Concerns, criticism, and recommendations: A response to Andreassen and colleagues. Psychological Reports, 110, 518–520. https://doi.org/10.2466/01.07.18.PR0.110.2.518-520
Discovered that there are two kinds of boredom!
Thank you boredom and HN for making my boredom strangely productive.
I remember just sitting in my living room thinking, "man watching TV is boring, I would rather do <whatever productive thing>".
The picture in the article could have been me. It had a magical just-do-it effect because I really had no better alternatives around.
I thought this was a well known observable fact. There are certain creative thought processes that only occur to me when I really have absolutely nothing else to think about, but that basically never happens anymore thanks to the internet. The only reason I'm even aware that I'm missing out on this is because it still happens when I take long showers, so basically the only time I don't have a phone or computer with me.
It's blinding to all of your senses and thoughts because as long as your attention is consumed by this fascinating object everything else is invisible.
Walls of blindness surround you. A kind of invisible prison.
I don't mean to be glib, but I often see people discuss this as though it's a smartphone only thing. It's just as possible to doom scroll on the big screen.
Maybe I'm jealous that some people can restrict time wasting to just the phone.
The opposite of being bored is cultivating your interests, treating them like a garden that takes work but grows over time into a variety of wonderful things.
Aren't all these activities doing the same thing, giving the brain pause to calm down, to refocus. Perhaps our brains require idle times as our bodies need pause after exercise.
I wonder if there is a record of what could help one break out of 'indeifference, apathy, ...' phase and into the 'creative thinking and activity' phase. It is just a matter of time? Is it possible only for some and not for others? Have you, dear reader, succesfully transitioned to the latter phase and as a result, change the course of your life towards a desirable goal?
I know I'm being hard, but I can't help feeling nauseated by this mindset of "reaping" something out of everything and everywhere.
On a non-sarcastic note, I recommend Derek Thompson's "Workism" -- it might resonate with you:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/religion-w...
These seems like very few people to be drawing such broad-ranging conclusions from.
I can contribute and participate actively by doing critical thinking and leaving comments but I can also read passively and barely even think my own thoughts. For me that passive version is the default.
I agree that social media is not the most accurate term. I wonder what a good alternative would be. “Mindless feed reading” could refer to the act of consuming it.