[gnatman]

You used to see this argument come up frequently in defense of smartphones, but it's fallen off recently. In my personal experience, scrolling through short-form videos is 100x more soul sucking than reading a book, magazine, or newspaper ever is. They're just not the same.

[thesuitonym]

In general, you're right, but this comment was about an airport. People are stuck there, sometimes for hours, with not much to do, and they can't really go far. And for all anyone knows, they could have been working, or reading, or who knows what. Anecdotal, I know, but my wife has crazy high screen time--like several hours a day, but it's because she reads a lot of ebooks, but doesn't want to carry a separate device.

There are all kinds of reasons a person may be looking at their phone, and to judge them for it, especially in an airport of all places, is kind of ridiculous.

[PhunkyPhil]

They said

"When I went on a trip this past fall and saw a very high percentage of people sucked in to these *short form videos* at any idle moment at the airport and out at public events..."

Assuming it was all short-form videos (I'd bet it was), then it's definitely more psychologically destructive than them reading a book on their phone.

Also your mentioning of several hours a day being "crazy high" is slightly telling of your understanding of the relationship, especially young people have, with their devices.

For younger people raised in this environment, myself included, putting in 6-8+ hours a day into doomscrolling youtube/instagram/tiktok is really not that out of the ordinary;

"13- to 18-year-olds use about eight and a half hours of screen media [per day]"[0]

[0]: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/researc... page 3