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Commenters are criticizing the man for knowing that cell phones exist and for being surprised by it.
I bought smartphones before the iPhone.
I stood in line for four hours to buy the first iPhone (never again).
I still use an iPhone.
Yet, I am regularly surprised by how often everyone is looking at their phones.
(Context: I live in a rural area outside a metro area and don’t go there often, except for work.)
When their kid is at a crowded city park, the parent is glued to their phone.
When their kid is performing, the parent is glued to their phone, their thumb scrolling.
During any break from activity, they whip out their phones.
I used to be skeptical about the claim that devices contribute to societal brain rot through dopamine hits. However, the more I pay attention, the more I notice it. Even though I'm quite disciplined, I still catch myself instinctively pulling out my phone.
I can easily see this man having that sincere thought. You know smartphones exist, but you have no idea how much they are used.
I truly believe we are at a stage where one could argue that smartphones qualify as cybernetics.
1. Insofar as no apps on phone, minimal social media usage at all, and willful focus on a return to my 70s/80s roots where I embrace active boredom doing nothing.
I did a week without my phone and it was astonishing how uncomfortable I was with… doing nothing. The act of just waiting for anything made me instinctively reach for the phone and when it wasn’t there… it was uncomfortable to not get that hit. Even after a week, it hadn’t gone away.
Addicted is right.
#sentfrommyiphone
Even when people are not looking at the phone, they need to know it's nearby.
Some young people feel anxiety without their phones to the level they don't go out even for a few minutes without a phone. They still lose their phone inside their homes, but they feel comfortable because they know it's nearby. But if you are asking someone to come to help carry something, takes max 2 minutes, and they refuse until they find their phone. It is same for taking out the trash, and visiting the nearby shop (5 min max).
Serious Q, what are most people doing with their phones so much? Social media? Work? Watching rando YT vids?
My wife's vice seems to FB, but unsure if that's what everyone else is doing.
Yeah it truly is astonishing how constant and ubiquitous. Occasionally I'll be out somewhere and I'll have that moment of clarity and just notice it and see it for what it is. That's usually only when my phone is dead or not on me though :\
… oops didn’t mean to comment and can’t delete this
I just spent several months helping someone who got released after 40 years. He got used to smartphones very quickly. He'd seen them in movies and TV, and they have tablets in most prisons these days to download music and movies and do texting.
Had to teach him how to pay with a debit card and PIN for everything as that wasn't a thing before he went in.
Humans are very adaptable.
Indeed, while still in jail, this man surely knew smartphones existed. And, of course, basic usage of a smartphone is easy; it wouldn't be addictive if it was hard.
The point of this (low quality) article was that, after 30 years far from the usual life, the man points out juste 2 changes during the period: "Everybody is looking at their phones" and a 2023 wildfire. He knew people had smartphones, but I guess he didn't not know to what extent. It's a/the most important part of the life for many people.
Last week, I saw a couple riveted to their screens while walking their dog on the river's edge. The woman didn't raise her eyes when she caught and threw the stick the dog had brought. I wondered how the dog could be so obviously excited, despite the lack of attention.
The UI for smartphones was also designed for the lowest common denominator. It’s so intuitive that we laughed at my toddler as she tried to swipe on a physical picture frame to see the next photo.
I would imagine it would be much harder to adapt to T9 input. My boomer parent stubbornly refused to adopt cell phones early on and that mindset crippled them as the world pivoted to apps and touchscreens.
Sci fi authors imagined future worlds where reality would be masked by drugs.
The drugs have arrived. They just take the form of phone and computer screens which keep games, forums, but even selective news true or fake in front of our eyes, sometimes BS office memos. We don't know how to make drugs alter our vision, mood, perception of the world to outright provide a "better" one. But we don't really need them. We know how to achieve that with screens and software. (And for the rest, SSRIs and such can alter our mood without even bothering to change the stimulus.)
It is surprising when you look up (from your screen) in the train and see everyone captured by their own reality - which is our new shared reality? Kind of? Pretty close for sci-fi.
The BS office memo asks us to justify our usefulness by Monday fist thing or report to reactor shielding (too soon? too soon.)
“All right already. Let’s see. Give me a second.” She scratches her chin while a wild animal screams within the Save-On. “I know—I remember when I first woke up how people kept on trying to impress me with how efficient the world had become. What a weird thing to brag about, eh? Efficiency. I mean, what’s the point of being efficient if you’re only leading an efficiently blank life?” I egg her on. “For example?”
…
“People didn’t evolve. I mean, the world became faster and smarter and in some ways cleaner. Like cars—cars didn’t smell anymore. But people stayed the same. They actually—wait—what’s the opposite of progressed?”
Excerpt From Girlfriend in a Coma Douglas Coupland This material may be protected by copyright.
I think a society was just not meant to be this connected. When a brain is this hyperconnected you get problems and the world hyperconnected becomes sick.
>A hyperconnected brain is a brain with increased connectivity between regions, or hubs. This can be a response to neuropathology, such as autism, depression, or schizophrenia.
>Hyperconnectivity in the brain can contribute to epilepsy by increasing the likelihood of seizures. This can occur due to a number of factors, including injury, disease progression, and changes in brain structure.
The world is in one big epileptic fit right now due to tech hyperconnectivity and I’m unsure how to fix that.
Perhaps in the future, governments could put strict caps on the amount of data one can download. For example, 1GB and no Internet for a person for the rest of the month.
There is no meant. We are evolving into what we create.
I hate my phone.
For years I've been mad at the content on the device - the interruptions - but I realized that was all misplaced.
I hate the device and ecosystem itself.
Felt right to finally figure that out
I know that feeling.
It takes some self discipline and effort to use our phones in non-unhealthy ways. I'm still working on it myself: to configure software, notifications, reduce mindless scrolling.
I'm naturally curious and so I often find myself asking an AI chat bot about things: sometimes about random stuff but more often my AI chats are aligned with my learning goals, and I love that proximity to knowledge. I guess this could become a somewhat unhealthy behavior, but I don't consider it a problem yet.
For me the most important thing is to be mindful of the power and addictive tendency of our phones, and crucially for me: to use the phone as a tool, especially for creative endeavors.
Genuine question: why didn't you just turn notifications off and logout/delete yourself from social media?
It's not hard.
The devices are amazing tools, just don't use social media and you'll be fine.
Electronics is an escape for people who don't like talking to other people.
Turns out most of us don't like talking to others.
I definitely don't. I enjoy online interactions way more than face to face.
I don't dislike talking to others. It's just hard for me to say what I want to say at the speed of normal conversation. I write more slowly and carefully, can edit what I've drafted, and check facts too, all before I hit the submit button.
I'm a people-watcher. People are so much more interesting to me than a phone.
Parasocial relationships are a thing, later I've been way too fond of Twin Peaks or some streamers, for instance.
I thought the same in HS until I found the right people. Online will never hit the same as a true friend group irl
Electronics are the ultimate distraction. Turns out we really like distracting ourselves.
> I enjoy online interactions way more than face to face.
It means you haven't met the right people yet, and that's a shame. Not just for you but for so many people missing out on the best parts of life.
Says this man who's lived 60 years. Don't have to be in prison to notice it's an epidemic.
Has this man really been wrongly jailed for 30 years? That's the insane thing here.
I've stayed at a Yoga school for up to 6 months straight.
Best part, all gadgets are locked up in a safe on arrival and returned when you leave.
“getting used to just how connected people are now.”
Ironically, I think we have never been as lonely and isolated as we are now.
I'm going to be honest, as a bookworm growing up, I feel a little bit of twisted satisfaction from this. I was treated as odd for having my nose in a book all the time. WHO'S THE ODD ONE NOW?
I heard someone say this last week and they never went to prison.
Before phones everyone was reading newspapers.
selfies and filming events with your phone are diseases
Not only this. Every group (work, school, uni) now uses whatsapp/other for communication, and if you own an older device you sometimes cant use said apps, so you are obligated to have a newer phone or else you will become isolated.
And Android/iOS has closed source code that makes you unable to update.
I was a huge nerd for having a PDA in primary school. I still am surprised every time I step in public transport and see hundreds of heads bent down staring at tiny screens.
Especially with the proliferation of generative AI, I anticipate something of a tech backlash in the next decade, and performatively NOT looking at one's phone will be part of it.
I'm sure that this already exists to some extant in certain subgroups, but I'd bet a small amount of money that this will grow to be a visible trend.
Just a fun thought!
The story that went untold here is how he had to be in prison for 30 years for a crime he quite likely didn't do.
It got really bad in the last couple of years, I think because the last group of people who were too old to get into technology are no longer seen much in public, so you go into a cafe and everyone, youth, adult or pensioner is just looking at their phone screen.
I saw this while browsing Hacker News on my phone. I wanted to say something but I don’t know what I could say without sounding hypocritical.
I guess I’ll just leave this comment and put my phone down. And try to be more mindful to not browse sites like this aimlessly. But I’ve tried that before too.
I own an iPhone and it's useful and a technological marvel (other smartphones too).
But I strongly dislike and am saddened by this impact that it's had on society.
How does one go from a hung jury with a single juror convicting to a unanimous conviction with a death sentence?
Also, isn’t this double jeopardy?
Well, yeah.
Mobile apps and their business models are designed for maximum addict^H^H^H^H^H^Hengagement. Journalists have written stories about social media and gaming companies hiring psychologists to better understand how to make their apps more engaging to people, even.
Unfortunately, it seems that state, federal or country-level governments have no interest in reeling this in. In fact, they actively enable this behavior by using ex-Twitter et. al. for official communications!
It's even worse than that, too; many businesses _only_ advertise or maintain business hours on social media platforms, so people that refuse to use these services are, effectively, digital dinosaurs.
I don't think things like checking your phone (usually social media) at a stoplight or a long stretch of road while you're driving becoming become more-or-less socially acceptable was what the iPhone team had envisioned when creating the phone, but here we are.
To be fair, though, this would have been just as much of a problem in 1994 as it is now if we had the technology back then. TV addiction was all the rage back then.
A half-solution that seems to have cut my own phone time down was to remove any app that lets me browse. HN is the only aggregator/exception, because there isn't a lot of bullshit here without intellectual value.
Instead, if I want to use my phone I have to deliberately look for things.
Everybody is a nerd now. They were not before. We beat them. We won
'Everybody is eating hot chip,' says man freed after 30 years in prison