It's like saying we have a driving addiction or a going to work addiction. Not everything can or should be couched in that kind of language. I've always found articles about internet and game addiction to be incredibly myopic, assuming that the "normal" of the 60's or 70's or 80's is somehow universal or worthy of being preserved, and that any deviation from it is an illness.

I understand what you're saying. Still though, you drive to get places or for fun sometimes, some people do it for sport for a living, but you don't find yourself just compulsively driving 8 hours a day. There are people that do find themselves staring at a phone 8 hours a day. The word addiction might be thrown around a little too loosely than it should be, but there's definitely widespread addiction to social media. I find it comparable to couch potatoes that sit down and watch TV all day.

Staring at a phone doing what? Swiping to refresh on social media for hours and hours at a time?

Using a phone is like going to the library, what you do there is what actually matters. Checking social media can be thought of as asking a librarian what new books are in. If you're asking every minute of every hour for 8 hours, then I can see that being a problem. But that's not really how people use the phone. You check email, you read news articles, you look at posts from friends on fb or instagram, you interact with people in a comments section, you take or share pictures, you have music or video essays playing to help you focus on work, you message coworkers, coordinate a meetup in a group chat, among other things.

I don't find it comparable to being a couch potato and watching TV all day. That analogy falls apart because watching TV isn't an interactive exercise.

>Staring at a phone doing what? Swiping to refresh on social media for hours and hours at a time?

Yes, for the technologically-not-literate people that I know, Internet = social media, and they totally spend every waking hour refresh the page to see "what's new". I used to do that on reddit.

>check email, you read news articles, you look at posts from friends on fb or instagram, you interact with people in a comments section, you take or share pictures, you have music or video essays playing to help you focus on work, you message coworkers, coordinate a meetup in a group chat, among other things.

Half of this thing are mental garbage, the other half are FOMO and outrage economy, so not doing them may result in a positive outcome.

I agree with you that escapism with tech can be more than a bad habit and it can take your attention away from things that would be more productive in the long term. However I don't know if I agree that it's a compulsion the way you'd think it with traditional addiction. If a friend you haven't talked to in a while suddenly came over to hang out, would you sit there and continue doom scrolling?

I also should clarify that I don't categorize reddit as social media because it's generally not people I know. I would consider fb, insta, snapchat as social media but not YouTube, reddit, or even here.

This reminds more of somewhere in between. Like stumbleupon but with a comment section where you can discuss things.

I am only differentiating because I believe the motivation for refreshing news aggregation sites vs social media is different. There's a much higher sense of urgency and importance when it's news. What you find interesting is also different between social media and news.

I think having a catch all term of being on the phone is not productive in helping people understand when the use of technology becomes unhealthy. Calling technology use unhealthy or even an addiction based on the perception of how long you spend is meaningless.

I agree that for some people using technology less would be positive, most often because they stop using technology to escape and ignore their responsibilities.

I don't know how fair it is to say it's garbage, some people like watching terrible films, some watch reality tv, some like video games, some like learning baseball stats, some like collecting NFTs, some like following twitter drama, I personally enjoy this kind of discourse on HN. How people choose to spend their time and what they enjoy is up to them.

I don't personally believe in the idea that constant stimulation is a bad thing as long as my responsibilities are taken care of. But I also have adhd so I don't know if everyone would share that sentiment.

“using a phone is like going to the library” lol

To be fair, it can be. It is for me a lot of the time. But most people don't use the internet that way, which is a shame really.

Addiction exists, though. I often browse Twitter for no particular reason. Six months ago I changed my year of birth for something like 2017 because I was annoyed it was compulsory. That resulted in an immediate suspension, as Twitter forbids minors to use it (rightfully so); the suspension would only be lifted if I submitted an ID.

At first I thought "who cares?" But then I found myself in want of browsing the (few) people I follow, and eventually did submit an ID to have my account restored.

I get nothing out of Twitter. Absolutely zero value. Still, apparently, I can't live without it. That's a problem.

> I get nothing out of Twitter. Absolutely zero value. Still, apparently, I can't live without it. That's a problem.

Knowing nothing about you, the way this sentence is put is the most disturbing part. If you can’t live without it, at least it fills a hole in your life and that’s as much value as you could expect from anything.

How many things do you do in a day where you can put a crystal clear value on it? I mean, I’m writing this and I’d be hard press to come with a valuation, and I also don’t think it matters much if I don’t find any.

If looking at Twitter reduced your life expectancy by 25% we’d look at it differently, but from your description it doesn’t feels so.

Life expectancy isn’t the only metric we should care about. Life satisfaction is arguably more important.

…as I sit here on my phone at 1 am, responding to comments on HN for no particular reason other than worthless internet points, I guess, moderately depressed and anxious, despite having an objectively pretty great life.

The addiction isn't to twitter. You feel like you will miss out on some important information if your access to twitter is blocked. You aren't browsing for no reason, while browsing a part of you has decided this is the best use of that time. Whatever else is going on isn't important enough to care about more than you care about seeing if there's new tweets.

If the people you follow stopped posting on twitter at the same time you changed your birthday, would you have cared about getting it restored? Valuing and caring about tweets people have sent isn't the same as being addicted to twitter. Maybe the problem is how much you value seeing those tweets the moment they are tweeted.

>I get nothing out of twitter.

That’s what made me quit Facebook. Best decision ever. I do miss the random international friend update from time to time, but nothing vital.

Still working on Twitter.

I browse directly to the accounts of the few people I still want to follow, and refuse to log in or use the general feed. There’s a nagging pop-up demanding that you log in if you try to click away into a retweeted thread these days, so that helps keep me from getting sucked into the rabbit hole. Maybe that can help for you.

I remember about 10 years ago or so, smartphone addiction was something we talked about as well. People looking at their phones during dinner out was something we consciously called out. Now, it's such a normal thing that in commercials you see families depicted as all staring at their own devices like it's no big deal. Streaming services and internet providers promote bingeing of TV shows as well.

During the pandemic, my internet usage has been through the roof. At all hours of the day I'm online. It's really my only regular social outlet. It's weird how quickly norms change around you.

Microsoft tried to save us, but Windows Phone failed

https://youtu.be/l9evyGr57hs

It seems to be a recurring thing with new technologies. Something new arrives and some people instantly see how it can ruin some aspects of our lives and warn about it. It gets taken semi-seriously, but in the end not seriously enough and the thing that those people warned us about ends up happening. After the fact no-one cares, because the new normal is now the thing that used to be unthinkably horrible before.

I remember someone here on HN once commented something about how the Amish instead of just categorically opposing all new technologies decide collectively which technologies to use and take into consideration how the technology might affect their culture and communities and this has lead them to reject things like the television and cars. I can't find any more realiable sources on this, but it sure seems like a much better way to build the society than ours is.

The "free" Western cultures are increasingly vulnerable to hacking of either human psychology or collective customs and laws. It's like a code base where every new commit automatically gets accepted and only occasionally some commits get reverted because someone managed to prove without doubt that it was a bad idea. To continue the metaphor, this sort of project management might make sense when the code base (or the civilization) is new and the focus is on just getting something running as quickly as possible, but makes the code base (or the cultural heritage of a society) bloated, unmanageable and vulnerable to attacks over longer time periods.

Breaking it feels hopeless.

If I wanted to quit a drug addiction, I could probably find a sober community to try to bond with, and you can do stuff that doesn't involve drugs.

But it doesn't feel like there is a real-life world left for me to return to. If I turned off the Internet, I'd be even more alone than I am being on the Internet talking to people all day.

I can't imagine what withdrawal would be cause I can barely conceive of not immediately lighting up again every couple minutes

I’ve taken breaks before, and it’s really not that bad and you do adapt. But you’re absolutely right, there’s less and less of a “real-life” world left out there. I lived in a cabin and carried around firewood for 6 months. It wasn’t exactly modernity.

I wish there were a community that people could move to where everyone agreed they wouldn't be on their smartphone. Maybe we could fix up some shacks in the hills and ensure we are out of 4G range.

Put a jammer in your house? Then you could live there and not have to move.

The point is that a whole group has to do it together. See the GP.

I think we stopped talking about it because most people realized that it's not a proper application of the word addiction. Adapting to the changing times doesn't make people ignorant. I dislike how when certain groundbreaking changes in the way people consume content is introduced, people who don't understand it call it an addiction. It's insulting to people who suffer clinical addiction. A perceived bad habit isn't an addiction.

We aren't addicted to having to use cars in suburban towns. But some can argue that people's legs aren't used like they were used to and we should all embrace biking or running everywhere. Not to mention traffic, pollution, road accidents. There's articles written in the last five years that use the term car addiction to describe modern population's necessity of cars for travel. https://www.credit-suisse.com/about-us-news/en/articles/news...

I think most people realized that the term internet and game addiction is most often used by people who simply don't understand the culture surrounding the internet or gaming.

> I think we stopped talking about it because most people realized that it's not a proper application of the word addiction. Adapting to the changing times doesn't make people ignorant.

Isn't that a bit like saying if everyone takes drugs, nobody is a drug addict? "Adapting to the changing times where everybody is on heroin doesn't make people junkies" -- but yes, that's exactly what it makes them.

Frankly, I’m still shocked at the shift from how it was during my childhood to the extent where we’re on desktop computers for over eight hours a day. Though I suppose sedentary office work has long predates PCs.

These two could have made sense if at the time we had a very solid grasp about the two topics, their place in society and their real impact. But the “addiction” label was thrown around at a time of uncertainty as they were too new, with a huge scoop of “back in the days” rhetoric.

There must be people studying actual internet and game addiction, but it won’t make headlines as much as it will be for actual pathological behaviors, affecting the few people that need actual treatment.

The same way we’ll probably have a flurry of “VR addiction” panic articles in the next years, that dies down when we get to better understand the topic.

It is because people lacked interest in it and ran out of things to say. The conversation was more or less saturated such that it occurs only mostly organically like an author's book coming out or an actual story related to the far dysfunctional outliers who let their kid starve to play more Everquest. Except with smartphones you can always half-ass most functions.

The media itself has an attention span of a small child in its pursuit of ratings so they move onto the next emotional source.

We didn't stop, it just stopped being a hot media topic. I still see threads about it on reddit (and sometimes HN) at least once a month, and probably more like once a week.

It was a hot topic because we make hot topics out of the "doom" of [insert new/cool thing here]. We've villified reading, chess, video games, television, dungeon and dragons, driving, dancing, and so on - and vilifying it all goes out of fashion.

Same for coffee. It’s now a socially accepted drug and I’m wondering if there’ll be a future where it’s badly seen to work without drinking coffee (“how can you even be productive?”)

We surrendered.