> "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.
> 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. ;)
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.
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.
>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.
>Makes sense. Hypersocial seems like a good thing to me. Am I the only person who likes how connected phones have made us?
No, there are some others too. Not me though.
I dislike how connected they make us to all kinds of harmful imperatives (spam, advertisement, surveillance, bosses, entitled people, etc.) and how disconnected they enable and encourage most of us to be from actual friends -- not just "here for you" friends, but also casual have a good time friends, with whom 20 years ago you would go out with or visit, as opposed to exchanging comments online.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.