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The article wants Apple to save us from mindless browsing, but I see mindless browsing as unavoidable. Not because of some technical or legal thing, but because
by spython 5y ago
The article wants Apple to save us from mindless browsing, but I see mindless browsing as unavoidable. Not because of some technical or legal thing, but because mindless browsing is a good thing. We need it. Mindless browsing is like a walk through the woods, just looking for what is happening, navigating a huge amount of information that is hardly important at the moment – oh, the cherry tree is blooming – but could be important later.
The 'outside' is made up of myriads of tiny details – wind is moving the leaves, slowly and irregularly, the birds are singing, insects flying through the air, the earth feels soft and damp and smells of freshness after the rain, the movements of clouds and the sun are inexorably changing the lighting. We are, however, spending time in concrete boxes where nothing ever moves, and even seal off the sounds and air flow from the outside. Within those boxes we sit and lie and enter other, flatter spaces of our screens, which nonetheless offer us the possibility of some kind of change, movement in the world.. Of course we will browse those changes mindlessly.
Since mainstream social media has turned into a manipulative toxic landscape, I find myself retreating to more niche and better moderated sites, devoid of hate and over-strained emotions. I also find myself wishing for a digital space, be it a game or a website, that would feel similar to a walk in the woods – where a lot is happening but not much is important. Like watching the breaking of waves on the beach. Like sitting at a campfire. Like watching the tree tops move in the wind.
I like mindless browsing. I enjoy it. Just give me the right space for it.
- andrepd 5y agoA walk through the woods is not engineered by Las Vegas casino designers backed by petabytes of user data to be as addictive as possible. There's taking an aimless stroll and there's compulsively opening reddit or facebook at 3am.
- spython 5y agoYes, of course it has a lot to do with information hygiene. We need to be more particular about what we let into our minds, we just don't have the tradition for it yet. Browsing facebook is more like taking a walk in a dystopian junkyard than a forest, and a sign by Apple saying "you might be browsing a junkyard" would just add to this dystopia. This is why the proposal is to design better spaces for mindless browsing, since we apparently need it.
- toomanyducks 5y agoIt's well past midnight, I've been interacting with apps designed to maximize 'user engagement' since 8 PM. I don't have coherent thoughts, I'm opening irrelevant tabs habitually. This is not healthy. I have a problem. That problem is mindless browsing, and it feels engineered. Not saying you're wrong, just that your ideas don't work for me.
- cout 5y agoI did the same thing for years, mindlessly browsing well past a sane hour. What changed is I started going to bed early and getting up early, before the sun rises. I still browse mindlessly on occasion, but my after-coffee morning browsing is a lot more directed than my drowsy evening browsing.
- itsthejb 5y agoAnother solution is no phones (chargers) in the bedroom. Have your "charging station" in the living room
- therealdrag0 5y agoWow I love this idea. I should get an old alarm clock ...
- welfvh 5y agofor me listening to audiobooks, music or podcasts is really helpful to keep the mind stimulated but slowly wind down in the evening
- therealdrag0 5y agoUnless it’s a real page turner :p
- headmelted 5y agoEven at that, Downtime is already a feature. Personally I'd want the mindless browsing feature on all the time, but it would be fairly trivial to assign it to Downtime same as other quality-of-life features already in the OS.
- mjrbrennan 5y agoI am not sure if this is entirely what you mean, but for a game Red Dead Redemption 2 can scratch this itch. The natural environment, ecosystem, and weather effects are amazing. You can easily just avoid the main game and just wander around the environment, and there are a lot of woods to walk in!
- pizza 5y agoWhen I walk through the woods, it's like the environment scrubs my mind of accumulated exposure to mental poisoning. When I scroll a news feed, the platform tries to jam my mind full of the most saccharine palaver possible. I end up feeling less like a prism, and more like a pack animal.. Perhaps there's a midpoint
- flohofwoe 5y agoI wouldn't compare it to a walk through the woods, more like walking through a busy street with angry people and advertisements screaming at you all the time ;)
- brailsafe 5y agoMindless browsing does have it's place, but it's often not in it's place, and it's certainly not a walk in the woods. A walk in the woods either allows the sounds of your brain to rest or for them to come to light and allow you to work on them. The pointless information cacophony is the opposite imo; it temporarily tranquilizes them, never letting them be addressed. Where a walk in the woods can be stress-relieving and possibly actually social, mindless browsing just throws your stress into a garbage bin, that just gets taken to a dump; you're pretty sure you dealt with it, it's not here anymore right?
- nicbou 5y agoI disagree. Exercise and walks in the woods feel like taking my brain to the dog park. Mindless browsing keeps my mind just busy enough to prevent me from thinking about anything or from being bored. It's like fast food for the mind.
- gerardnll 5y agoThe article offers you the choice to keep mindlessly browsing. What we have now it's not really an option. This would be like nutritional warnings for apps.
- indigochill 5y agoThis is why I enjoy hanging out in the tildeverse (https://tildeverse.org/ https://tildeverse.org/). It's just a loose group of public boxes you can SSH into and chat on (some of them share mailing lists, but others don't). Some people make websites or games or tools or whatever. But none of it is organized. It's just people hanging out online.
- foobarbecue 5y agoThanks, tildeverse looks fun! Just found the first clear, simple explanation of Makefiles I've read on there.
- spython 5y agoThis seems just wonderful!
- bipson 5y agoI disagree wholeheartedly. Mindless browsing will occupy my attention, keeps me distracted and on the edge, draining my energy and mental capacity, makes me jittery - even if this realization took me quite some time. A walk in the woods is refreshing and my mind is focused, wandering maybe aimlessly, but well-paced, on its own time, makes me relaxed and open-minded. We like distraction, our mind craves it, often we don't want to think about what bothers us. But allowing all the random itches that bother us is the only way to address them and let them go. Also, I have zero, NIL creativity after mindless browsing, I am drained. Alone with myself and my thoughts on a train or a walk the thoughts are no longer buzzing, they are forming, transforming, becoming real ideas.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Jenz 5y agoThis is the most comforting thing I ever have read (and right now, I needed that).
- blitz_skull 5y agoThis comparison is apples and oranges. Fresh air and sunlight actually has tangible physical benefits. Staring at a dim blue screen while contorting your thumbs isn’t doing you any favors physically. To say NOTHING of how infuriating anti-social it has made us as a society. Nature is mostly good. Mindless scrolling is mostly bad.
- Kiro 5y agoI don't want fresh air or sunlight. I want to sit in a dark basement with a big Unix beard. I hate this "lifestyle and health" dogma that has poisoned hacker culture.
- mark_l_watson 5y agoMindless browsing is nothing like walking randomly in the woods or on the beach, communing with nature. One thing saps our humanity and the other enhances it.
- spython 5y agoMy argument is that we need some kind of movement, some kind of change that is happening outside of us. It feels great to sit in the backyard and watch the chicken quarrel, but who has chickens anymore? It can be enjoyable to sit in a cafe at the town square and just witness life happening around you, but most town squares are losing this community side. Since the immediate 'outside' – my home and office – mostly lacks this tiny uninterrupted movements that I describe, this continuous stream of life happening, I begin to feel isolated and turn to the screens around me. They provide a similar feeling of being connected to life, even if much less fulfilling. Sure, I could work on changing the social life of my city, reviving the town square and planting gardens, but here, on a hacker news site, I like to dream about some technological solution that might fulfill the need of seeing myself embedded in a perpetual movement on life.
- hollerith 5y agoBrowsing the web without a goal feels to me more like daydreaming than it feels like walking in the woods. Sometimes I daydream while walking in the woods, but I am more likely to daydream while staring at a blank wall or while waiting for a bus on a boring street with nothing but concrete and asphalt rectangles to look at. In fact, my whole purpose in walking in the woods is to stop the mental chatter, including the daydreaming. If I find myself daydreaming during the walk, I consider that a failure and tell myself that next time I walk in the woods, I should take along a friend or a dog to make the walk more engaging and consequently more effective at stopping the chatter -- or that I should find more interesting woods. This comment could be extended greatly by introducing the concepts of "focused attention" and "involuntary attention". Very briefly, focused attention is how we pay the bills and contribute to advancing our civilization and all, but focused attention eventually tires the mind. The best way to recover from the tiredness and to restore the ability to focus the attention is to do things that engage "involuntary attention", e.g., taking a walk in the woods where there are things that attract attention involuntarily (without raising the blood pressure like the sirens and the horns of the city tend to do). That will restore the ability to pay focused attention (to whatever the person choose to focus on) faster than would being in a room alone and staring at a blank wall. Some people advise spending as much time as possible either engaging in focused attention or recovering the ability to focus one's attention and advise against daydreaming and aimless browsing of the web because those are sub-optimal ways of restoring the ability to focus attention. (Spending time with friends or walking in the woods with a dog are much better ways.)
- johnfn 5y agoMindless browsing is in no way a walk in the woods. Just observe your mood before and after a walk in the woods, and then your mood before and after mindlessly scrolling through facebook. One makes you feel better, one much worse.
- acituan 5y ago> Mindless browsing is like a walk through the woods, just looking for what is happening, navigating a huge amount of information that is hardly important at the moment – oh, the cherry tree is blooming – but could be important later. Your instinct points to the right direction; mild distraction is actually conducive to insight generation. But we have co-evolved with outside and can have a very intuitive grasp on the hierarchy of information; to dynamically tell apart what is noise what is signal in any moment. In contrast, apps are engineered by an army of experts to hijack those intuitions as a side-channel attack on our attentional heuristics. Browsing becomes mindless because we are oversaturated in our attentional system through the every trick available to keep us engaged and click on ads. E.g. red notification buttons vs. ripe fruit.