My anecdotal observations suggest it's pretty different. One thing is you can (and do, if you're a kid) carry it everywhere with you and stare at it all the time. I think the phone UI where each app takes over the whole screen also increases the impact of the worst sorts of apps (like TikTok).
Personally I'd think its different, smartphone apps usually have tons of dark patterns and are designed to always be with you versus a desktop or even a laptop.
I keep debating trying to go full-dumbphone, but I'm confident what would happen is that it would work great until I need a specific thing for whatever reason, and I'd have to buy an Android or iPhone, and then I'd be forced to carry around two devices and potentially have two separate cell phone plans. This seems like a pain in the ass.
But I don't dispute that waking up in the morning to a bunch of things competing for my stimulated attention probably isn't healthy.
I’d guess it’s very different from how most of the people consume content.
The problem with smartphone is that it’s always on you wherever you go, and the temptation to use it for filling every second of boredom is just too strong.
iPads/laptops on another hand are just too bulky for carrying them around - in a minute of boredom you have to take deliberate action to go and grab it from whatever place it’s right now.
From my experience, this additional barrier between you and content is a huge deterring factor.
As an anecdote, I use Brick app to lock my phone out of social media, and even tho the physical unlocking device in another corner of the same room where I’m, this works surprisingly well, because most of the time I’m just too lazy to take this action of going through unlocking procedure.
That’s interesting because I’ve been able to keep my iPads and computers entirely productivity devices but my phone wastes considerable amounts of my time.
Eerie parallels to tobacco smoking just a few decades ago. It's a public health problem but those in charge of the bureaucracy at the highest levels choose to obsess over rare vaccine side effects and the use of tylenol during circumcission? It's a mad mad mad mad world (great film, which is overdue for a cyber age remake)
I wonder how many 5-6 year olds are getting smartphones because parents are divorced and one parent wants to be able to check in on the other, could be something like that is the issue
I don't know many children who are 13 today and don't have a smartphone - in fact it was quite a common thing even a decade ago - how do you even control for this
To me, "The Internet" and "The Internet without short-form videos" are two different things.
There was a very short span of time when the mobile bandwidth was good enough for browsing, messaging, and corporate email, but not really good enough (or prohibitively expensive) for streaming. Feels like that was the sweet spot.
There's also a decade plus of various "Net Children Go Mobile" annual surveys across major tecnological countries that plot the diffusion of phone use and ownership by age and country.
Leading to a large ANOVA table of years, countries, ages, mental health statitics, etc.
Yes, Denmark measures these things is ways different to the UK and both differ from the US.
All the same, each being reasonably internally consisent across time means trends can be picked after normalising.
The case for whether encroaching phone use does correlate with increased early onset mental issue diagnoses becomes a consideration of thresholds and variances.
My first question would be: or is it that cat owners are schizophrenic are more likely to get a cat?
I'm not answering that question, but I do want to quote your article. From the bottom:
> Results were inconsistent across studies, but those of higher quality suggested that associations in unadjusted models might have been due to factors that could have influenced the results.
> One study found no significant association between owning a cat before age 13 and later developing schizophrenia, but it did identify a significant link when narrowing down cat ownership to a specific period (ages 9 to 12). This inconsistency suggests that the critical window for cat exposure is not well defined.
> A study in the US, which involved 354 psychology students, didn't find a connection between owning a cat and schizotypy scores. However, those who had received a cat bite had higher scores when compared to those who had not.
> Another study, which included people with and without mental disorders, discovered a connection between cat bites and higher scores on tests measuring particular psychological experiences. But they suggested other pathogens, such as Pasteurella multocida, may be responsible instead.
> Before we can make any firm interpretations, the researchers reiterate that we need better and broader research.
And of course there's endless correlation-causation isseus there as well. Under most circumstances you have to be both aggressive and careless to get bitten by a cat in the first place.
That article is junk. The leading cause of Toxoplasma gondii infection in humans is under cooked meat. Cat ownership is not actually linked to higher prevalence of T. gondii infection[1].
Schizophrenia is a subset of "doing worse mentally". For a proper comparison you need to check overall mental health, not just schizophrenia, which is a rare condition.
In the US, we restrict driving to around age 16, alcohol consumption to 18, voting to 18, and tobacco consumption to 21. Then there are industry-applied age ratings, like the MPA’s PG-13, R, and NC-17 ratings. Barbiturates and amphetamines we’re once available without a prescription.
There’s official/unofficial wiggle room, but there are limits. For example, if you live on a farm, you may be driving on the farm before you have a license to drive on public roads.
I could see mobile-phone ownership becoming similarly-restricted.
Kids can / often use other family members' smartphones / tablets (I assume it's the majority of cases). How can the law prevent this if parents do nothing about this?
The same way that the law prevents kids drinking their parents’ alcohol - it doesn’t. But having it be illegal sends a signal, even though it’s possible to circumvent it, and also allows prosecution if warranted.
That'd put it in the same basket as alcohol and tobacco. Although the pro/con of owning a mobile are a lot less clear than those two and banning phones in that way is probably a mistake.
It sucks because they could be pocket-sized bicycles for the mind rather than addicting ad-driven bullshit surveillance slot machines that maximize attention. Humanity had a choice and chose poorly.
Horrifically terrible data and methodology for even suggesting causal claims. Global Mind Data is literally self report online survey data. You may as well have used political surveys from Fox News and MSNBC
You shouldn't stick your head in the sand just because it makes you feel better. Since media companies are causing damage then they should be held liable. Where is the class action?
Dang, et al., go.com needs the subdomain visible, all go.com means is that it's a Disney owned brand.
How’s this compare to computer/internet usage? I’ve been chronically online most years since age 7 but didn’t get a smartphone until 22 or so.
My anecdotal observations suggest it's pretty different. One thing is you can (and do, if you're a kid) carry it everywhere with you and stare at it all the time. I think the phone UI where each app takes over the whole screen also increases the impact of the worst sorts of apps (like TikTok).
Personally I'd think its different, smartphone apps usually have tons of dark patterns and are designed to always be with you versus a desktop or even a laptop.
Soon:
Whatever the safe level of smartphone usage is, most of us are above it.I keep debating trying to go full-dumbphone, but I'm confident what would happen is that it would work great until I need a specific thing for whatever reason, and I'd have to buy an Android or iPhone, and then I'd be forced to carry around two devices and potentially have two separate cell phone plans. This seems like a pain in the ass.
But I don't dispute that waking up in the morning to a bunch of things competing for my stimulated attention probably isn't healthy.
There are also options to split the difference - a dumb phone that can sync with your smartphone or watch like https://dumb.co/
As someone who used dumbphones, trust me it wouldnt be that big of a mental gymnastic.
They are really cheap and some like kaechoda and other brands are really slim as well so I can recommend it genuinely.
Its worth looking more into but yes I am having an android now partially because of whatsapp and the fact that my old dumb phone had died
Rest in peace, it was really cool.
Fortunately, I use my smartphone about 20 minutes a day for work authentication, and for its camera while traveling. And audiobooks.
Unfortunately, my iPad Pro gets way, way, way more use. Much too addictive as a media consumption device.
I’d guess it’s very different from how most of the people consume content.
The problem with smartphone is that it’s always on you wherever you go, and the temptation to use it for filling every second of boredom is just too strong.
iPads/laptops on another hand are just too bulky for carrying them around - in a minute of boredom you have to take deliberate action to go and grab it from whatever place it’s right now. From my experience, this additional barrier between you and content is a huge deterring factor.
As an anecdote, I use Brick app to lock my phone out of social media, and even tho the physical unlocking device in another corner of the same room where I’m, this works surprisingly well, because most of the time I’m just too lazy to take this action of going through unlocking procedure.
That’s interesting because I’ve been able to keep my iPads and computers entirely productivity devices but my phone wastes considerable amounts of my time.
Yeah I can’t see any good reason to get an iPad if you’re not an artist. Just a way to get more video streaming in your life.
I doubt there is any meaningful difference in effect of smartphone usage versus tablet usage, though
Eerie parallels to tobacco smoking just a few decades ago. It's a public health problem but those in charge of the bureaucracy at the highest levels choose to obsess over rare vaccine side effects and the use of tylenol during circumcission? It's a mad mad mad mad world (great film, which is overdue for a cyber age remake)
I wonder how many 5-6 year olds are getting smartphones because parents are divorced and one parent wants to be able to check in on the other, could be something like that is the issue
I don't know many children who are 13 today and don't have a smartphone - in fact it was quite a common thing even a decade ago - how do you even control for this
To me, "The Internet" and "The Internet without short-form videos" are two different things.
There was a very short span of time when the mobile bandwidth was good enough for browsing, messaging, and corporate email, but not really good enough (or prohibitively expensive) for streaming. Feels like that was the sweet spot.
There's also a decade plus of various "Net Children Go Mobile" annual surveys across major tecnological countries that plot the diffusion of phone use and ownership by age and country.
Leading to a large ANOVA table of years, countries, ages, mental health statitics, etc.
Yes, Denmark measures these things is ways different to the UK and both differ from the US.
All the same, each being reasonably internally consisent across time means trends can be picked after normalising.
The case for whether encroaching phone use does correlate with increased early onset mental issue diagnoses becomes a consideration of thresholds and variances.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283320908_Net_Child...
Is owning a smartphone more or less dangerous than owning a cat?
"Cat Ownership Linked to Increased Risk of Schizophrenia, Research Suggests" https://www.sciencealert.com/owning-a-cat-could-double-your-...
> "After adjusting for covariates, we found that individuals exposed to cats had approximately twice the odds of developing schizophrenia,"
My first question would be: or is it that cat owners are schizophrenic are more likely to get a cat?
I'm not answering that question, but I do want to quote your article. From the bottom:
> Results were inconsistent across studies, but those of higher quality suggested that associations in unadjusted models might have been due to factors that could have influenced the results.
> One study found no significant association between owning a cat before age 13 and later developing schizophrenia, but it did identify a significant link when narrowing down cat ownership to a specific period (ages 9 to 12). This inconsistency suggests that the critical window for cat exposure is not well defined.
> A study in the US, which involved 354 psychology students, didn't find a connection between owning a cat and schizotypy scores. However, those who had received a cat bite had higher scores when compared to those who had not.
> Another study, which included people with and without mental disorders, discovered a connection between cat bites and higher scores on tests measuring particular psychological experiences. But they suggested other pathogens, such as Pasteurella multocida, may be responsible instead.
> Before we can make any firm interpretations, the researchers reiterate that we need better and broader research.
And of course there's endless correlation-causation isseus there as well. Under most circumstances you have to be both aggressive and careless to get bitten by a cat in the first place.
That article is junk. The leading cause of Toxoplasma gondii infection in humans is under cooked meat. Cat ownership is not actually linked to higher prevalence of T. gondii infection[1].
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3497129/
Schizophrenia is a subset of "doing worse mentally". For a proper comparison you need to check overall mental health, not just schizophrenia, which is a rare condition.
the culprit is toxoplasma. A third or so of US citizens have it in their brains.
Obviously, because people like cats, they are good, and because people don’t like phones, they are bad.
well since internet usage increases the purrrcent chance of cat ownership I’d say it’s at least a hair more dangerous and not without whisk(ers)
In the US, we restrict driving to around age 16, alcohol consumption to 18, voting to 18, and tobacco consumption to 21. Then there are industry-applied age ratings, like the MPA’s PG-13, R, and NC-17 ratings. Barbiturates and amphetamines we’re once available without a prescription.
There’s official/unofficial wiggle room, but there are limits. For example, if you live on a farm, you may be driving on the farm before you have a license to drive on public roads.
I could see mobile-phone ownership becoming similarly-restricted.
Kids can / often use other family members' smartphones / tablets (I assume it's the majority of cases). How can the law prevent this if parents do nothing about this?
The same way that the law prevents kids drinking their parents’ alcohol - it doesn’t. But having it be illegal sends a signal, even though it’s possible to circumvent it, and also allows prosecution if warranted.
That'd put it in the same basket as alcohol and tobacco. Although the pro/con of owning a mobile are a lot less clear than those two and banning phones in that way is probably a mistake.
It sucks because they could be pocket-sized bicycles for the mind rather than addicting ad-driven bullshit surveillance slot machines that maximize attention. Humanity had a choice and chose poorly.
Horrifically terrible data and methodology for even suggesting causal claims. Global Mind Data is literally self report online survey data. You may as well have used political surveys from Fox News and MSNBC
The math checks out for this campaign at least: https://www.waituntil8th.org/
Impossible to separate from level of parental care.
So, I can tell you my reaction when I was 13 and first saw a smartphone. (It must have been late 2007 or 2008.)
You know. Everything's round and cute and colorful. Like candy.
"Oh. This is for retarded people."
Unfortunately I was wrong.
It's actually much worse than that. It's for normal people. But it makes you retarded.
Slowly. You don't even notice it happening.
It eats away... day by day.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36256-4
Keeping your kids away from screens requires a significant parental effort
Zuikyte8ge
4753835383
You shouldn't stick your head in the sand just because it makes you feel better. Since media companies are causing damage then they should be held liable. Where is the class action?
Kiuy736383383