5 ms·

How many wikipedia articles have you read on your smartphone vs. ones you've read on your laptop/desktop? "In your pocket" represents a world of difference.

hodgesrm 9y ago
More on my laptop but that's only because I work on a laptop and have to look up (mostly) work-related stuff. I read a lot of 18th/19th century lit. Wikipedia is like having footnotes for anything you are reading. I use it regularly, almost exclusively on my iPhone.
- nicolimo86 9y ago
  The thing is that people like you are just a little minority respect to the whole. The vastly majority is destroing their screens by tapping here and there on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat....
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    If you looked a bit closer on their screens (easy to do in public transit), you'd see that they're mostly a) reading stuff, b) talking with friends, c) sending cool stuff to their friends. All standard ways of spending time with other people, except with the constraints of time and space lifted.
    - folksinger 9y ago
      Do you work for Facebook? It's OK if you do. It's OK if you don't accept what they do. It's OK if you don't love your job. We need to go out into the world and destroy parts of it just to survive. From 'The Way I Am', sung by Merle Haggard and many more: I wish I enjoyed how I made my living, Did what I do with a willing hand. Some may run but that ain't like me, So I just dream, keep on being the way that I am.
      - TeMPOraL 9y ago
        Wait what? No, I don't work for Facebook, nor am I affiliated with them in any way.
        folksinger 9y ago
        The reason I asked is because it seems like you might have a lot of your identity and self-worth dependent on a moral acceptance of social media. It seems like you might be subconsciously denying the negative impact that these technologies have on both individuals and society at large. Or not! Maybe you are fully accepting and fully aware and it is I who is missing the extra pieces to the puzzle!
        TeMPOraL 9y ago
        Nah, my identity isn't particularly tied to social media. I just feel those problems are blown hugely out of proportion and/or just non-issues[0]. But maybe both of us are right, just right about different population groups? Maybe I happen to mostly see the use of social media I'd consider reasonable, and this biases my perception? Bubbles are strong in physical world too. -- [0] - The kind of "smartphones make us antisocial on trains", except they don't, because before smartphones it was walkmans, and before walkmans it was newspapers.
        folksinger 9y ago
        You make a good point about Walkmans and newspapers... As McLuhan would point out, the Narcissus trance is present in all media technologies! That doesn't meet we should give in to the alluring trance of the Siren. It is true that newspapermen created the Spanish-American war out of thin air as well, but we learned our lessons about the unethical use of mass print media. Irony of ironies in the name Pulitzer Prize! I just want to make sure we're not blind to the downsides of this new "liberating" technology. It has had plenty of defenders and has swept up billions of people in its grasp. Perhaps feeling depressed by staged photos of a friend on vacation posted to Facebook is one thing but threats of nuclear war on Twitter are a much more serious matter!
TeMPOraL 9y ago
A fucking lot. Probably as much as on the computer - and I'm in front of the computer for 10-12h / day. Most of my mobile searches are related to a) things I'm learning right now, or b) things I've just read about and I don't know what they are.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
CM30 9y ago
Loads of them. And not just Wikipedia articles, longwinded articles from every other source under the sun. Usually ones on sites with minimal CSS and Javascript, because they use less data than the alternatives. Admittedly a lot of people would probably just stick to browsing Facebook or Twitter most of the time, but even then, they'll look up tons of small facts and trivia pieces through Google whenever they don't know something too. In the olden days, that wasn't possible. Even less people looked up stuff they were curious about, since it meant either having to go home and online (before phones) or bringing out the encyclopedia (before computers in general).
navjack27 9y ago
I'm on my phone now. I do most of my reading and technical stuff on my phone, even when I'm home. Why? I have it on me, it's a mini computer with a camera.

hodgesrm 9y ago

More on my laptop but that's only because I work on a laptop and have to look up (mostly) work-related stuff. I read a lot of 18th/19th century lit. Wikipedia is like having footnotes for anything you are reading. I use it regularly, almost exclusively on my iPhone.

nicolimo86 9y ago
The thing is that people like you are just a little minority respect to the whole. The vastly majority is destroing their screens by tapping here and there on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat....
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  If you looked a bit closer on their screens (easy to do in public transit), you'd see that they're mostly a) reading stuff, b) talking with friends, c) sending cool stuff to their friends. All standard ways of spending time with other people, except with the constraints of time and space lifted.
  - folksinger 9y ago
    Do you work for Facebook? It's OK if you do. It's OK if you don't accept what they do. It's OK if you don't love your job. We need to go out into the world and destroy parts of it just to survive. From 'The Way I Am', sung by Merle Haggard and many more: I wish I enjoyed how I made my living, Did what I do with a willing hand. Some may run but that ain't like me, So I just dream, keep on being the way that I am.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      Wait what? No, I don't work for Facebook, nor am I affiliated with them in any way.
      - folksinger 9y ago
        The reason I asked is because it seems like you might have a lot of your identity and self-worth dependent on a moral acceptance of social media. It seems like you might be subconsciously denying the negative impact that these technologies have on both individuals and society at large. Or not! Maybe you are fully accepting and fully aware and it is I who is missing the extra pieces to the puzzle!
        TeMPOraL 9y ago
        Nah, my identity isn't particularly tied to social media. I just feel those problems are blown hugely out of proportion and/or just non-issues[0]. But maybe both of us are right, just right about different population groups? Maybe I happen to mostly see the use of social media I'd consider reasonable, and this biases my perception? Bubbles are strong in physical world too. -- [0] - The kind of "smartphones make us antisocial on trains", except they don't, because before smartphones it was walkmans, and before walkmans it was newspapers.
        folksinger 9y ago
        You make a good point about Walkmans and newspapers... As McLuhan would point out, the Narcissus trance is present in all media technologies! That doesn't meet we should give in to the alluring trance of the Siren. It is true that newspapermen created the Spanish-American war out of thin air as well, but we learned our lessons about the unethical use of mass print media. Irony of ironies in the name Pulitzer Prize! I just want to make sure we're not blind to the downsides of this new "liberating" technology. It has had plenty of defenders and has swept up billions of people in its grasp. Perhaps feeling depressed by staged photos of a friend on vacation posted to Facebook is one thing but threats of nuclear war on Twitter are a much more serious matter!

TeMPOraL 9y ago

A fucking lot. Probably as much as on the computer - and I'm in front of the computer for 10-12h / day. Most of my mobile searches are related to a) things I'm learning right now, or b) things I've just read about and I don't know what they are.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

CM30 9y ago

Loads of them. And not just Wikipedia articles, longwinded articles from every other source under the sun. Usually ones on sites with minimal CSS and Javascript, because they use less data than the alternatives. Admittedly a lot of people would probably just stick to browsing Facebook or Twitter most of the time, but even then, they'll look up tons of small facts and trivia pieces through Google whenever they don't know something too. In the olden days, that wasn't possible. Even less people looked up stuff they were curious about, since it meant either having to go home and online (before phones) or bringing out the encyclopedia (before computers in general).

navjack27 9y ago

I'm on my phone now. I do most of my reading and technical stuff on my phone, even when I'm home. Why? I have it on me, it's a mini computer with a camera.