5 ms·

Haven't most people always been wasting most of their time? Before it was TV, Radio, gossip magazines, books, you name it. Do we know?

by jopsen 9y ago

dredmorbius 9y ago
The distractions weren't driven by vast, A/B-tested, AI-assisted, institutional machines with the resources of major nation-states. In 1817, your primary distractions would mostly have involved hauling: bringing water, food, wood, and materials into a home, and hauling the waste products out. The metaphor was buckets and baskets, not pipes. There might have been some home-craft production, or farming. But those were not idle pursuits. Entertainment was something done rather than consumed: people told stories or read to one another (if they could), or played music (or dice or cards -- considered vices). And the primary information conduit was a weekly sermon or service.
emerged 9y ago
Good question - some tools/tech have increased productivity, and others have optimized their ability to drain productivity (in exchange for monetized attention). Sad bit is, I'd be hesitant to trust any scientific studies which tried to weigh their relative proportions (for a variety of reasons).
ahartman00 9y ago
dredmorbius makes a good point, but if you change always to recently, and time to free time, i think you are right. Brave New World was published in 1932 after all. "As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions."" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World#Comparisons_with_George_Orwell.27s_Nineteen_Eighty-Four https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World#Comparisons_wi... "In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action." https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/ relevant: "The pace of modern life" https://xkcd.com/1227/ https://xkcd.com/1227/

Haven't most people always been wasting most of their time? Before it was TV, Radio, gossip magazines, books, you name it. Do we know?

by jopsen 9y ago

Haven't most people always been wasting most of their time? Before it was TV, Radio, gossip magazines, books, you name it. Do we know?

dredmorbius 9y ago

The distractions weren't driven by vast, A/B-tested, AI-assisted, institutional machines with the resources of major nation-states. In 1817, your primary distractions would mostly have involved hauling: bringing water, food, wood, and materials into a home, and hauling the waste products out. The metaphor was buckets and baskets, not pipes. There might have been some home-craft production, or farming. But those were not idle pursuits. Entertainment was something done rather than consumed: people told stories or read to one another (if they could), or played music (or dice or cards -- considered vices). And the primary information conduit was a weekly sermon or service.

emerged 9y ago

Good question - some tools/tech have increased productivity, and others have optimized their ability to drain productivity (in exchange for monetized attention). Sad bit is, I'd be hesitant to trust any scientific studies which tried to weigh their relative proportions (for a variety of reasons).

ahartman00 9y ago

dredmorbius makes a good point, but if you change always to recently, and time to free time, i think you are right. Brave New World was published in 1932 after all. "As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions."" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World#Comparisons_with_George_Orwell.27s_Nineteen_Eighty-Four https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World#Comparisons_wi... "In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action." https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/ relevant: "The pace of modern life" https://xkcd.com/1227/ https://xkcd.com/1227/