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Having used a Palm Pilot to genuine benefit in highschool in the 90s, and having finally just gotten a smart watch in part specifically to reduce smartphone usa
by xoa 2y ago
Having used a Palm Pilot to genuine benefit in highschool in the 90s, and having finally just gotten a smart watch in part specifically to reduce smartphone usage, I have mixed feelings about broad restrictions. Networked smart phones absolutely have major addictive and disruptive effects, and are hard to police in practice. But watches provide some pretty useful health and emergency benefits, while IME have lived up to my hopes of being high enough friction/miserable enough to use for browsing or the like that the effect is nothing like a phone. Putting it all in the same bucket feels overboard, though maybe is necessary in practice. But pendulums seem to often have a tendency to swing between extremes and I wish officials were willing to try more tailored measures before sledgehammers more often. Still I think the overall trend looks positive.
- tourmalinetaco 2y agoMe and my wife were discussing this earlier, and we both agreed we missed the days of cellphones + PDAs. That era was so much less predatory to our time, and there’s something to be said about the mental separation between “fun text time” and a dedicated work device. It’s just a shame that given the current technological landscape the closest we have to PDAs are tablets, which are typically too large to pocket (and nonetheless an attractive option).
- katzinsky 2y agoMan I miss PDAs. My dad worked for 3com so I had a palm since about when I learned to read. I was early with smartphones because I thought they'd essentially be PDAs with a modem ("They're just working out the kinks.") Smartphones have to be the most disappointing thing that's happened to consumer computing. It's kind of funny that with pervasive networking I miss having to be mindful and sync everything I wanted to take with me.
- tyre 2y agoyeah let em have flip phones with T9 word and snake. those Nokias had the benefit of being invincible
- BlueTemplar 2y agoSmartphones and tablets do come in all sizes : https://ewritable.com/best-e-ink-tablets/#Best_Dedicated_Note-Taker_Supernote_A6X2_Nomad https://ewritable.com/best-e-ink-tablets/#Best_Dedicated_Not...
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> watches provide some pretty useful health and emergency benefits Fitbits let you “see calls, texts & smartphone app notifications on your wrist when your phone is nearby” [1]. It has all the attention, focus and de-socialisation problems of a smartphone. [1] https://www.fitbit.com/global/us/products/smartwatches/sense2?sku=521BKGB https://www.fitbit.com/global/us/products/smartwatches/sense...
- cwillu 2y agoUnless a fitbit has a convenient keyboard I've been missing for years, no, it does not remotely have all of the attention, focus and de-socialisation problems.
- asadotzler 2y agoProbably 90% of what kids do on phones is consumption, not production.
- umbra07 2y agoOf social media. Not texts - and tbeir friends can't message them during school hours anyways.
- WalterBright 2y ago> But watches provide some pretty useful health and emergency benefits For kids? How ever did anyone survive before 1990.
- xoa 2y ago>How ever did anyone survive before I really, really hate this mindless, lazy line of argument in general. It gets tossed out with absolutely everything, from the internet to vaccines to modern farming. The simple answer in many cases to "how did anyone survive before X" is "well, often they didn't". Life expectancies were in fact lower in the past. More people died, or were maimed, with no hope of treatment. Or sometimes it's "they did, but much less efficiently and we come to depend on each growth of the economy which at the foundation is literally about being able to do things more efficiently". Ease of communication, knowing what the weather is, all sorts of things mean less wasteful use of time and energy. Sometimes "they did, but perhaps less happily". A loved relative was in and accident, went to the hospital and you never got the chance to be involved when it mattered. And of course in some cases it's "new things have created downsides that create a need for other new things, the world has changed". Sometimes we can do something about that in the near term. Sometimes we cannot. Low effort responses like you made are discouraged on HN for good reason. Yeah, absolutely new negatives have come with the new positives and seeking to reduce the former matters. But productive discussion and activity tends to focus on specifics vs generalities. Reducing the benefits of real time communication devices to a binary "life/death" and then NOT grappling with modern trends in everything from natural disasters to school shootings to reduced bussing doesn't strike me as great Walter.
- WalterBright 2y agoI stand by my assertion. How many times in your 12 years in school was instant 24/7 communication for everyone in the school been of significant benefit, or would have been if they had it? It's zero in my case. Then look at the downsides, which are pervasive - inattention, disruption, distraction. If you still want it, put a landline phone in each classroom on the teacher's desk. The principal can also have a switch to turn it off in an emergency.
- noufalibrahim 2y agoI can sort of squint and see the logic in your argument but I'm not convinced that allowing smart devices in schools and especially during class hours has enough good to consider seriously. I don't let my kids use a smart phone for entertainment. They use it sometimes for chatGPT and Google translate especially when they study but not beyond that and I intend to keep it that way till they're old enough (17 or so).
- knallfrosch 2y ago> But watches provide some pretty useful health and emergency benefits I'm sure you can get an exception for a glucose monitor if you have diabetes.