Is "smartphone usage" merely a proxy for "social media usage"?
When I got my first smartphone almost two decades ago as a 16yo, I used it mostly to play with the system, write my own UIs, debug system daemon issues, tinker with bootloaders and ended up contributing to a community distro for it. It was a fun computer in my pocket that taught me a lot and a massive upgrade over earlier phones where I had to use Opera Mini and Bombus via J2ME.
The vast majority of smartphones of today are toys with very little potential to tinker, and even when it's there, the entry barriers are enormous. Compiling Android is a huge undertaking, while as a teenager, I could already launch vim on my phone screen in a tram and hack on a SMS daemon written in Python. It's incomparable, and even if you do start, you quickly encounter hard barriers like device attestation.
These days I'm not immune to social media either, as evidenced by me writing this on my phone right now - but wouldn't these "worse mental health outcomes" be rather connected with social media usage, media consumption in general, intrusive notifications etc. that are commonly associated with but aren't inherently necessary part of smartphone usage? At the same time, my mental health isn't becoming immune to social media damage when I doomscroll on a PC just because I used a bigger screen with a physical keyboard.
Looking at sibling comments going "it doesn't affect me cause I browse social media on big screen", it seems like using this proxy brings more confusion than good.
Individuals on Hacker News of all sites bringing up their individual usage patterns as a counterpoint says nothing about the applicability of this proxy.
> Is "smartphone usage" merely a proxy for "social media usage"?
I think yes, since the App Store and anything involving likes/up-down votes/karma (sorry) and basically any form of reward for posting or consuming content.
I keep debating trying to go full-dumbphone, but I'm confident what would happen is that it would work great until I need a specific thing for whatever reason, and I'd have to buy an Android or iPhone, and then I'd be forced to carry around two devices and potentially have two separate cell phone plans. This seems like a pain in the ass.
But I don't dispute that waking up in the morning to a bunch of things competing for my stimulated attention probably isn't healthy.
Just do it, it's not that hard. Also don't go for a full fledged plan for the non-dumb phone (or for the dumb one). Pick one as the main outside and live with the downsides of it too.
We tend to forget that we didn't always have Google maps to help us, so we would ask a stranger for directions, we would have to wait before being able to call someone, etc.
Problem is with a dumb phone is that there are applications you may REQUIRE and it is only supported on relatively recent smartphones. This situation sucks though.
Same with cash vs. card. You prefer cash? Well, tough shit, because many places accept only cards, and some countries are going cashless as well.
I try to practice a discipline of not looking at my phone until at least after I’ve had my coffee. It may be a drop in the ocean but small habits of resisting the dopamine programming add up.
I've been using a featureful dumb phone (Sunbeam F1 Pro, Juniper) for a few weeks now. Before this I've been using an iPhone since iPhone 6s, and before that an Android phone since Nexus 4. My new phone runs BasicOS, an Android remix that removes Google Play, removes all web browsers, and comes with a suite of custom default apps built to nice with physical buttons (T9-style).
My phone has calls, SMS, MMS, email (IMAP), calendar (CDAV), contacts (CDAV), navigation (offline and Waze), note-taking, voice memos, a music player, weather, and voice-to-text via Azure's AI models. The only things I've missed so far are:
- Two-factor authentication via TOTP and HOTP. I loathe SMS-based 2FA, and not every service supports Email-based 2FA. This has been so annoying I've considered jailbreaking it, learning Kotlin and Android development, and releasing an MIT-licensed application for the company to bundle with the phone.
- A way to scan QR codes. It would be fine if I could just extract the text into a Note.
- The ability to record a call without an additional device. I've been dealing with a medical billing kerfuffle and it was much easier to disclose and press record, than to disclose and find another recording device.
- The ability to send and read SMS/MMS messages from my MacBook Pro. It should be possible with the Bluetooth HFP, which many cars use to enable the same thing. Sadly, Tunabelly Software's app "Handsfree 2" was pulled from the market and I could not get Sustainable Softworks' app "Phone Amego" to work. I've considered building a TUI for this purpose.
- At first I missed Audible, but then I learned two important facts. First, I can listen to my Audible books on my Kindle as long as I connect a bluetooth speaker (including Ford SYNC). And second, Audible and iTunes for Windows integrate with each other to allow me to burn Audible books to CDs, 80 minutes at a time.
- I really miss having O'Reilly Learning Platform. I used to listen to audiobooks on there all the time, and now I've got no good solution for it. I've replaced that time with Audible books (which are rarely about software). I still get plenty of software book reading done when I can focus my eyes on it, though.
There have also been some UX problems, which are livable:
- The camera is not extremely high quality. I've taken to borrowing my wife's iPad to take photos of my whiteboard when I need to preserve something before I erase it. It's fine for texting photos to friends, but not for document scanning.
- The music player is good for music, but not great for audiobooks and podcasts. It doesn't remember where you are in the middle of an audio file when you play it again later (which would, admittedly, be weird for music).
But the benefits have been incredible:
- I no longer stay up way too late every night pushing pixels past my peepers. Instead, I stay up way too late only some nights, reading technology books.
- I no longer browse social media, play puzzle games, or browse news headlines every time I'm bored for a few minutes. Instead, I contemplate (what my plans for tomorrow are, a recent problem I failed to solve, what that odd sound is, how pretty the clouds are, etc.).
- I no longer have to put up with Liquid Glass. (I also replaced my Apple Watch with a Casio LWS2200H and downgraded my MacBook Pro to Sequoia.)
- I no longer have to be concerned with anybody but my carrier tracking me.
- I've been less aware of state, national, and world news--which has been a huge boon to my mental health. Conversations with friends and coworkers still keep me apprised of the things that are important enough to need to know. All the other crap just passes me by. Nothing is shoving headline notifications at me, and the easy moments to browse headlines have been replaced by devicelessness.
<< Two-factor authentication via TOTP and HOTP. I loathe SMS-based 2FA, and not every service supports Email-based 2FA. This has been so annoying I've considered jailbreaking it, learning Kotlin and Android development, and releasing an MIT-licensed application for the company to bundle with the phone.
Ngl, lately it feels like some of my projects are born out of sheer aggravation more than anything else. I get the impulse.
<< I've been less aware of state, national, and world news--which has been a huge boon to my mental health.
Can confirm; this approach helped me a lot too. There is so much I can't do so being aware of its minutiae does nothing for me except make it worse. I still keep up with local news, because it is far more likely to make immediate impact.
I’d guess it’s very different from how most of the people consume content.
The problem with smartphone is that it’s always on you wherever you go, and the temptation to use it for filling every second of boredom is just too strong.
iPads/laptops on another hand are just too bulky for carrying them around - in a minute of boredom you have to take deliberate action to go and grab it from whatever place it’s right now.
From my experience, this additional barrier between you and content is a huge deterring factor.
As an anecdote, I use Brick app to lock my phone out of social media, and even tho the physical unlocking device in another corner of the same room where I’m, this works surprisingly well, because most of the time I’m just too lazy to take this action of going through unlocking procedure.
That’s interesting because I’ve been able to keep my iPads and computers entirely productivity devices but my phone wastes considerable amounts of my time.
> Whatever the safe level of smartphone usage is, most of us are above it.
I think I'm immunized from it because I hate using smartphones, especially when I'm at home and could be doing the task on a PC with a big screen and keyboard. I have a few but just use them for practical tasks when away from home (occasional text, deliveries on porch, looking something up in the store, listening to podcasts, to do list for the day). Viewing content on a tiny screen with a minefield of things to accidentally tap? No thanks. They are great multi-function devices to replace others on the go.
A bigger screen isn't better? I'll have to respectfully disagree. Having a huge screen on the PC has been a godsend.
A PC isn't just a smartphone with a bigger screen. I keep a bunch of things open and fully visible at the same time (file browser, text editor, terminal, smaller browser window, larger browser window, and some space for other things). This is nothing like using a smartphone. Every one of those programs is a content viewer/editor, where I set what they show. No notifications. Most of the time they're all static, showing what I chose and waiting for my command. If this is how you use your smartphone, then I stand corrected.
Eerie parallels to tobacco smoking just a few decades ago. It's a public health problem but those in charge of the bureaucracy at the highest levels choose to obsess over rare vaccine side effects and the use of tylenol during circumcission? It's a mad mad mad mad world (great film, which is overdue for a cyber age remake)
This may actually be false! Owning a smartphone is so normal, even required, nowadays that people who don't even own one are often "edge cases". For example people who believe in fringe conspiracy theories, people with severe health problems, elderly people, etc. Even if resigning from phone helps by itself, "average people" rarely do.
Similar statistical effect happens with alcohol usage: from raw data it often looks like people who drink almost nothing - let's say one drink a month - are healthier than people who drink absolutely nothing.
My first question would be: or is it that cat owners are schizophrenic are more likely to get a cat?
I'm not answering that question, but I do want to quote your article. From the bottom:
> Results were inconsistent across studies, but those of higher quality suggested that associations in unadjusted models might have been due to factors that could have influenced the results.
> One study found no significant association between owning a cat before age 13 and later developing schizophrenia, but it did identify a significant link when narrowing down cat ownership to a specific period (ages 9 to 12). This inconsistency suggests that the critical window for cat exposure is not well defined.
> A study in the US, which involved 354 psychology students, didn't find a connection between owning a cat and schizotypy scores. However, those who had received a cat bite had higher scores when compared to those who had not.
> Another study, which included people with and without mental disorders, discovered a connection between cat bites and higher scores on tests measuring particular psychological experiences. But they suggested other pathogens, such as Pasteurella multocida, may be responsible instead.
> Before we can make any firm interpretations, the researchers reiterate that we need better and broader research.
That one also reads 'schizotypy'. This is much more broad than schizophrenia and includes schizoid personality disorder; something I don't have a diagnosis for but I do tick the boxes for (IMO) as a so-called introvert with diagnosed autism. And yes, we do have cats, and I have a natural dislike for dogs.
And of course there's endless correlation-causation isseus there as well. Under most circumstances you have to be both aggressive and careless to get bitten by a cat in the first place.
That article is junk. The leading cause of Toxoplasma gondii infection in humans is under cooked meat. Cat ownership is not actually linked to higher prevalence of T. gondii infection[1].
Schizophrenia is a subset of "doing worse mentally". For a proper comparison you need to check overall mental health, not just schizophrenia, which is a rare condition.
I've struggled throughout my life with anxiety, ADHD, and bouts of depression.
I've done years of therapy, and use some medication to help with my ADHD. I will say though, singlehandedly, the best (and hardest) thing I've had to do is fight my own phone/internet/computer usage.
I grew up with computers and still work professionally with them day to day, but have made a serious effort in the last year to cut down my usage in an extreme manner:
- Using a 'brick' device to control which apps work on my phone, requiring I physically tap my phone to the brick to lock/unlock the restricted mode. This is always on.
- Blocking tons of sites via multiple means (iOS screen time, eero network profiles)
- Turning my iPhone into a very very basic phone: in "bricked" mode, which I will find myself using for continuous days at a time, I can only use: gmail, photos, notes, weather, maps, spotify, telephone, imessage. No news, no internet browsing, no social media.
- I've deleted all social media accounts (except LinkedIn, but this too is blocked on my phone).
From all of this, the initial realization was, "wow, I'm bored..", which is hard at first to sit with as a feeling, when normally my first instinct to that feeling was "let's open some app/youtube/etc." Then you slowly find positive things creeping in to occupy that boredom time: reading, calling friends/family, getting chores done, etc. And for anything "restricted" that I can't do on my phone, I largely can do on my computer (though I still block sites like reddit, youtube). But this is much healthier as I'm much less likely to pick up my laptop for hours on end, vs. opening my phone at every moment I'm bored.
I don't know many children who are 13 today and don't have a smartphone - in fact it was quite a common thing even a decade ago - how do you even control for this
My 13 year old has a phone. Most of the apps are blocked. Messages is open, and we tweak based on expectations how much he has access per day, and when. Right now it's 8:30pm to 9pm (so after sports and homework).
He can call and text me and my wife anytime of the day. Thankfully the school bans phone usage, so it's not a lot.
A handful of his friends have no phone. Most have, and all apps are accessible (not sure how parents configure age restricted content/apps).
It's a lot of work to limit and tweak and even his 1 minute a day on Safari (because I couldn't find a way to cut to 0) allowed him to create a TikTok and Instagram account (on web). I am a technologist... and gee my 13 year is a genius when trying to find ways to circumvent the restrictions. Every other week I have to change some minor thing in Settings. But my point is that it's a LOT of work... I can see why some people either completely ban or allow. But to me it's worth. Messages is open because I believe he needs to talk with his friends, but fuck Tiktok and Instagram and Youtube.
I’ve been told from some folks who work on child safety features and are passionate about the space that the features are often ignored by parents anyways :/
That may be part of the reason for difficulty of configuration. You might be in a small cohort of people actually using them. That cohort should be larger.
To me, "The Internet" and "The Internet without short-form videos" are two different things.
There was a very short span of time when the mobile bandwidth was good enough for browsing, messaging, and corporate email, but not really good enough (or prohibitively expensive) for streaming. Feels like that was the sweet spot.
....yeah but then, they found out how to build & deliver mobile ADS & co, so bandwidth need exploded, bringing us to the "mobile web" we have today. E.g. including YT Ads popping up after 15 min in a meditation class :-D
There's also a decade plus of various "Net Children Go Mobile" annual surveys across major tecnological countries that plot the diffusion of phone use and ownership by age and country.
Leading to a large ANOVA table of years, countries, ages, mental health statitics, etc.
Yes, Denmark measures these things is ways different to the UK and both differ from the US.
All the same, each being reasonably internally consisent across time means trends can be picked after normalising.
The case for whether encroaching phone use does correlate with increased early onset mental issue diagnoses becomes a consideration of thresholds and variances.
My anecdotal observations suggest it's pretty different. One thing is you can (and do, if you're a kid) carry it everywhere with you and stare at it all the time. I think the phone UI where each app takes over the whole screen also increases the impact of the worst sorts of apps (like TikTok).
Interesting observation about everything effectively running in full-screen on a smartphone, taking it out of the larger context of whatever else you were doing before that.
Personally I'd think its different, smartphone apps usually have tons of dark patterns and are designed to always be with you versus a desktop or even a laptop.
It probably makes a difference that the internet of ~15 years ago was healthier to use than the half-dozen websites that encompass the entire internet for most people today. Attention-optimizing algorithms and infinite scrolling are some of the worst inventions that have come to the internet since the pop-up ad.
In the US, we restrict driving to around age 16, alcohol consumption to 18, voting to 18, and tobacco consumption to 21. Then there are industry-applied age ratings, like the MPA’s PG-13, R, and NC-17 ratings. Barbiturates and amphetamines we’re once available without a prescription.
There’s official/unofficial wiggle room, but there are limits. For example, if you live on a farm, you may be driving on the farm before you have a license to drive on public roads.
I could see mobile-phone ownership becoming similarly-restricted.
>In the US, we restrict ... alcohol consumption to 18
isn't it 21 all over the US? it was changed to cut drunk driving in the late 70s at the federal level, tied to highway funds, so the states needed to cave
Banning smartphones in general would be more akin to banning kids from riding in cars (not driving them) or being around alcohol (even in their own home)
To say nothing of the inconsistency of those bans. You can vote, enlist in the army, and take on life-altering student loans... but smoke a cigarette? No way!
Also, isn't it the sale and purchase of alcohol that is banned for underage persons, not the consumption? That is, if parents want to give their kids alcohol, that's not illegal.
Banning smartphones in general would be more akin to banning kids from riding in cars (not driving them)
How so? I don't see you make an argument for why your simile would be more accurate, and I fear I lack the imagination to conjure up what back-seat phoning would look like.
Correlating smartphone ownership with mental health issues - without diving into how they actually use them - would be like correlating kids simply sitting in a car with them not being able to drive it safely. Or, to use another of my examples, it would be like correlating cigarette possession with cancer rates. Yes, you'll probably see some correlation, unsurprisingly, but it doesn't give any information on causation.
It sucks because they could be pocket-sized bicycles for the mind rather than addicting ad-driven bullshit surveillance slot machines that maximize attention. Humanity had a choice and chose poorly.
Driving is restricted because of responsibility (same way marriage and contracts in general require someone legally responsible)
Porn, alcohol, tobacco and gambling is cultural/religious, the same way The Prohibition happened in the US, or all alcohol and gambling is banned in hard Islamic countries and adult women are mandatory veiled.
It's pretty interesting to see where a smartphone ban would fit as a category.
I think alcohol and tobacco used to be banned for cultural reasons but there’s pretty clear research now pointing to bad outcomes for early drug use. 21 is still high so some of the cultural element remains but I wouldn’t consider those two entirely ungrounded in reason.
> there’s pretty clear research now pointing to bad outcomes for early drug use
I wasn't aware. Or more specifically, I thought it wouldn't ethically be possible to do that research while it's legally forbidden.
I assumed We'd be bound to look at cases pathologic enough to warrant intervention, and the researchers tracking back the root cause at drug ingestion. While a useful approach, it would tell us nothing about all the other cases that weren't pathological.
On tobacco specifically I think most long term effects disappear in smoker below 25 ? Not arguing that kids should smoke, but like coming at th French situation, it looks like there is a dose where the effects on kids will be negligible.
PS: even for people withing the legal smoking range, studies on drugs still tend to focus on patients that had to enter the medical system
For instance alcohol addiction is extremely destructive at pathological levels, and we have a flurry of studies coming to a "no safe dose" conclusion. But we also have plenty of evidence on what happens when outright banning alcohol at large scale and it's not great either.
I'm not sure we have a good model or understanding yet of what it actually means to have addictive substances around and their social effects.
I don't think that's true. We have thousands of years of experience. Not everything needs the perfect study taken in the perfect lab conditions for folks to make conclusions which are useful for operating in the real world.
Kids can / often use other family members' smartphones / tablets (I assume it's the majority of cases). How can the law prevent this if parents do nothing about this?
The same way that the law prevents kids drinking their parents’ alcohol - it doesn’t. But having it be illegal sends a signal, even though it’s possible to circumvent it, and also allows prosecution if warranted.
That'd put it in the same basket as alcohol and tobacco. Although the pro/con of owning a mobile are a lot less clear than those two and banning phones in that way is probably a mistake.
I wonder how many 5-6 year olds are getting smartphones because parents are divorced and one parent wants to be able to check in on the other, could be something like that is the issue
Reading Jonathan Haidt's 'The Anxious Generation' broke me. I have two kids, still far too young for smartphones, but his book and all of the surrounding research has made me DRASTICALLY alter the way I use my own smartphone and will shape the way I treat phones with them.
It really depends. Not all kids are extremely dumb and get hooked by very obvious attempts from evil social networks. I still have hope for future aaron swartzs and linus torvaldss
Horrifically terrible data and methodology for even suggesting causal claims. Global Mind Data is literally self report online survey data. You may as well have used political surveys from Fox News and MSNBC
You shouldn't stick your head in the sand just because it makes you feel better. Since media companies are causing damage then they should be held liable. Where is the class action?
Soon:
Whatever the safe level of smartphone usage is, most of us are above it.Is "smartphone usage" merely a proxy for "social media usage"?
When I got my first smartphone almost two decades ago as a 16yo, I used it mostly to play with the system, write my own UIs, debug system daemon issues, tinker with bootloaders and ended up contributing to a community distro for it. It was a fun computer in my pocket that taught me a lot and a massive upgrade over earlier phones where I had to use Opera Mini and Bombus via J2ME.
The vast majority of smartphones of today are toys with very little potential to tinker, and even when it's there, the entry barriers are enormous. Compiling Android is a huge undertaking, while as a teenager, I could already launch vim on my phone screen in a tram and hack on a SMS daemon written in Python. It's incomparable, and even if you do start, you quickly encounter hard barriers like device attestation.
These days I'm not immune to social media either, as evidenced by me writing this on my phone right now - but wouldn't these "worse mental health outcomes" be rather connected with social media usage, media consumption in general, intrusive notifications etc. that are commonly associated with but aren't inherently necessary part of smartphone usage? At the same time, my mental health isn't becoming immune to social media damage when I doomscroll on a PC just because I used a bigger screen with a physical keyboard.
It is and it is an accurate proxy. 99.9% of smartphone users are not doing hackerman stuff on the phone.
Looking at sibling comments going "it doesn't affect me cause I browse social media on big screen", it seems like using this proxy brings more confusion than good.
Individuals on Hacker News of all sites bringing up their individual usage patterns as a counterpoint says nothing about the applicability of this proxy.
And your comments say nothing about whether applying this proxy is useful.
I use my smartphone for primarily for: email, phone calls, text messages, second-factor authentication, calendar, camera and photo viewing.
I don't use it for social media.
You are the 0.01%
Seems like I am in the 0.01%, too, then! Yay.
I am also the .01%
Same, but different. I don't use my smartphone for email, but I do use it for navigation.
> Is "smartphone usage" merely a proxy for "social media usage"?
I think yes, since the App Store and anything involving likes/up-down votes/karma (sorry) and basically any form of reward for posting or consuming content.
It seems like a reasonable proxy, but I would assume that general reduction of smartphone usage improves mental health.
and do you usually doomscroll on your PC or on the nightmare rectangle you carry with you everywhere, even to the bathroom?
My PC, of course. Scrolling on the phone happens mostly in bed or in transit. Carrying it to the bathroom is gross :P
I keep debating trying to go full-dumbphone, but I'm confident what would happen is that it would work great until I need a specific thing for whatever reason, and I'd have to buy an Android or iPhone, and then I'd be forced to carry around two devices and potentially have two separate cell phone plans. This seems like a pain in the ass.
But I don't dispute that waking up in the morning to a bunch of things competing for my stimulated attention probably isn't healthy.
The thing that keeps me on a smartphone is public transit (maps/route planning + stop arrival trackers).
I used public transit back in the no-phone/dumbphone era. I'm never going back. But if there were some way to ditch the rest of the smartphone....
Just do it, it's not that hard. Also don't go for a full fledged plan for the non-dumb phone (or for the dumb one). Pick one as the main outside and live with the downsides of it too.
We tend to forget that we didn't always have Google maps to help us, so we would ask a stranger for directions, we would have to wait before being able to call someone, etc.
Problem is with a dumb phone is that there are applications you may REQUIRE and it is only supported on relatively recent smartphones. This situation sucks though.
Same with cash vs. card. You prefer cash? Well, tough shit, because many places accept only cards, and some countries are going cashless as well.
So why not use a card? What does that have to do with phones?
It is only loosely related.
You cannot get your job done if you are using a phone on which applications are not supported.
I ran across it a couple of times.
> This seems like a pain in the ass.
If you want to limit screen time pain is a feature not a bug though.
I try to practice a discipline of not looking at my phone until at least after I’ve had my coffee. It may be a drop in the ocean but small habits of resisting the dopamine programming add up.
I've been using a featureful dumb phone (Sunbeam F1 Pro, Juniper) for a few weeks now. Before this I've been using an iPhone since iPhone 6s, and before that an Android phone since Nexus 4. My new phone runs BasicOS, an Android remix that removes Google Play, removes all web browsers, and comes with a suite of custom default apps built to nice with physical buttons (T9-style).
My phone has calls, SMS, MMS, email (IMAP), calendar (CDAV), contacts (CDAV), navigation (offline and Waze), note-taking, voice memos, a music player, weather, and voice-to-text via Azure's AI models. The only things I've missed so far are:
- Two-factor authentication via TOTP and HOTP. I loathe SMS-based 2FA, and not every service supports Email-based 2FA. This has been so annoying I've considered jailbreaking it, learning Kotlin and Android development, and releasing an MIT-licensed application for the company to bundle with the phone.
- A way to scan QR codes. It would be fine if I could just extract the text into a Note.
- The ability to record a call without an additional device. I've been dealing with a medical billing kerfuffle and it was much easier to disclose and press record, than to disclose and find another recording device.
- The ability to send and read SMS/MMS messages from my MacBook Pro. It should be possible with the Bluetooth HFP, which many cars use to enable the same thing. Sadly, Tunabelly Software's app "Handsfree 2" was pulled from the market and I could not get Sustainable Softworks' app "Phone Amego" to work. I've considered building a TUI for this purpose.
- At first I missed Audible, but then I learned two important facts. First, I can listen to my Audible books on my Kindle as long as I connect a bluetooth speaker (including Ford SYNC). And second, Audible and iTunes for Windows integrate with each other to allow me to burn Audible books to CDs, 80 minutes at a time.
- I really miss having O'Reilly Learning Platform. I used to listen to audiobooks on there all the time, and now I've got no good solution for it. I've replaced that time with Audible books (which are rarely about software). I still get plenty of software book reading done when I can focus my eyes on it, though.
There have also been some UX problems, which are livable:
- The camera is not extremely high quality. I've taken to borrowing my wife's iPad to take photos of my whiteboard when I need to preserve something before I erase it. It's fine for texting photos to friends, but not for document scanning.
- The music player is good for music, but not great for audiobooks and podcasts. It doesn't remember where you are in the middle of an audio file when you play it again later (which would, admittedly, be weird for music).
But the benefits have been incredible:
- I no longer stay up way too late every night pushing pixels past my peepers. Instead, I stay up way too late only some nights, reading technology books.
- I no longer browse social media, play puzzle games, or browse news headlines every time I'm bored for a few minutes. Instead, I contemplate (what my plans for tomorrow are, a recent problem I failed to solve, what that odd sound is, how pretty the clouds are, etc.).
- I no longer have to put up with Liquid Glass. (I also replaced my Apple Watch with a Casio LWS2200H and downgraded my MacBook Pro to Sequoia.)
- I no longer have to be concerned with anybody but my carrier tracking me.
- I've been less aware of state, national, and world news--which has been a huge boon to my mental health. Conversations with friends and coworkers still keep me apprised of the things that are important enough to need to know. All the other crap just passes me by. Nothing is shoving headline notifications at me, and the easy moments to browse headlines have been replaced by devicelessness.
<< Two-factor authentication via TOTP and HOTP. I loathe SMS-based 2FA, and not every service supports Email-based 2FA. This has been so annoying I've considered jailbreaking it, learning Kotlin and Android development, and releasing an MIT-licensed application for the company to bundle with the phone.
Ngl, lately it feels like some of my projects are born out of sheer aggravation more than anything else. I get the impulse.
<< I've been less aware of state, national, and world news--which has been a huge boon to my mental health.
Can confirm; this approach helped me a lot too. There is so much I can't do so being aware of its minutiae does nothing for me except make it worse. I still keep up with local news, because it is far more likely to make immediate impact.
I'm finding "smartphone, but with Google Play disabled" a pretty good compromise.
As someone who used dumbphones, trust me it wouldnt be that big of a mental gymnastic.
They are really cheap and some like kaechoda and other brands are really slim as well so I can recommend it genuinely.
Its worth looking more into but yes I am having an android now partially because of whatsapp and the fact that my old dumb phone had died
Rest in peace, it was really cool.
There are also options to split the difference - a dumb phone that can sync with your smartphone or watch like https://dumb.co/
Fortunately, I use my smartphone about 20 minutes a day for work authentication, and for its camera while traveling. And audiobooks.
Unfortunately, my iPad Pro gets way, way, way more use. Much too addictive as a media consumption device.
I’d guess it’s very different from how most of the people consume content.
The problem with smartphone is that it’s always on you wherever you go, and the temptation to use it for filling every second of boredom is just too strong.
iPads/laptops on another hand are just too bulky for carrying them around - in a minute of boredom you have to take deliberate action to go and grab it from whatever place it’s right now. From my experience, this additional barrier between you and content is a huge deterring factor.
As an anecdote, I use Brick app to lock my phone out of social media, and even tho the physical unlocking device in another corner of the same room where I’m, this works surprisingly well, because most of the time I’m just too lazy to take this action of going through unlocking procedure.
I solved the social media problem by leaving social media. Not viable for everyone, sadly.
it is 100% viable for everyone other than people that make a living there
That’s interesting because I’ve been able to keep my iPads and computers entirely productivity devices but my phone wastes considerable amounts of my time.
Yeah I can’t see any good reason to get an iPad if you’re not an artist. Just a way to get more video streaming in your life.
I doubt there is any meaningful difference in effect of smartphone usage versus tablet usage, though
> Whatever the safe level of smartphone usage is, most of us are above it.
I think I'm immunized from it because I hate using smartphones, especially when I'm at home and could be doing the task on a PC with a big screen and keyboard. I have a few but just use them for practical tasks when away from home (occasional text, deliveries on porch, looking something up in the store, listening to podcasts, to do list for the day). Viewing content on a tiny screen with a minefield of things to accidentally tap? No thanks. They are great multi-function devices to replace others on the go.
Starting at a bigger screen doesn't make it better
A bigger screen isn't better? I'll have to respectfully disagree. Having a huge screen on the PC has been a godsend.
A PC isn't just a smartphone with a bigger screen. I keep a bunch of things open and fully visible at the same time (file browser, text editor, terminal, smaller browser window, larger browser window, and some space for other things). This is nothing like using a smartphone. Every one of those programs is a content viewer/editor, where I set what they show. No notifications. Most of the time they're all static, showing what I chose and waiting for my command. If this is how you use your smartphone, then I stand corrected.
This isn't entirely true, the prefrontal cortex doesn't finish forming until age 25-26.
Also, The brain from age 4-12 is highly impressionable and quite different from 13-26.
Eerie parallels to tobacco smoking just a few decades ago. It's a public health problem but those in charge of the bureaucracy at the highest levels choose to obsess over rare vaccine side effects and the use of tylenol during circumcission? It's a mad mad mad mad world (great film, which is overdue for a cyber age remake)
This may actually be false! Owning a smartphone is so normal, even required, nowadays that people who don't even own one are often "edge cases". For example people who believe in fringe conspiracy theories, people with severe health problems, elderly people, etc. Even if resigning from phone helps by itself, "average people" rarely do.
Similar statistical effect happens with alcohol usage: from raw data it often looks like people who drink almost nothing - let's say one drink a month - are healthier than people who drink absolutely nothing.
Dang, et al., go.com needs the subdomain visible, all go.com means is that it's a Disney owned brand.
I think that is warning enough.
Is owning a smartphone more or less dangerous than owning a cat?
"Cat Ownership Linked to Increased Risk of Schizophrenia, Research Suggests" https://www.sciencealert.com/owning-a-cat-could-double-your-...
> "After adjusting for covariates, we found that individuals exposed to cats had approximately twice the odds of developing schizophrenia,"
My first question would be: or is it that cat owners are schizophrenic are more likely to get a cat?
I'm not answering that question, but I do want to quote your article. From the bottom:
> Results were inconsistent across studies, but those of higher quality suggested that associations in unadjusted models might have been due to factors that could have influenced the results.
> One study found no significant association between owning a cat before age 13 and later developing schizophrenia, but it did identify a significant link when narrowing down cat ownership to a specific period (ages 9 to 12). This inconsistency suggests that the critical window for cat exposure is not well defined.
> A study in the US, which involved 354 psychology students, didn't find a connection between owning a cat and schizotypy scores. However, those who had received a cat bite had higher scores when compared to those who had not.
> Another study, which included people with and without mental disorders, discovered a connection between cat bites and higher scores on tests measuring particular psychological experiences. But they suggested other pathogens, such as Pasteurella multocida, may be responsible instead.
> Before we can make any firm interpretations, the researchers reiterate that we need better and broader research.
>A study in the US, which involved 354 psychology students
Sometimes I think that psychology students mental health must have extremely large influence on the field of psychology.
That one also reads 'schizotypy'. This is much more broad than schizophrenia and includes schizoid personality disorder; something I don't have a diagnosis for but I do tick the boxes for (IMO) as a so-called introvert with diagnosed autism. And yes, we do have cats, and I have a natural dislike for dogs.
And of course there's endless correlation-causation isseus there as well. Under most circumstances you have to be both aggressive and careless to get bitten by a cat in the first place.
That article is junk. The leading cause of Toxoplasma gondii infection in humans is under cooked meat. Cat ownership is not actually linked to higher prevalence of T. gondii infection[1].
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3497129/
And the second most common cause is - if I remember correctly - working a garden/field without gloves.
I think contact with contaminated soil is the vector here.
Schizophrenia is a subset of "doing worse mentally". For a proper comparison you need to check overall mental health, not just schizophrenia, which is a rare condition.
Obviously, because people like cats, they are good, and because people don’t like phones, they are bad.
the culprit is toxoplasma. A third or so of US citizens have it in their brains.
well since internet usage increases the purrrcent chance of cat ownership I’d say it’s at least a hair more dangerous and not without whisk(ers)
There's a popular saying about correlation and causation
I've struggled throughout my life with anxiety, ADHD, and bouts of depression.
I've done years of therapy, and use some medication to help with my ADHD. I will say though, singlehandedly, the best (and hardest) thing I've had to do is fight my own phone/internet/computer usage.
I grew up with computers and still work professionally with them day to day, but have made a serious effort in the last year to cut down my usage in an extreme manner:
- Using a 'brick' device to control which apps work on my phone, requiring I physically tap my phone to the brick to lock/unlock the restricted mode. This is always on.
- Blocking tons of sites via multiple means (iOS screen time, eero network profiles)
- Turning my iPhone into a very very basic phone: in "bricked" mode, which I will find myself using for continuous days at a time, I can only use: gmail, photos, notes, weather, maps, spotify, telephone, imessage. No news, no internet browsing, no social media.
- I've deleted all social media accounts (except LinkedIn, but this too is blocked on my phone).
From all of this, the initial realization was, "wow, I'm bored..", which is hard at first to sit with as a feeling, when normally my first instinct to that feeling was "let's open some app/youtube/etc." Then you slowly find positive things creeping in to occupy that boredom time: reading, calling friends/family, getting chores done, etc. And for anything "restricted" that I can't do on my phone, I largely can do on my computer (though I still block sites like reddit, youtube). But this is much healthier as I'm much less likely to pick up my laptop for hours on end, vs. opening my phone at every moment I'm bored.
I don't know many children who are 13 today and don't have a smartphone - in fact it was quite a common thing even a decade ago - how do you even control for this
My 13 year old has a phone. Most of the apps are blocked. Messages is open, and we tweak based on expectations how much he has access per day, and when. Right now it's 8:30pm to 9pm (so after sports and homework).
He can call and text me and my wife anytime of the day. Thankfully the school bans phone usage, so it's not a lot.
A handful of his friends have no phone. Most have, and all apps are accessible (not sure how parents configure age restricted content/apps).
It's a lot of work to limit and tweak and even his 1 minute a day on Safari (because I couldn't find a way to cut to 0) allowed him to create a TikTok and Instagram account (on web). I am a technologist... and gee my 13 year is a genius when trying to find ways to circumvent the restrictions. Every other week I have to change some minor thing in Settings. But my point is that it's a LOT of work... I can see why some people either completely ban or allow. But to me it's worth. Messages is open because I believe he needs to talk with his friends, but fuck Tiktok and Instagram and Youtube.
I’ve been told from some folks who work on child safety features and are passionate about the space that the features are often ignored by parents anyways :/
That may be part of the reason for difficulty of configuration. You might be in a small cohort of people actually using them. That cohort should be larger.
Heh. My son found that deleting and reinstalling an app resets the time limit.
Instagram, TikTok and YouTube are the worst. They are all blocked on our kids’ wifi as well as their phones.
I would forgo all the benefits of a smart phone if it meant my kids could grow up without one.
To me, "The Internet" and "The Internet without short-form videos" are two different things.
There was a very short span of time when the mobile bandwidth was good enough for browsing, messaging, and corporate email, but not really good enough (or prohibitively expensive) for streaming. Feels like that was the sweet spot.
....yeah but then, they found out how to build & deliver mobile ADS & co, so bandwidth need exploded, bringing us to the "mobile web" we have today. E.g. including YT Ads popping up after 15 min in a meditation class :-D
There's also a decade plus of various "Net Children Go Mobile" annual surveys across major tecnological countries that plot the diffusion of phone use and ownership by age and country.
Leading to a large ANOVA table of years, countries, ages, mental health statitics, etc.
Yes, Denmark measures these things is ways different to the UK and both differ from the US.
All the same, each being reasonably internally consisent across time means trends can be picked after normalising.
The case for whether encroaching phone use does correlate with increased early onset mental issue diagnoses becomes a consideration of thresholds and variances.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283320908_Net_Child...
How’s this compare to computer/internet usage? I’ve been chronically online most years since age 7 but didn’t get a smartphone until 22 or so.
My anecdotal observations suggest it's pretty different. One thing is you can (and do, if you're a kid) carry it everywhere with you and stare at it all the time. I think the phone UI where each app takes over the whole screen also increases the impact of the worst sorts of apps (like TikTok).
Interesting observation about everything effectively running in full-screen on a smartphone, taking it out of the larger context of whatever else you were doing before that.
Very! I’ll be thinking about that for a while.
Personally I'd think its different, smartphone apps usually have tons of dark patterns and are designed to always be with you versus a desktop or even a laptop.
Remove Google Play, install F-Droid instead with curated list of apps and games.
Curated by who?
It probably makes a difference that the internet of ~15 years ago was healthier to use than the half-dozen websites that encompass the entire internet for most people today. Attention-optimizing algorithms and infinite scrolling are some of the worst inventions that have come to the internet since the pop-up ad.
In the US, we restrict driving to around age 16, alcohol consumption to 18, voting to 18, and tobacco consumption to 21. Then there are industry-applied age ratings, like the MPA’s PG-13, R, and NC-17 ratings. Barbiturates and amphetamines we’re once available without a prescription.
There’s official/unofficial wiggle room, but there are limits. For example, if you live on a farm, you may be driving on the farm before you have a license to drive on public roads.
I could see mobile-phone ownership becoming similarly-restricted.
>In the US, we restrict ... alcohol consumption to 18
isn't it 21 all over the US? it was changed to cut drunk driving in the late 70s at the federal level, tied to highway funds, so the states needed to cave
Not only that, but at least in my home state you can buy tobacco at 18. Maybe the person you replied to got the two mixed up?
Banning smartphones in general would be more akin to banning kids from riding in cars (not driving them) or being around alcohol (even in their own home)
To say nothing of the inconsistency of those bans. You can vote, enlist in the army, and take on life-altering student loans... but smoke a cigarette? No way!
Also, isn't it the sale and purchase of alcohol that is banned for underage persons, not the consumption? That is, if parents want to give their kids alcohol, that's not illegal.
Banning smartphones in general would be more akin to banning kids from riding in cars (not driving them)
How so? I don't see you make an argument for why your simile would be more accurate, and I fear I lack the imagination to conjure up what back-seat phoning would look like.
Correlating smartphone ownership with mental health issues - without diving into how they actually use them - would be like correlating kids simply sitting in a car with them not being able to drive it safely. Or, to use another of my examples, it would be like correlating cigarette possession with cancer rates. Yes, you'll probably see some correlation, unsurprisingly, but it doesn't give any information on causation.
Well, I had to carry my phone everywhere just so my mom could call me to check up on me. It is a good enough reason against the ban... to me.
It sucks because they could be pocket-sized bicycles for the mind rather than addicting ad-driven bullshit surveillance slot machines that maximize attention. Humanity had a choice and chose poorly.
Driving is restricted because of responsibility (same way marriage and contracts in general require someone legally responsible)
Porn, alcohol, tobacco and gambling is cultural/religious, the same way The Prohibition happened in the US, or all alcohol and gambling is banned in hard Islamic countries and adult women are mandatory veiled.
It's pretty interesting to see where a smartphone ban would fit as a category.
I think alcohol and tobacco used to be banned for cultural reasons but there’s pretty clear research now pointing to bad outcomes for early drug use. 21 is still high so some of the cultural element remains but I wouldn’t consider those two entirely ungrounded in reason.
> there’s pretty clear research now pointing to bad outcomes for early drug use
I wasn't aware. Or more specifically, I thought it wouldn't ethically be possible to do that research while it's legally forbidden.
I assumed We'd be bound to look at cases pathologic enough to warrant intervention, and the researchers tracking back the root cause at drug ingestion. While a useful approach, it would tell us nothing about all the other cases that weren't pathological.
On tobacco specifically I think most long term effects disappear in smoker below 25 ? Not arguing that kids should smoke, but like coming at th French situation, it looks like there is a dose where the effects on kids will be negligible.
PS: even for people withing the legal smoking range, studies on drugs still tend to focus on patients that had to enter the medical system
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10798824/
If you have any good study that encompasses a wider range I'd love to read it.
The negative outcomes aren’t health outcomes as in lung sickness. Instead early consumption correlates with increased likelihood of future addiction.
I’ll see if I can find some studies but it might be some weeks before I get back to this post.
Addiction is difficult to properly evaluate IMHO.
For instance alcohol addiction is extremely destructive at pathological levels, and we have a flurry of studies coming to a "no safe dose" conclusion. But we also have plenty of evidence on what happens when outright banning alcohol at large scale and it's not great either.
I'm not sure we have a good model or understanding yet of what it actually means to have addictive substances around and their social effects.
I don't think that's true. We have thousands of years of experience. Not everything needs the perfect study taken in the perfect lab conditions for folks to make conclusions which are useful for operating in the real world.
Kids can / often use other family members' smartphones / tablets (I assume it's the majority of cases). How can the law prevent this if parents do nothing about this?
The same way that the law prevents kids drinking their parents’ alcohol - it doesn’t. But having it be illegal sends a signal, even though it’s possible to circumvent it, and also allows prosecution if warranted.
That'd put it in the same basket as alcohol and tobacco. Although the pro/con of owning a mobile are a lot less clear than those two and banning phones in that way is probably a mistake.
The math checks out for this campaign at least: https://www.waituntil8th.org/
I wonder how many 5-6 year olds are getting smartphones because parents are divorced and one parent wants to be able to check in on the other, could be something like that is the issue
Reading Jonathan Haidt's 'The Anxious Generation' broke me. I have two kids, still far too young for smartphones, but his book and all of the surrounding research has made me DRASTICALLY alter the way I use my own smartphone and will shape the way I treat phones with them.
If you have kids, take the "wait until 8th" pledge: https://www.waituntil8th.org/
No smart phones until after 8th grade.
Real talk, if I had kids they wouldn't get a smartphone until they turned 18. Kids have no business having smartphones.
Impossible to separate from level of parental care.
Keeping your kids away from screens requires a significant parental effort
It really depends. Not all kids are extremely dumb and get hooked by very obvious attempts from evil social networks. I still have hope for future aaron swartzs and linus torvaldss
What purpose does the id parameter doing this URL? The site does not work without it.
Because it's id?
I mean slug is not important - id - is. https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Family/eating-carrots-make-childr...
Horrifically terrible data and methodology for even suggesting causal claims. Global Mind Data is literally self report online survey data. You may as well have used political surveys from Fox News and MSNBC
Honestly seems like a proxy for bad parents have sad kids. Makes logical sense to me.
You shouldn't stick your head in the sand just because it makes you feel better. Since media companies are causing damage then they should be held liable. Where is the class action?
or ever
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So, I can tell you my reaction when I was 13 and first saw a smartphone. (It must have been late 2007 or 2008.)
You know. Everything's round and cute and colorful. Like candy.
"Oh. This is for retarded people."
Unfortunately I was wrong.
It's actually much worse than that. It's for normal people. But it makes you retarded.
Slowly. You don't even notice it happening.
It eats away... day by day.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36256-4