I’ve felt withdrawal symptoms for caffeine, and I can only imagine it is worse for stronger drugs. Maybe this addiction is of the same sort but the withdrawal is so slight that I don’t notice?
The really short version is that there's some science that suggests that periods of boredom increase creativity. By constantly keeping active with your phone, we're losing this "boredom time".
Personally, I've made a habit of occasionally just doing nothing every now and then. Put the phone away; don't listen to anything. It's actually great for my commute home (I take a bus). I can just sit/stand and not do anything and just relax for a few minutes on the way home.
Personally, I think the biggest problem here isn't that kids are spending a lot of time looking at their screens. It's that parents _aren't_ spending a lot of time engaging with their kids about the content.
When a screen is used to distract a child - or anyone,really - instead of engage them, that's where the problem arises.
Not only personal time, but work time as well. How many of us see work colleagues on their phones or random websites during work time? If that moment of boredom had been spent thinking about new products, the details of a customer problem, or something else work-related, that could have produced something tangible, rather than being wasted. When "slack time" is automatically used for indulging in phone apps or web surfing, that's displacing activity which pre-phone-apps and pre-internet, would be much more likely to have involved alternative productive activity, from future planning to work-related talk with co-workers, to designing and prototyping experimental stuff. Now it's self-indulgent skinner boxes compelling us to fairly fruitless time wasting.
Some people are so focussed on this stuff that it takes priority over actual face to face conversations, which I personally find intensely rude, and I don't think I'm wrong in saying this is going to directly affect the productivity and effectiveness of them as an individual and the team as a whole. Their focus isn't on the company's business, but on themselves. I don't find this degree of self-absorption healthy; it's like working with zombies. In some ways, I preferred my original programming job where we only had a shelf full of books and dial-up internet, and you actually worked with your co-workers, talked to your customers on the phone, rather than merely existing in the same space while their minds are somewhere else. Not that I'm a Luddite, it's the social changes I abhor, not the technical.
It's weird, and worrying, just how addicted people have become at the expense of real life in the here and now, and a pushback against it is long overdue.
It's not the end of the world, if I end up having problems with it on my next bigger phone I'm more than capable of deleting the problematic apps. I've already done that with Facebook on my SE.
Even so, I'm also not excited about the ever climbing costs for new "upgrades" that I don't want. SE was a great size and had the top of the line camera from the 6s. Now if I want the smallest screen and the best camera, the price went from $400 to $1000. Welp.
My iPhone adds incredible value to my life and I find screen time very useful in helping me control my own urges to over consume enjoyable content. I don’t think people at Apple are intentionally selling you cigarettes or opiate like products.
If parents can’t understsnd spending too much time on phones or infront of TV is potentially harmful then it’s common sense we’ve lost. Nothing else.
Take it easy.
Smartphones absolutely add a lot of convenience and value. But, in my opinion, most of that value doesn't come from having deliberately addictive media consumption available at your fingertips at half a second's notice. Yet that's what phones are being optimized for.
Does calling an Uber need a 6" screen? Or voice navigation instructions in my car? Shooting photos and videos? GPS tracking my runs?
Most of the things that bigger screens enable are things that I'm trying to minimize, so making these big inviting smartphone screens is no longer adding value to my life. But that's the only phone Apple will sell me. No, it's probably not as bad as opiates. But "not as bad as opiates" is a pretty low bar to set for "should I be OK with this?"
The new Palm small phone thing is a nice idea, except that it's a companion accessory to go with a bigger phone. So close: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/10/25/18022382/...
What I really want is a small phone like that to go with an iPad. With a full size tablet, carrying it and sitting down to use it two handed are enough of a barrier that I can't absentmindedly find myself sucked into a reddit hole.
Maybe that's Apple's plan to sort this out. Make next year's iPhone Max Plus so big that you have to carry it around in your backpack and can't make a habit of staring at it all the time.
Giant screens aren't being foisted on you, you go to the store and pay for them. You could buy a featurephone if you wanted.
Having the screen be smaller makes those software products suck enough that I don't like using them for extended periods, it's a defense mechanism against hyper optimized advertising engagement apps.
Personally I think that's a feature.
My other problem with Apple that they're only interested in the high end $750+ for their phones. The SE was comparatively a steal at $400, and nothing about the new ones is $250 more impressive. Can't be securely held one handed and adds a big screen that I don't want, so I'm not excited about paying more for it.
It was just one person, and entirely subjective, but seems worth a look.
If I understand you correctly, it’s the phone fault people are addicted to bad content? The phone is just too easy to use, too high quality that unwitting victims are just defenseless? If we are talking kids, that’s a parent problem, but if we are talking adults, then it’s a problem of self-responsibility. Grocery stores have plenty of ice cream for sale: it’s up to you to not buy and eat it all the time. Grown ups ought to act like it instead of blaming shiny objects of their own obsessions. Adults aren’t victims of their phones.
Also both those phones have e-ink displays.
It reminds me of the Colonel Sanders scene in So I Married an Ax Murderer: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TPMS6tGOACo
You imply that this is obviously a bad idea, but why? I wouldn't eliminate the idea out of hand. If cars were slightly less comfortable, maybe people would drive slightly less and walk/bike slightly more. Maybe removing temptation by having a phone that doesn't make it as easy to play games is simply a healthier choice.
As a parallel, the Amish are a societal group that isn't being overwhelmed by technology. Contrary to popular belief, the Amish don't shun technology, rather they develop rules as a community to try to figure out how to take advantage of the benefits of technology while avoiding the downsides.
In most Amish communities, the current rule is that using telephones is fine, but they are not allowed to be in the house. They tried it when they first came out, and decided it wasn't working. The current approach is to put community phones in outside sheds so they aren't too tempting, but can be used when needed: http://amishamerica.com/got-a-quarter/
Unfortunately Apple has decided that's the only car they're going to make.
1: https://www.nsc.org/road-safety/safety-topics/distracted-dri...
A lot of those behaviors, I currently have trouble with at full-size computers. I can absentmindedly browse cat pictures on reddit for a couple of hours. But I have to sit down at my computer to do that, I can't do it comfortably on a 4" phone screen. And I like it that way.
Put that comfortable time-wasting computer in my pocket where it follows me everywhere and I'm about 99% certain that I'm have a problem.
I'd love to know if someone's studied this more rigorously.
Then they give us "Screen Time" and Tim Cook talks about giving people the tools to be aware of how much they're using their phones and to make their own decisions about it.
If drug companies said "We're discontinuing Advil for your headaches and replacing all painkillers with small dosage opiates, but we'll give you an app to count how much you're taking and you can make your own decisions" we'd immediately jump down their throats.
Apple discontinues the iPhone SE, standardizes on a comparatively gigantic 6.1 inch screen size for their mainstream phone model, and tells us "It's fine. We gave people a new app so they won't get addicted to their phones."
I don't think it's fine. Apple's just in denial about it because the design team likes big shiny things, premium phones print money, and users keep on buying them because we collectively don't have a grip on the downsides.
Just give me a damn phone that I can call a car or text friends on, I don't want to or need to spend hours consuming media on a giant shiny screen. But if I get a giant shiny screen foisted on me, I know it's going to happen.
But like you said, if someone's living on their phone too much, we treat it like their own moral failing. The manufacturers that made the phones this way and the software companies that deliberately A/B tested their engagement stats to death to rope you in as hard as possible and sell more ads? Nah, not their fault. It's these irresponsible phone users not owning up to their own faults.