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Sure, the smartphone is a great thing to take with you when something unpredictable happened and you're forced to wait 1/2/10 hourse, and you didn't take anythi

Sure, the smartphone is a great thing to take with you when something unpredictable happened and you're forced to wait 1/2/10 hourse, and you didn't take anything with you (a book, your computer, etc). But how often does this happen, and how often, instead, does a smartphone distract from better tasks? How often I choose not to pick a book when leaving, because I've got the smartphone "just in case" ? Of course I have ebooks on it, but many times I waste time on facebook/HN/twitter/surfing. It's TOO EASY to get distracted.

Freak_NL 9y ago
Interesting. I have a smartphone that doesn't interrupt me at all, because it doesn't run any of the apps that tend to do so — this is a Meizu Pro5 running the now abandoned Ubuntu Touch; I'll probably jump over the UBports soon. It does have a web browser though. Last week I was in London as a tourist visitor, and being able to pull up the local public transit planner (https://tfl.gov.uk https://tfl.gov.uk) and OpenStreetMap were just conveniences that a mobile computer seems particularly well suited for. Effectively it's a pull-only smartphone. Nothing is being pushed to me, so nothing takes me out of the moment.
- gordaco 9y ago
  After I install a program in my PC, the first thing I do is to disable all the sounds... and after I install an app in my phone, the first thing I do is to disable all the notifications.
  - freehunter 9y ago
    On the flip side of that, I keep all notifications turned on and only selectively disable them when they start pushing complete nonsense or spam or ads to me. I get very focused and will forget to check email, forget to check Facebook, forget to check text messages, sometimes for days at a time. When I got an iPhone 6 and could no longer depend on the vibrate motor making an audible noise (seriously how terrible is the vibrations on the newer iPhones?) I got a Pebble watch so when the phone rings it actually physically sends me a push notification by buzzing. Slack has this annoying habit on my work computer to not make an audible noise when I get a message even though that setting is turned on and I never check my Mac's dock when I'm working on something so I had to unhide the dock so I could see the notification come in. Then again at one point in time I had alarms set on my phone telling me it was time to eat or time to go to bed because I will focus in on something so much that everything else disappears for hours at a time. Notifications help break me out of that to get back to the real world.
yoz-y 9y ago
For me smartphone was the way to get back into book 'reading' in a way. I now mostly consume audiobooks and I have probably read more in the past year than in the ten years that preceded my subscription.
icebraining 9y ago
Of course I have ebooks on it, but many times I waste time on facebook/HN/twitter/surfing. I use a smartphone without a mobile data plan. Not because of addictiveness, I just don't think it's worth the cost, but it does avoid that problem. I keep it stocked with ebooks and audiobooks.
Sean1708 9y ago
It's also a great thing to take with you if you need to check a map, check on the opening times of a shop, or check when your train is. These are things which many people do daily. While I do understand the point you're trying to make, I think it's a bit unfair to insinuate that their only advantage is as a way to pass the time.
Karunamon 9y ago
Serious, non-snarky question: In what way is a book better than a link on Hacker News or Facebook? The problem I see (and have yet to get a good answer for) with all of these extreme productivity tactics like shutting off all internet access is that carry a value judgment that older > newer, for all values of information absorption. It reminds me of how some of the financial advice for people in debt is to eschew all forms of credit and live on cash only. Which is fine until you need to buy a house... If the problem is being distracted from the real world, and that's truly a negative, rather than filling dead time that couldn't really be used for anything else (waiting in line, etc), being absorbed in a book is functionally no different from being absorbed in a newsreader app. With that in mind, where and why is this value judgment coming from? I see a poster upthread mentioning we've "forgotten how to be bored". I don't know about people here, but I saw boredom as an awful state of mind even before the proliferation of smartphones. Could someone help me understand what the bigger picture here is?
- alethiophile 9y ago
  One of the major underlying issues people are calling out with the indictments of "smartphone culture", and trying to fix by going offline, is a sort of progressive shrinkage of the attention span. It involves progressively less continual attention paid to progressively more individual topics or items; the (current) apotheosis of this paradigm might be Twitter, where you read a constant feed of conceptually disconnected 140-character messages, and any longer-form thought needs unnatural gyrations of the underlying technology to express. Web surfing, or news reading, encourages this style of interaction, with the surfeit of links away to tangentially-related content that is usually not of a form to encourage deep immersion in a single piece. Books, meanwhile, are of a form to encourage deeper immersion in a single input. Generally speaking, the obvious mode of interaction is to read a single book from start to finish, taking at least hours during which you remain focused on that topic. This kind of long-term focus is required to actually accomplish anything; therefore, a mode of information absorption that trains long-term focus is more effective of personal cultivation than one which encourages mayfly attention-hopping. Nothing about this necessarily disparages the Internet; it's quite possible to focus on long-form pieces that are Internet-published, or to hop from topic to topic using offline media. But because friction costs encourage longer-term focus when offline, going offline is one effective way to incentivize it.

Freak_NL 9y ago

Interesting. I have a smartphone that doesn't interrupt me at all, because it doesn't run any of the apps that tend to do so — this is a Meizu Pro5 running the now abandoned Ubuntu Touch; I'll probably jump over the UBports soon. It does have a web browser though. Last week I was in London as a tourist visitor, and being able to pull up the local public transit planner (https://tfl.gov.uk https://tfl.gov.uk) and OpenStreetMap were just conveniences that a mobile computer seems particularly well suited for. Effectively it's a pull-only smartphone. Nothing is being pushed to me, so nothing takes me out of the moment.

gordaco 9y ago
After I install a program in my PC, the first thing I do is to disable all the sounds... and after I install an app in my phone, the first thing I do is to disable all the notifications.
- freehunter 9y ago
  On the flip side of that, I keep all notifications turned on and only selectively disable them when they start pushing complete nonsense or spam or ads to me. I get very focused and will forget to check email, forget to check Facebook, forget to check text messages, sometimes for days at a time. When I got an iPhone 6 and could no longer depend on the vibrate motor making an audible noise (seriously how terrible is the vibrations on the newer iPhones?) I got a Pebble watch so when the phone rings it actually physically sends me a push notification by buzzing. Slack has this annoying habit on my work computer to not make an audible noise when I get a message even though that setting is turned on and I never check my Mac's dock when I'm working on something so I had to unhide the dock so I could see the notification come in. Then again at one point in time I had alarms set on my phone telling me it was time to eat or time to go to bed because I will focus in on something so much that everything else disappears for hours at a time. Notifications help break me out of that to get back to the real world.

yoz-y 9y ago

For me smartphone was the way to get back into book 'reading' in a way. I now mostly consume audiobooks and I have probably read more in the past year than in the ten years that preceded my subscription.

icebraining 9y ago

Of course I have ebooks on it, but many times I waste time on facebook/HN/twitter/surfing. I use a smartphone without a mobile data plan. Not because of addictiveness, I just don't think it's worth the cost, but it does avoid that problem. I keep it stocked with ebooks and audiobooks.

Sean1708 9y ago

It's also a great thing to take with you if you need to check a map, check on the opening times of a shop, or check when your train is. These are things which many people do daily. While I do understand the point you're trying to make, I think it's a bit unfair to insinuate that their only advantage is as a way to pass the time.

Karunamon 9y ago

Serious, non-snarky question: In what way is a book better than a link on Hacker News or Facebook? The problem I see (and have yet to get a good answer for) with all of these extreme productivity tactics like shutting off all internet access is that carry a value judgment that older > newer, for all values of information absorption. It reminds me of how some of the financial advice for people in debt is to eschew all forms of credit and live on cash only. Which is fine until you need to buy a house... If the problem is being distracted from the real world, and that's truly a negative, rather than filling dead time that couldn't really be used for anything else (waiting in line, etc), being absorbed in a book is functionally no different from being absorbed in a newsreader app. With that in mind, where and why is this value judgment coming from? I see a poster upthread mentioning we've "forgotten how to be bored". I don't know about people here, but I saw boredom as an awful state of mind even before the proliferation of smartphones. Could someone help me understand what the bigger picture here is?

alethiophile 9y ago
One of the major underlying issues people are calling out with the indictments of "smartphone culture", and trying to fix by going offline, is a sort of progressive shrinkage of the attention span. It involves progressively less continual attention paid to progressively more individual topics or items; the (current) apotheosis of this paradigm might be Twitter, where you read a constant feed of conceptually disconnected 140-character messages, and any longer-form thought needs unnatural gyrations of the underlying technology to express. Web surfing, or news reading, encourages this style of interaction, with the surfeit of links away to tangentially-related content that is usually not of a form to encourage deep immersion in a single piece. Books, meanwhile, are of a form to encourage deeper immersion in a single input. Generally speaking, the obvious mode of interaction is to read a single book from start to finish, taking at least hours during which you remain focused on that topic. This kind of long-term focus is required to actually accomplish anything; therefore, a mode of information absorption that trains long-term focus is more effective of personal cultivation than one which encourages mayfly attention-hopping. Nothing about this necessarily disparages the Internet; it's quite possible to focus on long-form pieces that are Internet-published, or to hop from topic to topic using offline media. But because friction costs encourage longer-term focus when offline, going offline is one effective way to incentivize it.