5 ms·

> But they also provide access to Wikipedia [etc] But let's be honest, most smartphone users spend their time confined in a limited number of domains: social m

by jansho 9y ago

> But they also provide access to Wikipedia [etc] But let's be honest, most smartphone users spend their time confined in a limited number of domains: social media, games, shopping etc. In that sense, we can be called a bit zombie in the head.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
If we're going to be totally honest, then first, let's call social media primarily talking to your friends and family. Which is one of the most deeply and fundamentally human things you can do. And it is also critical to doing anything together with other people. The Internet has lifted constraints of time and geography from communication - which is why you see people on IM in situations where, without the phone, the time would be wasted. They're making more efficient use of their time. As for shopping, I don't see anything wrong with acquiring resources needed for various things in your life.
- jononor 9y ago
  Social media is both 'talking to friends and family', and 'posturing in front of near-strangers'. The latter might also be a latent human thing, but overall I don't it contributes as much to wellbeing as the first.
- Chathamization 9y ago
  > If we're going to be totally honest, then first, let's call social media primarily talking to your friends and family. Which is one of the most deeply and fundamentally human things you can do. I disagree. Pre-social media, people would talk with friends and family using e-mail and programs like AIM, and there would actually be deep and meaningful conversations. This has been supplanted by social media, which is often simple banal comments on an article/rant that someone threw up for everyone to see. If someone told you 15 years ago that people would stop having conversations by e-mail and communicate by LiveJournal posts/comments instead, it would have seemed like a hilariously terrible idea, but that's more or less where we are.
  - FeepingCreature 9y ago
    > I disagree. Pre-social media, people would talk with friends and family using e-mail and programs like AIM, and there would actually be deep and meaningful conversations. This seems hilariously false.
    - Chathamization 9y ago
      Of course I can only speak from personal experience. But in my experience, long personal e-mail (several paragraphs) from friends to catch up used to be relatively common, and now they've all but disappeared (I don't think I've gotten any in the past couple of years). Likewise, long chats of the old AIM/MSN variety - spend an hour or two chatting with a friend sharing ideas and news with them - seems much rarer than before (where it wasn't uncommon to have them every few days).
      - jansho 9y ago
        This is true for me too. It's funny that we can now literally connect to thousands of people in social media, but through likes and short comments. Sometimes I get the impression that long threads of discussion is not encouraged, that it's polite to just keep it short and sweet (example, when Instagram introduced the "like comment" button, I sometimes find myself using it rather than thanking directly.) So our connecting is more like lines crossing over briefly, but never more than that. Sometimes this is fun - because where else can you encounter other people different from you - and sometimes it's just a little sad.
        folksinger 9y ago
        Where as we have F=m•a in physical reality, in hyperreality it seems as though the rule is inverted, F=m÷a. It seems the less "mass" a message contains the more "force" it seems to exert. A long response is ignored and carries with it very little persuasive power compared to the pithy response of a mere binary form of approval.
    - intended 9y ago
- jansho 9y ago
  Social media is primarily intended for talking to friends and family. As others have pointed out in this thread, the reality for most people is closer to mindless browsing and addiction. That's because the systems are designed to 'hook' people that way. I'm not suggesting in any way that social media, shopping etc are bad (I use them all the time) but as the Internet is literally at our fingertips now, I do think that we need to be more cautious of unintended consequences, for individuals (particularly vulnerable ones like children) and for society as a whole. We're already seeing some of them today. So the question to ask now is, regardless if you're solutionist/ Luddite/ neutral/ etc, how do we tackle this? Do we need to tone down some of the 'hook' features? Do we need to totally discourage unethical tactics like dark patterns? What can we do to educate/push people towards a healthier Internet diet, to have enough will to protect themselves from being psychologically hacked? This is an entirely new design philosophy, maybe not so good for big tech corps, but can potentially push the Internet to the next level. Edit: language
  - peoplewindow 9y ago
    That's because the systems are designed to 'hook' people that way No they aren't. Nobody sat down and said "how do we design Instagram to be maximally addictive". They just said, hey, look, I made some neat photo filters and someone else said, hey, love the filters, it'd be neat if I could share these photos with my friends. Badaboom, a social network. The fact that so many people spend so many hours on Instagram is nothing to do with the software itself and everything to do with how people use it. To be brutally honest here, in my experience it's 90% girls who obsess over Instagram. I know very few men who use Instagram at all, let alone post regularly. Women use it so much because the posts they configure the app to show them consist mostly of girls boosting each others self confidence by telling each other how beautiful or successful they look in each photo. Equally important - what's not there: no politics, re-sharing of links that someone might expect you to read or care about, and in general nothing that would require any mental effort at all. Nobody designed Instagram to be full of trivial ego pumping, it's a neutral photo sharing tool. There are no dark patterns, whatever they're meant to be, unless you believe that the absence of a "share this link" feature is a dark pattern. It just so happens that this is how many people choose to use the tool. In the same vein, nobody designed Twitter to be mentally less taxing than other social media sites, it was just that due to technical limits SMS restricted your character count, and Twitter inherited that limit, and limiting the size of a post sets a very low but very consistent quality bar on tweets, such that people who would have been intimidated by blogging full sized articles can now engage in online discussion without feeling out-competed. And why not? The attitude you display here shows a great feeling of superiority: people don't like Twitter or Instagram because they like the culture on these networks, instead it's because they've been "addicted" by "dark patterns" beyond their comprehension of control, in some sort of vast Silicon Valley conspiracy that is mysteriously unsupported by any sort of paper trail or emails showing discussion of these malign intentions. Please, grow up and just let people enjoy communicating in whatever way makes them feel good.
- folksinger 9y ago
  Is an ad-subsidized and for-profit business deeply and fundamentally required to talk to your friends and family? If interacting with friends and family is what is important, is Facebook the best way to do so?
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    It's not, but it's what we have. Phones are controlled by private for-profit companies too (with different business, though). And the post is funded by taxes. Point being, the business models are not inherent to communication mediums, but due to history, those mediums are provided through the particular business models we have.
    - folksinger 9y ago
      It is not what we have. We have many other options beyond even the other technologies you've listed. Businesses and products are not prerequisite for interacting with friends and family. What about simply having a conversation in person, mediated only by spoken language? What if you never moved away from your family and could stop by for dinner a few times a week? There are many possibilities beyond just accepting the dictations of a few product managers in Silicon Valley!
- 659087 9y ago
  > let's call social media primarily talking to your friends and family Let's call it what it actually is, instead: Talking to your friends and family while a stalker sits in the corner recording and taking notes.

by jansho 9y ago

TeMPOraL 9y ago

If we're going to be totally honest, then first, let's call social media primarily talking to your friends and family. Which is one of the most deeply and fundamentally human things you can do. And it is also critical to doing anything together with other people. The Internet has lifted constraints of time and geography from communication - which is why you see people on IM in situations where, without the phone, the time would be wasted. They're making more efficient use of their time. As for shopping, I don't see anything wrong with acquiring resources needed for various things in your life.

jononor 9y ago
Social media is both 'talking to friends and family', and 'posturing in front of near-strangers'. The latter might also be a latent human thing, but overall I don't it contributes as much to wellbeing as the first.
Chathamization 9y ago
> If we're going to be totally honest, then first, let's call social media primarily talking to your friends and family. Which is one of the most deeply and fundamentally human things you can do. I disagree. Pre-social media, people would talk with friends and family using e-mail and programs like AIM, and there would actually be deep and meaningful conversations. This has been supplanted by social media, which is often simple banal comments on an article/rant that someone threw up for everyone to see. If someone told you 15 years ago that people would stop having conversations by e-mail and communicate by LiveJournal posts/comments instead, it would have seemed like a hilariously terrible idea, but that's more or less where we are.
- FeepingCreature 9y ago
  > I disagree. Pre-social media, people would talk with friends and family using e-mail and programs like AIM, and there would actually be deep and meaningful conversations. This seems hilariously false.
  - Chathamization 9y ago
    Of course I can only speak from personal experience. But in my experience, long personal e-mail (several paragraphs) from friends to catch up used to be relatively common, and now they've all but disappeared (I don't think I've gotten any in the past couple of years). Likewise, long chats of the old AIM/MSN variety - spend an hour or two chatting with a friend sharing ideas and news with them - seems much rarer than before (where it wasn't uncommon to have them every few days).
    - jansho 9y ago
      This is true for me too. It's funny that we can now literally connect to thousands of people in social media, but through likes and short comments. Sometimes I get the impression that long threads of discussion is not encouraged, that it's polite to just keep it short and sweet (example, when Instagram introduced the "like comment" button, I sometimes find myself using it rather than thanking directly.) So our connecting is more like lines crossing over briefly, but never more than that. Sometimes this is fun - because where else can you encounter other people different from you - and sometimes it's just a little sad.
      - folksinger 9y ago
        Where as we have F=m•a in physical reality, in hyperreality it seems as though the rule is inverted, F=m÷a. It seems the less "mass" a message contains the more "force" it seems to exert. A long response is ignored and carries with it very little persuasive power compared to the pithy response of a mere binary form of approval.
  - intended 9y ago
jansho 9y ago
Social media is primarily intended for talking to friends and family. As others have pointed out in this thread, the reality for most people is closer to mindless browsing and addiction. That's because the systems are designed to 'hook' people that way. I'm not suggesting in any way that social media, shopping etc are bad (I use them all the time) but as the Internet is literally at our fingertips now, I do think that we need to be more cautious of unintended consequences, for individuals (particularly vulnerable ones like children) and for society as a whole. We're already seeing some of them today. So the question to ask now is, regardless if you're solutionist/ Luddite/ neutral/ etc, how do we tackle this? Do we need to tone down some of the 'hook' features? Do we need to totally discourage unethical tactics like dark patterns? What can we do to educate/push people towards a healthier Internet diet, to have enough will to protect themselves from being psychologically hacked? This is an entirely new design philosophy, maybe not so good for big tech corps, but can potentially push the Internet to the next level. Edit: language
- peoplewindow 9y ago
  That's because the systems are designed to 'hook' people that way No they aren't. Nobody sat down and said "how do we design Instagram to be maximally addictive". They just said, hey, look, I made some neat photo filters and someone else said, hey, love the filters, it'd be neat if I could share these photos with my friends. Badaboom, a social network. The fact that so many people spend so many hours on Instagram is nothing to do with the software itself and everything to do with how people use it. To be brutally honest here, in my experience it's 90% girls who obsess over Instagram. I know very few men who use Instagram at all, let alone post regularly. Women use it so much because the posts they configure the app to show them consist mostly of girls boosting each others self confidence by telling each other how beautiful or successful they look in each photo. Equally important - what's not there: no politics, re-sharing of links that someone might expect you to read or care about, and in general nothing that would require any mental effort at all. Nobody designed Instagram to be full of trivial ego pumping, it's a neutral photo sharing tool. There are no dark patterns, whatever they're meant to be, unless you believe that the absence of a "share this link" feature is a dark pattern. It just so happens that this is how many people choose to use the tool. In the same vein, nobody designed Twitter to be mentally less taxing than other social media sites, it was just that due to technical limits SMS restricted your character count, and Twitter inherited that limit, and limiting the size of a post sets a very low but very consistent quality bar on tweets, such that people who would have been intimidated by blogging full sized articles can now engage in online discussion without feeling out-competed. And why not? The attitude you display here shows a great feeling of superiority: people don't like Twitter or Instagram because they like the culture on these networks, instead it's because they've been "addicted" by "dark patterns" beyond their comprehension of control, in some sort of vast Silicon Valley conspiracy that is mysteriously unsupported by any sort of paper trail or emails showing discussion of these malign intentions. Please, grow up and just let people enjoy communicating in whatever way makes them feel good.
folksinger 9y ago
Is an ad-subsidized and for-profit business deeply and fundamentally required to talk to your friends and family? If interacting with friends and family is what is important, is Facebook the best way to do so?
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  It's not, but it's what we have. Phones are controlled by private for-profit companies too (with different business, though). And the post is funded by taxes. Point being, the business models are not inherent to communication mediums, but due to history, those mediums are provided through the particular business models we have.
  - folksinger 9y ago
    It is not what we have. We have many other options beyond even the other technologies you've listed. Businesses and products are not prerequisite for interacting with friends and family. What about simply having a conversation in person, mediated only by spoken language? What if you never moved away from your family and could stop by for dinner a few times a week? There are many possibilities beyond just accepting the dictations of a few product managers in Silicon Valley!
659087 9y ago
> let's call social media primarily talking to your friends and family Let's call it what it actually is, instead: Talking to your friends and family while a stalker sits in the corner recording and taking notes.