I don't think avoiding phone usage completely is needed, just a shift in mentality towards favoring "I'll sit down and work on this when I get home" over pulling out your phone to take care of things when you first think of them.
Not intended as sarcastic: how is that working out for you?
It's easy to say "Oh, I'll just use my phone in a healthy way in the future" while pouring yourself another drink. I can quit when I want mindset.
I quit. It's very difficult. I had to come back out of the real need for a smartphone today. I noticed the patterns that the author described very quickly slipping back into the day by day.
It's working pretty well. I certainly use my phone for some things, especially if I'm away from the house. But I've just set habits that if I'm doing certain things (writing more than a sentence or two, buying things online, etc.) I just default to a laptop.
Having a microwave doesn't force me to eat TV dinners for every meal. But sometimes it's convenient to just microwave food. Just not all the time.
> Having a microwave doesn't force me to eat TV dinners for every meal. But sometimes it's convenient to just microwave food. Just not all the time.
It's hard for me to remember the times I accidentally scrolled two hours on my microwave, or saw a person hand a microwave to their kid in a restaurant to entertain them. It feels like the argument you're making doesn't really fit the problem smartphones have become.
I've never really understood people spending hours on a phone. I get fed up and move to a computer. At the very least, it's got a bigger screen and a keyboard, making it easier to respond to a post than the phone does.
I recognize that it's a problem for a lot of people, and I'm sure that OP does too. Because it seems like they're arguing for purposefully using a phone less. They're describing a different way to choose to be.
Downloading music off the internet is just the next logical step after taping songs off the radio. Cassette tapes didn't really affect the music industry, so I wouldn't worry about this whole Napster thing.
Mass media homogenizes our input (which influences our output). If we want to think about how AI might be different we should consider how it might directly homogenize our output.
There is a secondary way in which homogenization occurs.
Mass media are not only able to deliver the same message to everyone, or the same presuppositions to everyone (a more dangerous thing, as the desired conclusions are then drawn by people themselves; see Bernays's "music room" tactic for getting people to buy pianos), but once the same content has been delivered to everyone, people will talk about it at some point. This creates the impression of consensus which causes people to assign greater confidence to the content that the mass media have delivered.
So it's circular. You put an idea in people's head, they all end up talking about the idea, and this causes people to feel confident about it being true, because everyone is talking about it. And even if you don't consume mass media, you still face a society of people who do. You don't escape the effects of mass media simply because you personally don't consume it.
I'm working on a little flat file based blogging tool called Postwave ( https://github.com/dorkrawk/postwave ) and using it to power a blog with career advice for software engineers called Don't Break Prod ( https://dontbreakprod.com/ ). Because the world needs more blogging tools and advice. Or maybe it just scratches my itch and it's fun to build.
