Would you think the same of an art project that removed, say, watches from people's wrists as they check the time? Or maybe hammers from the hands from people working in construction?

Would love to see this picture with the phones and cameras removed:

https://artsmetaphor.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Mona-Lis...

This is depressing. What's the point of taking another smartphone picture of the Mona Lisa. So they can go home and show or post on some "social" website another smartphone pic of the Mona Lisa? I guess I just don't get it.

Another one of the same vein I've seen circulated:

https://petapixel.com/2013/03/14/a-starry-sea-of-cameras-at-...

That's exactly the point.

It's called humble-brag.

Now that's a depressing assumption, that people who want to share their neat experience is just humble-bragging.

One that removes cars, airplanes, and horses would be great

It would be a cool web project to have photographs of scenes where you could dynamically choose what to remove from the scene.

Somewhat related "Automatically “block” people in images using a pretrained neural network" https://github.com/minimaxir/person-blocker (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16720233 , 110 points, 8 months ago, 59 comments)

I think comparing the watch removal to the phone removal would really drive the point home - I don't think you see a lot of couples checking their watches at the same time.

I think I get the point your making - a phone is a tool, and useful, like watches and hammers. But watches, hammers, and even books aren't designed to make you addicted to them. Lots of things on phones are.

And lots of things on phones aren't... but the most addictive aspects are the most prevalent.

> and even books

If you've never gotten into a dopamine cycle with a good book (we usually just call this "a page turner" or "couldn't put it down") then I think that's kinda sad itself.

Books are definitely designed to make you addicted to them in a similar way that apps and games often are.

No, because these things don’t isolate us from each other. You have a number of couples in the photographs that are close physically yet miles and miles apart.

Are you honestly saying that this (neat) art piece, which is of carefully curated shots taken over months, is general proof that phones are some fundamentally different mode of isolation, compared to any other tool that humans have had?

I would say that. Most other tools have a "pull" dynamic where the user has made the decision to use them. Instead, while phones also have this dynamic, they also have a "push" dynamic where someone else, or even just an automated notification, can demand your attention.

The second noteworthy distinction is phones' ability to solve many different problems as well as provide many different willful distractions in a very accessible manner. A tool that can be both productive and entertaining requires a higher amount of willpower to use productively without succumbing to the desire to use it for entertainment.

Some of the most productive coding I've done has been in places where there was no internet to temp me with distractions.

I would actually be interested to hear you explain why, in terms of social isolation, phones are not a fundamentally different mode of isolation than any other human tool.

Social media are designed to be as addictive as possible. Smartphones have replaced a great number of tools and devices. At the end of the day it's up to the individuals to not spend a lot of time on their phones, but, I can see it's hard for most people. At least around me (including myself). Another thing I've noted is the exhaustion experienced after spending a long time on your smartphone.

I sometimes wonder if it is the ubiquity of the phone that allows us to use it as a framework (or that it reveals in some egregious way we cannot ignore) a fundamental social state of modernism that has, in one form or another, been there since its inception. And that we an ignore this because, prior to the contemporary age, there remains so little detailed record if the lives of the, for lack of a better term, masses. Now everyone can comment on youtube videos no matter where they're at in the world or what else they may be doing at the moment. So that we are overwhelmed with our own banality, subsumed beneath a flood of images and messages that we are beginning to feel in some instinctual sense, can never approach in even the most rudimentary of ways, that which we have called communication.

That's not how burden of proof works :) I'm not the one making the claim that phones isolate us differently.

This is nothing new. Couples have been physically together yet miles apart way before phones came around, and still are.

Oh yes let's all remember 2005 when no one ever looked in the mirror and everyone in big city public transport held hands and sung folk songs on their morning commute.

For the record I have sung songs with a subway car full of people on Chicago's Red Line. Was not during commuting hours tho. Alcohol was probably a bigger factor than the presence of cell phones.

The N train was the "3am Disney Sing-a-Long" after the bar on my friend's ride home to Queens.

How about removing books from photos? ;)

I don't know, I just can't see this as a meaningful representation. Maybe I'm biased because I don't check my phone all the time - but you could get a snapshot of me in most of these situations. It would just not be an accurate depiction of how I live my life. It's like "hey I have a picture of you washing your hands, how many minutes per day do you spend in front of a sink?".

Sure, everyone who goes to concerts knows those people who film every minute. But if you time it right you'll also see me taking a quick picture, that's a few seconds once or twice on a 3h concert.