>Are you not also absorbed by your phone in other ways?
Honestly, no, and I feel very disconnected from modern culture as a result. I use my phone like a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy: to have access to everything we know as humans at my fingertips, in my pockets, at all times.
Otherwise, I don't use it. That said, I have nothing against people using their phone for enjoyment, and there's nothing wrong with people smiling, laughing, and dancing. It's just not easy to relate to the obsession with applications like Instagram, Vine, TikTok, and so on.
Not for me. I don't use social media (I'm even one of those few people who spend less than an hour or two per day using my smartphone at all), but smartphones are still a real problem for me.
>>All I want to do is look at my phone and consume more content.
I think I see the problem here ....
(and I am not being flippant - I gave up 99% of social media almost a year ago: no twitter, no facebook, no instagram, no tiktok etc - and I hardly read the news at all except for stories of local importance - my life is better for it, give it a try - you don't have anything to lose.
> I don't know how people use phones for hours to do that
I assume you stay off Reddit and Instagram on your phone then? I personally find mobile to be the biggest time sink for me on the low-brain-energy social media (memes and short-form videos, really) consumption front.
> If anything is going to fade, it's this particular form of nostalgia and not the connected culture.
I agree, and would like to add I find it odd to differentiate between a digital world, and a somehow more real world, as if the digital world isn't real. The people we interact with are real, the words that form in my head as I type them are real, and the social interactions are very much real.
Unfortunately I can't remember where I heard it first, but someone said that people on their phones all the time are not anti social, but hyper social.
> They are no longer human as far as I'm concerned.
Well, yeah. We’re cyborgs now and have been for a while. Smartphones have basically become an integrated extension of ourselves.
> It's the norm now to immediately reach for the phone because god forbid they might otherwise feel 2 seconds of boredom.
Probably because I have a wealth of information in my pocket. I can utilize my idle time and study flash cards or chess theory or get back to someone. Sometimes I just meditate or think about things instead.
I do agree that apps can’t possibly fix social issues like people no longer having communities to fall back on. However this comment is an unnecessarily pessimistic take in my opinion. I’m pretty sure people have tried to douse their loneliness with external sources for millennia.
Edit: to be clear, internet / smartphone addiction is a real issue that isn’t seriously discussed as far as I’m aware. However this is different from simply using your phone. In any case being antagonistic and referring to people as not human is probably not a great method of spreading one’s ideas.
> however, I think that most of the people in western cultures are moving past this. The materialistic part. Most would not care about clothes or the phone you own. What matters is personality and what you believe in.
A beautifully naive and disconnected perspective. Why do you think Instagram or Snapchat or even Facebook are so popular? A good part of it is to show off conspicuous consumption.
If anything, now that they can afford it a bit more, people are even more vain.
> you are in a tiny minority of incredibly focused people.
I have never been described as a focused person but I have never lost an hour to Instagram because I do not use Instagram. Nor do I use Facebook or any other social media apps. Not a one is even installed on my phone.
If you lose an hour to Instagram that is entirely on you. Instagram has to ask you to turn on notifications. You choose to open it.
Turn off all your notifications and silence your ringer and your phone won't distract you with anything. Even better delete social media apps that demand your engagement to make them money. If you feel you must use some social media only do so through their web apps.
By allowing notifications you're participating in your own abuse.
> A smartphone without social media is a tool. A smartphone with social media is a prison.
Smartphones are a dopamine feed regardless. I got a modern Android smartphone only after deleting my Facebook account some years ago, and I have no other social media. I still find myself doomscrolling the news on the phone, to the point where I was no longer reading literature or simply thinking my thoughts. I had to make a rule that at home, my phone would never leave the kitchen.
> _So_ much can be achieved with a phone, we have got to stop treating it like a Devil's implement.
I agree, that is why it is not the phone that is the devil tool itself, but what's on it. Broadcasting tools like Instagram are the most time consuming and addictive without actual benefits. Using those tools are actually detrimental to mental health [1].
Thus I believe without understanding what makes phone usage harmful to both productivity and mental health, we are bound to fall into the same traps with other technologies.
Every single social media platform in the world is trying to cover this.
>I find dealing with my social life to be really exhausting.
That is a first-world problem if I've ever heard one. How is it exhausting? Are you so popular that there are too many events to attend? Are you stuck on Snapchat and Facebook 10 hours a day? Maybe you just need an app that deletes all of your social apps.
>Is there anything that makes it easier or simpler?
Do you just need something that will push posts out to all of your social media accounts, something like Sendible?
Apologies if any of this comes across as condescending, it's just that it's a strange predicament you're in, and you're being a bit vague. My overall answer is to back off the socializing and learn to enjoy time by yourself, because if you can't do that, you'll never be happy. Get away from screens and live a little.
> Experiences may differ, but having grown up in the wild west of the internet this is normal to me and therefore I just don't get how it could stress someone out all that much or why people would voluntarily expose themselves like that.
Most people didn't grow up in the wild west of the internet. Most people carry their intuitions about social interaction over from the real world. Tech people seem to chronically underestimate just how monumentally ill-prepared society was for the ubiquity of smartphones and always-on communication.
> I do not believe that anybody who keeps having a smartphone can really quit a social media.
I just quit Facebook, not all social media. On my phone, I have three Telegram groups (one tracks the war, the other is my family, the other is my extended family), a Twitter account I look at every 3-4 days (and that may go away because Twitter just isn't interesting other than a few friends telling jokes), LinkedIn because my company sells software to recruiters and HR (and that's where they all are), and SMS. I run with notifications only on for emails for business from customers and employees, SMS and telegram from family.
>Makes sense. Hypersocial seems like a good thing to me. Am I the only person who likes how connected phones have made us?
No, there are some others too. Not me though.
I dislike how connected they make us to all kinds of harmful imperatives (spam, advertisement, surveillance, bosses, entitled people, etc.) and how disconnected they enable and encourage most of us to be from actual friends -- not just "here for you" friends, but also casual have a good time friends, with whom 20 years ago you would go out with or visit, as opposed to exchanging comments online.
> Ask people to go to a world without iPhones, Facebook, Google, Uber/Lyft and they’ll call you crazy.
I did used to the live in that world, and wasn't all that bad. There are times when I wish I still did. But better yet would be some reasonable compromise between the two where we had the convenience of smartphones and social media without Facebook, Google, etc and their massive surveillance, annoying advertising, and addictive practices.
> I’m in a battle to minimize social media and related apps influence over my life.
Get rid of the social media apps. You don't need them. You're lying to yourself if you think that you do. Nobody is going to miss your Instagram or Facebook posts. TikTok is a stupid waste of time and likely algorithmically programmed to make you hate your country (why we let China ban our social media apps and then let them operate in our country I'll never understand) and Reddit is a cesspool of awful, uninformed opinions and if you really need to visit a special interest community there you can just visit that manually. You don't need an account and you don't have anything interesting to say so there's no reason to post.
Instead, fill your home screen with apps with positive goals. For me, this includes having Downdog, btwb, Fitness (Apple), Wikipedia, Maps, my local newspaper, and similar style apps with all red dot notifications turned off.
> But I need to sell things on Facebook marketplace so I'll have to keep my account.
No. Use eBay or Craigslist, sell it at a yardsale, or stop buying stuff you don't need. If you can't stomach that then you delete your actual Facebook account and create a new one specifically for marketplace.
> But how will I stay in touch with all of these groups and influencers that I follow who post entertaining content?
You won't. That's the point. Otherwise stop stressing about being addicted to social media and just embrace it. There's no separation of "people I like to follow" and "I feel addicted". You cannot have one without the other.
> I'm going to lose touch with friends and family.
Good. People come and go, including close friends and family members. And if the primary way you stay in touch is social media, well, you're just lying to yourself about your relationship with them. Let it go. It's unhealthy to cling to past relationships.
> Yea but I do stay in touch but I also like to see their new baby pictures
Well great, instead of seeing all of this stuff beforehand, just see them in person like you regularly do and ask them to show you pictures and then you can sit down and have a meaningful interaction.
Yes I understand that HackerNews and LinkedIn and other sites that I use are also social media. There are degrees of addictiveness. I don't believe you can only "minimize" top social media apps. They do provide value to a lot of people, but if you feel that you're being pulled away from your real life and you're literally posting asking how to win the battle over social media apps and their influence, the best thing you can do is start disengaging with the most addicting ones.
Some people can buy a bag of M&Ms and eat just one and put the bag down. Most people can't.
> I live in a world without Facebook, and now without Twitter. I manage to survive too without Kiki, Snapchat, Viber, Telegram, Signal and the rest of them. I haven’t yet learned to cope without iMessage and SMS.
I respect what he's getting at, but this is all sorts of backwards for someone who wrote an earlier paragraph about escaping the eye of advertisers (and presumably surveillance)
> Most of us consider (or used to consider; and I'm not even old) that enjoyable.
Eh, I’m 50 years old and don’t really use social media (certainly not Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, twitter, etc.). I don’t even really text other people. But, I don’t agree with your sentiment. I’ve never understood people who want to have small talk with strangers. It is the opposite of enjoyable.
Honestly, no, and I feel very disconnected from modern culture as a result. I use my phone like a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy: to have access to everything we know as humans at my fingertips, in my pockets, at all times.
Otherwise, I don't use it. That said, I have nothing against people using their phone for enjoyment, and there's nothing wrong with people smiling, laughing, and dancing. It's just not easy to relate to the obsession with applications like Instagram, Vine, TikTok, and so on.
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