
Can’t Put Down Your Device? That’s by Design - tacon
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/06/technology/personaltech/cant-put-down-your-device-thats-by-design.html
======
chiefofgxbxl
> "There’s nothing about a global computer network that necessitates
> addiction-like behaviours."

I've recently reflected that despite the internet having origins which
benefited the military and scientific community, the utility it offers the
average user today is just a glorified photo album.

You see it as people endlessly scroll their Facebook feed, spending very
little time even paying attention to the photos they are viewing. You see it
in Snapchat, where users are encouraged to narcissistic-ly document their life
every few seconds. It's on Imgur (granted, that's not too surprising),
Buzzfeed, and clickbait (25 Unbelievable photos taken by a skydiver). I'm sold
that if you want to make a successful app or website (based on number of
users, not quality of content), it needs to revolve around users taking
photos...

~~~
Alex3917
> the utility it offers the average user today is just a glorified photo
> album.

There are basically two kinds of Internet use that young people engage in --
hanging out with friends, and teaching themselves new skills.

The vast majority of young people though are mostly using the Internet to hang
out with friends. The exception is apparently affluent white males, who have
much higher rates of using the Internet to explore new ideas and teach
themselves new skills. This is called the 'participation gap.' (It's perhaps
also partly why, for example, there are more male entrepreneurs even though
women do better in formal education.)

The important thing to note is that decisions about what to use the Internet
for have a lot to do with who you are following in your social networks. E.g.
this determines what new interests you're likely to discover, what
opportunities are made available to you, etc.

source: [http://www.amazon.com/Participatory-Culture-Networked-Era-
Co...](http://www.amazon.com/Participatory-Culture-Networked-Era-
Conversation/dp/0745660711)

~~~
rustynails
I know you mention that women do better in formal education. That wasn't the
case a few decades ago, when I believe there was far less prejudice.

I had lunch with a few female teachers several weeks ago. One of their
conversations was around the over-enthusiasm of boys in class. They
unanimously agreed that boys needed to "shut up" (literal quote) so girls
could answer questions too. This view parallels that of my ex-girlfriend who
is (and was then) a teacher who felt boys had some sort of natural advantage
that needed to be suppressed.

I also made mention of code.org that had one link only on the main page "why
girls should participate in IT" (or very similar words). My young son noticed
this and asked if he was welcome.

I would not use today's metrics on boys vs girls in education as a basis for
any measurements. If we stopped with the prejudice (which is extremely common
today), the picture would look quite different.

~~~
wpietri
I am fascinated by your theory that there was less prejudice a few decades
ago. This graph, for example, does not look like a graph of _increasing_
prejudice:

[http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-
women-stopped-coding)

I read that as decreasing systemic bias in education. At least in law,
medicine, and physical sciences.

~~~
x1798DE
That graph doesn't look to me like something characterized by prejudice at
all. Why would people suddenly become sexist in the computer technology field
only, practically overnight?

The article even suggests that the drop started with the boom of the personal
computer. That is not inconsistent with the hypothesis that women do better in
formal settings, since that inflection point is essentially the moment it
became possible for large amounts of people to teach themselves to be a
computer programmer. It seems likely that some pre existing bias (either in
interest our ability from girls or more likely an interplay of interest and
culture) was just amplified when the flood of autodidacts joined the field,
not that everyone decided to exclude women just as the field was getting hot.

~~~
wpietri
My point is that the other three lines are indicative of decreasing prejudice
in education, not increasing. The computer-science line is clearly different
and why is an interesting topic, but it's not the topic at hand.

~~~
VLM
A pet theory I've been developing is the decline in the 80s began with a
growth in self destructive behavior in the programming employment sector.
Eating junk food, caffeinated energy drinks, lack of exercise, lack of good
food, lack of sleep, lack of socializing, lack of overtime pay, lack of
professionalism, obsessive game play, lack of life balance, lack of decent
working environment. Before the 80s programmer culture felt very engineer /
mathematician / academic, after the 80s its kinda felt like an introverts
weird interpretation of an all night party, every night. Here have a hot
pocket and type all night. A culture that prides itself on twinkies and
monster energy drinks isn't going to fit the nearly 100% female readership of
the typical health magazine. The stereotypical programming environment is
nearly unique in the working world, isn't it? Are there any other job markets
culturally like programming? If there were, we could compare how the two
fields opposition to personal hygiene or opposition to dressing fashionably,
or even dressing in clean clothes might not appeal to women at similar rates,
for example. I've only found two work places kinda like programming/IT as
defined above. One is military mechanic and the other is SOME trading desks at
big finance. Both tend a bit male.

That's directly on topic. I suppose from an "eating your own (addictive)
dogfood" perspective its kinda self inflicted.

It would be interesting to look at male/female relations and ratios for
programmers at non-traditional employers, perhaps the government or military
or maybe academic. I suspect the lifestyle at a unionized state government
office is quite a bit different than "standard" programming environment and
theorize almost anything would be an improvement WRT women's interest in that
workplace. Perhaps addictive behaviors would vary in those circumstances.

Surely there must be some HR statistics buried somewhere at a giant
corporation or government about % of programmers participating in the
corporate alcoholism project by decade, or something like that, WRT trends in
addictive personality by decade.

~~~
wpietri
Interesting. One way one could sum up the obsessive-dedication-at-the-expense-
of-all-else culture you describe is "macho", which is a reasonable tie to
gender.

------
Alex3917
Also published recently on the same topic:

[https://aeon.co/essays/if-the-internet-is-addictive-why-
don-...](https://aeon.co/essays/if-the-internet-is-addictive-why-don-t-we-
regulate-it)

(In fact the NYT article looks like it might be plagiarized from this.)

~~~
indians_pro
this is better than the NYT article. i don't understand how it can consider
regulation though, when the only currency onvolved is the user's attention,
and they are their own federal reserves. does the web physically make us
addicted, like cigarettes, to the point of unpleasantness when not indulging
in the activity, or does it just form patterns pf behaviour that can be easily
broken, provided one is _conscious_ of them?

------
AndrewKemendo
Engineering addictive/compulsive usage is the highest achievement for any
company as relates to their bottom line. Coke, Apple, FritoLay, Altria, Google
etc... Literally every consumer focused company that is a leader in their
market has gotten this down to a T and the ones with the most addicting
properties among them, do the best.

~~~
cma
Leading car companies?

~~~
majormajor
Status (probably not the best word for it) addiction?

BMW, Mercedes, Tesla, etc... you'll find high rates of satisfaction, repeat
business, etc, despite rather high rates of unreliable over-engineered
components. It's more important to a lot of people to be driving a
technologically advanced Tesla with great acceleration, or a differently-
advanced sporty BMW that handles like a dream, rather than a more boring, more
reliable car that just works. (Or, for a eco-friendly to eco-friendly
comparison, the Tesla inspires much more devotion than other electric or
hybrid vehicles.)

~~~
knughit
Tesla is Consumer Reports highest rated car ever.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
Just. Wait.

IMO you don't know if a car is reliable until the kid created in the back seat
is old enough to pick up his prom date in it.

I'll also add that there's not a lot of people driving Teslas as their only
vehicle year round in salt states and the typical owner is wealthy and can
afford to take care of it.

I'm not saying it's not reliable, just that we don't know yet and that they'll
never get very hard treatment.

------
qrendel
One of the amusing parallels regarding Facebook (and similar products) is the
way your likes, messages, and notifications, are basically like a little
scoreboard, even in about the same location as old arcade games, and
emphasized as strongly as anything else on the site - bright red against a
similar shade of blue. It definitely contributes to that impulsive feeling I
remember (prior to closing my account) to just keep checking. Similar to the
worst psychological tactics and "reward-for-suffering" schemes employed by
some game developers, e.g. Farmville, Curiosity, World of Warcraft, etc.

It'd be nice to see gamification used for good rather than kinda-evil, but the
potential users they alienate with these tactics are clearly a minority
compared to the ones they manage to attract and keep hooked - or else they
wouldn't have managed to stay successful products for as long as they have.

------
Falkon1313
People tend to refresh the same feeds/groups/sites repeatedly, unthinkingly.
Each of those has biases depending on the people who post there. Something
useful to interrupt the unthinking refresh cycle would be an app or extension
that analyzes group sentiments and occasionally signals "You've visited this
site 3 times today. Would you like to try one of the following to see some
different viewpoints on the same topics?"

Probably not possible without privacy issues, but if opinions are already
being tracked that way for advertising and surveillance purposes anyway, we
could get some value out of it...

~~~
juhq
This as a browser extension yes! I need this. I wish I could give you 1000
votes! Please make this happen, I can even help you with it!

------
microcolonel
Frankly I'm not sure how to feel about this line of thought.

I safely avoid experiences like this and I don't see the appeal of Instagram.
I imagine the feeling is much like eating snack food: you know you're eating
too much, you have plenty, and nothing in the moment except shame will stop
you from eating it.

The answer is: don't buy snack food ever. Eat hearty meals and leave it at
that.

I take that approach to web/app content: read hearty texts, view great images.
Switch it off when the quality dips below ambient levels.

~~~
anthropomorph
So how do you manage your time on Hacker News? Even though this site teaches
me things, it works a lot like a slot machine. Each pull of the lever has a
small chance of dispensing a reward like a mildly interesting article. Not
that different from reddit or buzzfeed. The difference mostly being the
academic level of the reward.

~~~
microcolonel
I'm picky about the kinds of articles I read from HN. I admit that I responded
in this thread because I figured the title itself insinuated a lot more than
it should.

I tend to opt not to read or participate in threads based on that though.
General rules are: read the headline and the number of points for each item on
the home page and the "new" page; if it's interesting pop it into a tab. If
the quality of the article is mediocre or bad then it just gets closed.

Then I don't come back for at least two hours.

Not sure this is a great general strategy, I'd be interested to see what other
people do.

------
selectodude
"Please revisit using Google Chrome" no, that's okay.

