
Study reports cell phones may be making us hypersocial, rather than antisocial - ohjeez
https://neurosciencenews.com/social-interaction-addiction-8445/
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lev99
> "We’re Not Addicted to Smartphones, We’re Addicted to Social Interaction"
> [title of linked article]

Social interaction is a requirement for being a fully healthy human. Just like
food, many people develop unhealthy behaviors with social interactions. It's
important to choose healthy relationships and healthy ways of nurturing those
relationships. Cellphones are a tool, there are healthy and unhealthy ways of
using it.

We should focus on educating people on self reflection, so they can notice
when their own behaviors are not in the best interest. In this way we protect
not only against Cellphone Addiction Disorder (or whatever the DSM ends up
naming it), but other future technology use disorders as well.

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gexla
> Relax and celebrate the fact your addiction reflects a normal urge to
> connect with others!

Addicting partly because it's so easy. It's much harder than going into
"impro" mode and striking up a conversation which will hold someone's interest
around just about any topic.

Another angle is that I know people who have social anxiety who spend a lot of
time chatting on FB. I suppose there are some pros and cons to this, but being
hypersocial on a cell doesn't seem to ease face to face social anxiety. It's
better than nothing though, I have also seen these people get involved in real
activities through these interactions.

For me, hypersocial is hyperdistracted. I can't stand to chat more than a few
minutes. Much prefer pricking the awkward bubble which surrounds people and
breaking into a silly conversation. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't,
but the Ycombinator community knows all about experimentation. ;)

~~~
aplc0r
As someone who has struggled with social anxiety to varying degrees throughout
life, online interactions are a bandage for the much larger issue.
Communicating via text without the pressure of timing (generally) gives you
the ability to think over your words and perfect the message. It also allows
you to easily avoid and exit conversations you don't want to participate in.
This doesn't help you to build some of the skills that are necessary to be
social offline.

In my experience, social anxiety is being hung-up on all the "what ifs". I
want all the information up front, and time to think over the "right"
response. That mentality is enabled online.

Like everything, balance is key. I do believe that having the ability to
communicate so easily online has benefited me socially overall. However, I
have the feeling that if we had been as connected as we are today back when I
was kid, I wouldn't have been able to reach that balance at the point I did.

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godzillabrennus
Makes sense. Hypersocial seems like a good thing to me. Am I the only person
who likes how connected phones have made us?

Seems like sentiments shared on here are often focused on the negatives.

I met the love of my life on social media.

I do business with people because of social media.

Being connected has let me speak with folks I never would have had the
opportunity to speak with otherwise.

~~~
jstimpfle
You might just have figured out how to use technology to your advantage.

I have a friend who can't stay away from his phone. I hate meeting up with him
and then having to share his attention with his other acquaintances that I
don't know, and can't even see. We sometimes play ping-pong, and even that
often gets interrupted by phone checks.

~~~
21
This just tells you that your are just not that important to him.

Thought experiment: if he was playing ping-pong with a celebrity

~~~
coldtea
>This just tells you that your are just not that important to him.*

That's the problem though: it's not just that are people X and Y, and X is "by
nature or nurture" not that important to Y.

It's also that modern technology encourages X being indifferent to Y (and e.g.
maximising its eyeball capture).

Not everything is about conscious decisions -- or even subconscious but from
someplace within us. There are tons of factors (like social norms, fashion,
family, ads, etc) that influence us and shape us, and not all of them for the
better. Mobile phones are one such factor.

Evolutionary, the human is totally susceptible to all kinds of BS tricks and
influences.

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jaysonelliot
This study is simply moving the goalposts, conflating the low-quality screen
interactions we have with the actual face-to-face social interactions that
they are replacing.

"Hypersocial" has no meaningful definition. It doesn't speak to the quality of
the interactions, nor to how they affect us in terms of happiness and quality
of life. Those are the real measures that matter, not the number of micro-
interactions we have through looking at text on a screen.

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kerng
The questions, are online connections actually social? Maybe more nuanced
definitions are needed in the future. A big part of the benefits of social
interactions is the physical parts that show positive benefits for health,
like touch, hug,... when one gets hypersocial it is missing a set of
dimensions that ordinary old school social interactions come along with.

~~~
bodas
Online interactions are just different. Yes they are not the same as IRL
interactions, but they can be made around a shared interest, particularly
something that might be hard to find where you live. So they can be more
important.

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aethertron
Phones have enabled a shift toward high quantity, low quality social
interaction.

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Swizec
Imagine, a device that lets you connect in real time with any person in the
world, making us _more_ social? Can’t be.

Although it would be nice if we were all a little better at putting them away
while interacting face to face. Or maybe I’m just boring and take too long to
say things. It’s hard to compete for attention with thousands of invisible
people whose full time job it is to be entertaining

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trophycase
I guess technically speaking we may be more social, but the number of times I
see it used as an excuse to avoid face to face socializing makes me skeptical.
People on their phones at dinner, standing in line, sitting on the train all
could be making conversation with others around them, but it so much easier to
just grab the phone.

~~~
amelius
Maybe that's because in the online world, you often _know_ the interests of
the other person before you engage in a conversation.

Perhaps we should have this in the real world too. Or perhaps we need a
combination of tech + real world communication, e.g. where you can see the
profile of the people in your vicinity, so you can start a real-life
conversation.

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xg15
This story follows the same narrative as similar stories about fast food: It
explains unhealthy behavior as a simple "evolutionary accident" where
otherwise useful evolutionary urges are simply misplaced in today's
industrialized world.

I don't think that theory holds up when a lot of today's product design is not
only acutely aware of those urges but _actively tries to exploit them_.

E.g., yes, today, we are able to produce almost arbitrary quantities of fat
and sugar-rich food. We could also produce food with different nutritional
composition. Yet design for fast-food skews heavily towards heavy on fat and
sugar and not much else - because obviously this kind of food will sell best,
thanks to the evolutionary urges mentioned in the article.

The same thing happens on the internet - social networks actively waggle the
carrot of rewarding social interactions to maximize engagement with the
network.

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wu-ikkyu
Being too hyper social inevitably leads to anti social behavior due to
diminishing returns. In order to have deep, meaningful, long lasting
relationships one must necessarily conserve their attention and forgoe social
interactions with others.

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alexkavon
I don’t see the ideas as mutually exclusive. Hyper-social in cause, perhaps,
but the effect is incredibly increased antisocial.

TLDW; hypersocial sounds like a rebranding of the idea of social media

