How TikTok is turning a generation of video addicts into a data goldmine | John Naughto... - 0 views
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"After lunch at a friend's house, his host motioned to him to observe his 11-year-old son, who "walked to the couch and lay on his side. With his arm extended in front of him cradling his phone, he… went vacant. For the next hour, he was comatose. No signs of life other than his open eyes and an occasional finger swipe. 'We have to make him stop, pull him out, every time,' his dad said. My head filled with images of opium dens in China. Something about the stillness, the lying on his side." There are two insights to be derived from this domestic scene. The first is that the addictive properties of social media have been ratcheted up a further notch. In metaphorical terms, if Instagram and YouTube dispense marijuana, then TikTok provides "digital crack cocaine", as Forbes magazine once colourfully expressed it."
China plans control of tech that US can only dream of, Government & Economy - THE BUSIN... - 0 views
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"The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) unveiled a 30-point draft proposal for "algorithm recommendation management regulations" that would directly affect companies including ByteDance, Tencent Holdings and Kuaishou Technology. The rules would forbid practices that "encourage addiction or high consumption", as well as any activities that endanger national security or disrupt social and economic order."
Constant craving: how digital media turned us all into dopamine addicts | Life and styl... - 0 views
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"We've forgotten how to be alone with our thoughts. We're forever "interrupting ourselves", as Lembke puts it, for a quick digital hit, meaning we rarely concentrate on taxing tasks for long or get into a creative flow. For many, the pandemic has exacerbated dependence on social media and other digital vices"
Smartphone is now 'the place where we live', anthropologists say | Smartphones | The Gu... - 0 views
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""The smartphone is no longer just a device that we use, it's become the place where we live," said Prof Daniel Miller, who led the study. "The flip side of that for human relationships is that at any point, whether over a meal, a meeting or other shared activity, a person we're with can just disappear, having 'gone home' to their smartphone.""
Screen time is as addictive as junk food - how do we wean children off? | Social media ... - 0 views
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"Some ideas include building mechanisms into devices or platforms that cause them to shut down automatically after two hours, or nudges that make it more difficult to keep spending money in an app. The problem is that tech companies are ruled by a profit model built on capturing more of our attention to sell to advertisers. Designing platforms so they limit the amount of time we spend on social media runs counter to this model."
Instagram at 10: how sharing photos has entertained us, upset us - and changed our sens... - 0 views
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"Instagram turned our phones into adult pacifiers. At first, this was a tranquillising reel of pretty pictures, pumped in a steady stream with each thumb-swipe. Like a warm milky drink, but of sunsets and puppies and toes in the sand. Later, and more insidiously, the dopamine hit shifted to refreshing your feed to see how many likes your own pictures had. Either way, we had got ourselves in a feedback loop of attention-seeking in which our emotions were channelled from our brains to our phones and back again. Twitter is about your tribe, Facebook is about home and family, but Instagram is a romance between just you and your phone."
The Citizen crime app hasn't made me safer - just more scared | Emma Brockes | Opinion ... - 0 views
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"Citizen, which was launched in 2017, is a glorified police scanner that promises to help users "stay safe and informed". It invites input from witnesses - mostly involving shaky phone footage of police milling around while a stretcher is carted by in the background - and, bafflingly, includes a comments section, in which users speculate fatuously on the crime in question and quibble over the accuracy of the map function. It is grimly fascinating, mildly addictive and, relative to its stated aims, totally without value."
Problematic Smartphone Use: Addiction or Compulsion? - 0 views
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"Many studies like these describe heavy users as addicted to smartphones. But the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the official guidebook for psychiatric diagnoses released in 2013, does not view smartphones as addictive. The manual separates behavioral and substance-use problems for the first time, but online gambling is the only behavioral addiction recognized by the DSM-5, as it's called."
Olivia Laing: 'I was hooked and my drug was Twitter' | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views
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"I wasn't so much addicted to the spectacle as to the ongoing certainty that the next click, the next link, would bring clarity. I felt like if I watched everything, if I read every last conspiracy theory and threaded tweet, the reward would be illumination. I would finally be able to understand not just what was happening but what it meant and what consequences it would have. But there was never a definitive conclusion. I'd taken up residence in a hothouse for paranoia, a factory manufacturing speculation and mistrust."
Indian police threaten to arrest those caught playing online shooter game PUBG -- Socie... - 0 views
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"Just ahead of the first anniversary of its release, Indian law enforcers are accusing the popular game of inciting violence and distracting kids from their studies, even pushing for a large-scale prohibition of the "battle-royal" style shooter. Following numerous complaints by parents, a temporary ban on the mobile app was first announced by police in metropolitan Rajkot, with some other cities multiplayer-game soon following suit. While the current ban only extends until March 30, the police and children's rights watchdog are petitioning New Delhi to ban the game altogether"
'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia | Technol... - 0 views
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"There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called "continuous partial attention", severely limiting people's ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity - even when the device is turned off. "Everyone is distracted," Rosenstein says. "All of the time.""