Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bogdanoff_2 238 days ago
What exactly do you not agree with?
1 comments

Perhaps they disagree with the idea that it’s an addiction or that it’s a problem with screens in particular, rather than a problem with people not being able to or not knowing how to spend their free time in other ways.
> rather than a problem with people not being able to or not knowing how to spend their free time in other ways.

That's literally what an addiction is.

An addiction would be you struggle to stop doing it. That would suggest they have no issue stopping, given a more interesting option.
> people not being able to spend their free time in other ways

> people not knowing how to spend their free time in other ways

Are two indications how it is difficult to stop something.

“I can stop any time I want!”
You don't stop doing drugs because there's some movie you want to see. People do get off their phones for that.
Have you seen how many people watch movies these days? Even in the cinema they are scrolling.

Not touching alcohol for 12 hours a day does not mean you are not an alcoholic.

I can see that, but IMO the main difference is that this feels like it's intentionally trying to be an active detriment to your life. TV et. al are fairly neutral generally. Even with the ads.

But with targeted advertisement, it feels a lot more like they're trying to get inside your mind to steal your money.

And with content on social media, it feels specifically engineered to make your life as bad as possible. More fear, more anger, more racism, more sexism. Here's some big boobies, now look at this disgusting immigrant. Isnt Earth awful? Aren't these guys ruining everything?

This. Targeted adds + bespoke algorithms make our current tech incomparable to the previous boogeyman of TV et al. We have devices that are designed to keep and farm our attention at all costs