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.

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)

Books and papers are passive - they don't have an agenda (beyond what's in the printed content anyway, but you'd generally have an idea about that beforehand).

Digital devices on the other hand push their own agenda - driving engagement, registering ad impressions, and are designed to keep you hooked and coming back - because that's what's profitable.

Being in control (with passive reading material) vs not being in control (with digital devices, unless you're extraordinarily focussed) is the point of contention, at least the way I see it.

Depends what you're using the device for? You are assuming that they're being used for social media, and perhaps for most people that's a reasonable assumption. But ebooks and long-form web magazine articles are also perfectly good use-cases for digital devices.

Books and papers don't have an agenda?

The agenda of the book/paper writer is to sell you the book/paper. The agenda of the services rendered on the phone is to keep you glued to the service as long as possible so the relatively constant % of your time that they sell to advertisers is increased for the purpose of increased profits.

The written word is quite a bit older, but there was some concern about reading a while back [0]:

> "[...] [the written word] will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves." - Socrates

[0] http://www.units.miamioh.edu/technologyandhumanities/plato.h...

> I don't remember people shaking their heads at parents reading a paperback book at the park, or commuters reading broadsheet newspapers on the train.

That's because you're not old enough. Some people did complain. (I can't find the actual quote, but I'll wager you've seen the photo that usually accompanies it - a train full of people reading the newspaper.)

You're definitely not old enough to remember Socrates bitching about kids learning to read and write.

And I suppose you're lucky enough that your parents didn't complain about you reading books, like some of my friends' did.

When cheap fiction novels became popular, there was a similar concern that young people were staying inside and reading instead of going outside.

There has never been an era where parents failed to find fault in young people's behavior.

There was also a moral panic about "penny dreadfuls" and pornographic literature and similar.

As a transhumanist, I see the recent advertisement campaign for device-free dinners as an implicit accusation that devices necessarily inhibit interpersonal engagement rather than enhance it.

A device-free social event makes as much sense to me as having an equipment-free sporting event. Imagine playing baseball without bats, balls, or gloves. Imagine soccer without balls or goals.

The family dinner with meaningful conversation is a cultural construct that is yanked directly from a Normal Rockwell cover on the Saturday Evening Post--a myth of Americana. There is nothing inherently good or virtuous about it. It's fine if that's what your family does, but it's also fine if your family plays poker for chore chits, or if it eats in perfect silence, with no one acknowledging anyone else for the entire duration.

With devices, once my kids are moved out of my house, I will still be able to have conversations with them during dinner, or at any other time of the day. And those conversations will include images with lame pun captions.

"I pretend I'm one of those hikikomori. That way I don't have to have any goddamn stupid useless voice conversations with anybody. If anybody wants to tell me something, they can write it in a text or direct message. They never get bored with their phones, and so I'd get to have asynchronous conversations with proper sentence structure, punctuation, and grammar for the rest of my life. Everybody thinks I'm just a poor hermit bastard, dependent on technology, and no one even cares." --Holden Logfromblammofield

>As a transhumanist, I see the recent advertisement campaign for device-free dinners as an implicit accusation that devices necessarily inhibit interpersonal engagement rather than enhance it.

They do inhibit it.

I think it's funny that we live in this amazing world of sights, smells, movement, filled with other animals and humans with all sorts of physical and social activities to choose from, but instead we choose to take the blue pill so we can look at a tiny glass square displaying mostly advertising and trivialities, with a horrible user interface.

The only explanation I can think of is that phones are addictive. Smartphones set up a reward system that displaces more enjoyable and useful behaviours.

It's like we've become those people tethered to slot machines at a casino continuously swiping at these devices. They don't even 'pay out' most of the time. It's sad.

I'd prefer to just be a human, thanks.

"Normal" social interactions establish a negative reward for certain people, myself included. If you have never been fat, ugly, some form of minority, or female, you might not have a good frame of reference for asymmetric social encounters. Perhaps people around you treat you with a higher default level of courtesy. I'm sure your games are more fun when you aren't always picked last for teams, and are not abandoned the instant you start winning.

Most of the time, in the US, a "normal" conversation consists of one or more people employing impolite tactics such as interruption, overtalking, and non sequitur to crowd me out of the conversation entirely. In short, most people have no interest in what I have to say, but somehow expect me to listen to them anyway.

While on a device, I can at least finish my paragraph without being interrupted. It doesn't matter so much if no one bothers to read it, so long as I am not prevented from saying it in the first place, which is the modal situation for a synchronous voice conversation. I eagerly anticipate a world where it is no longer possible to take one look at me and dismissively decide that I am not worthy to add to a conversation. Unattractive and unpopular people can have interesting ideas, too.

Sometimes I'm the schlemiel, but mostly I'm the schlimazel. I'm the type of person that gets insulted out in public, for no particular reason, and no one bothers to call out the bad behavior. Because I guess that person is just cooler than I am, and that's the way of the world. If you want to run with a casino metaphor, imagine a slot machine that not only never pays out, but also punches you in the face every time you push the play button. That's me whenever I step out of my bubble. That little black rectangle doesn't make the slot machine actually pay out, but it does stop me from getting punched in the face, which is nice, comparatively speaking.

Regular humans can be pretty awful. I try not to be bitter about it, but it's difficult whenever people declaim how great and fun their life is, because it just reinforces that the terrible people are often selectively rude--to me, specifically--and not uniformly horrible to everyone.

Well I for one make it a point to call out people being rude to others when I see it. We are out there.

Don't let people get you down.

>>A device-free social event makes as much sense to me as having an equipment-free sporting event. Imagine playing baseball without bats, balls, or gloves.

You need bats, balls and gloves to play baseball. You don't need devices for social events. Social events by definition are about interacting with other event attendees. Devices often - in fact almost always - detract from that.

In theory, devices can enhance social engagement. In actuality, they more commonly put up barriers. You name my nightly meal a myth. I'll name yours an unrealistic fantasy.

When trying to play catch, it's nice to have a partner who throws the ball back. Whatever the medium.

> A device-free social event makes as much sense to me as having an equipment-free sporting event.

A bad analogy is like an equipment-free sporting event: it has no objectively measurable goals.