Are smartphones serving as adult pacifiers?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/02/26/cellphones-security-blankets/

by pseudolus • 4 years ago

148 76 4 years ago

Are smartphones serving as adult pacifiers?

Absolutely yes!

I wrote plenty about it in Digital Vegan but there's only time and space to touch the surface of the psychology and research in a short accessible book.

https://digitalvegan.net

I'm working on a new study with attachment theory experts looking at the ways we form emotional bonds with digital devices and how they become transitional or proxy objects.

MandieD2• 4 years ago

“Digital Vegan contains 50 short chapters suitable for daily reading…”

Hey, just about right for this year’s Lent, in which I intend to closely examine my relationship with technology, because I can’t tell where “mommy brain” stops and where a deeper problem with attention and concentration driven by how I’m using the internet begins. I’m kicking it off with Carr’s “The Shallows,” but your book might be a good way to ensure I get through something every day.

nonrandomstring3• 4 years ago

FWIW Mandie, here's my list of modern pop tech critique, all topics that DV touches at least tangentially. Far more than 40 days and nights worth of reading

Shoshana Zuboff Big Other (surveillance capitalism)

Virginia Eubanks Automating Inequality

Sophie Brickman Baby Unplugged

Cory Doctorow Radicalized

Mike Monteiro Ruined by Design

Nick Srnicek Platform Capitalism

Paul Kingsnorth Life versus the machine

Heather Burns Understanding Privacy

Roger McNamee Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe

Siva Vaidhyanathan Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us

Catherine Price How to Break Up With Your Phone

Thomas Kersting Disconnected: Protect Your Kids Against Device Dependency

Nicholas Kardaras Glow Kids

Zeynep Tufekci Twitter and Tear Gas

Lelia Green Technoculture

Douglas Rushkoff Team Human

Jaron Lanier Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media

Carissa Véliz Privacy is Power: Why You Should Take Back Control

Xiaowei Wang Blockchain Chicken Farm

Jenny Oddell How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

Wendy Liu Abolish SIlicon Valley

Jonathan Taplin Move Fast and Break Things

Andrew L. Shapiro The Control Revolution

Lawrence Lessig Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace

David Shenk Data Smog

Douglas Rushkoff Cyberia

Paulina Borsook Cyberselfish.

leobg3• 4 years ago

At first glance: Very intriguing way to look at it. On second thoughts: The analogy doesn’t seem to hold. People who put their phone away for the weekend actually report feeling happier and more relaxed. I don’t think that would be true of a baby if you take its pacifier away (provided the baby is conditioned to use one for emotional self regulation).

nicoburns• 4 years ago

If you took a baby's pacifier away and actually gave it your full attention it probably would.

leobg3• 4 years ago

Very true. Wouldn’t need a pacifier in the first place then!

LeifCarrotson• 4 years ago

...are you a parent? Apparently not!

Two parents can give a child their full attention, but infants can be fickle, picky creatures. I've been stuck in quite a few situations where the pacifier got driven off in Mom's car and the backup isn't in my bag - stranded away from supply lines without the required materiel. My son would only pull on his thumb or mine for a couple seconds before wailing...and, yes, trying again, but it was a pretty short attempt and a high duty cycle on the crying.

You do parents a disservice and assume the worst, probably based on a few narcissistic jerks, sure, but if there was anything I or many other parents could do for their kids we would do it. If I could have made my son comfortable in those situations I would have.

Sometimes they don't want Mom and they don't want Dad, they don't have to poop and they don't want to sleep, they don't want to play, they don't want to eat, they don't want to bounce, they don't want to sing....they want their pacifier. Nothing else will do. Not even Grandma...

globular-toast• 4 years ago

It depends if those feelings of happiness are immediate or eventual. A child does need to eventually give up the comfort of nipple or womb. I am sceptical if people report immediate feelings of happiness, though. That sounds more like novelty and wanting it to be true.

mike50• 4 years ago

Is legacy media wasting my time with click bait?

zeroonetwothree2• 4 years ago

When hasn’t it done so

WhompingWindows• 4 years ago

Click bait from all content producers exists to waste our time. The one goal of clickbait is to get you to click so their ads load and they make a few cents.

Has anyone seen this trend on YT recently? The videos are much shorter and much more click-baity. I do worry that it's pushing our attentions down down to the lowest common denominator, which seems to be 30-60 seconds.

genewitch• 4 years ago

there was an indication that YT shorts was able to be gamed, and it was unstoppable. I tested the theory and it was true for a short while, but it looks like google was able to "stop it". If you uploaded a #shorts tagged video it would be fed to everyone seemingly "at random" and you would get a ton of views and interaction. I uploaded a dumb 8 second video about the local mail truck and it got 800 views, far more than any other video i've uploaded in the last decade.

I don't know that google even actually fixed it, i think the idea that it could be gamed sort of fixed it by deluge of #shorts videos, this diluting the pool so that your video was less likely to appear at random.

This is simplified a bit; but the point is, once upon a 2008ish, youtube decided that monetization should be harder, and this was around the time that fully monetized videos were required to be 10 minutes long. This was a paradigm shift, considering that in the old days there were length limits to individual videos imposed on youtube (and google videos), first being quite short (possibly even 10 minutes) and eventually ran out to 30 minutes, and now where i'm unsure if there's even a 'real' limit on video length. I know there are some 20+ hour videos on youtube.

So in order to appease advertisers, youtube made it so content producers had to fill their time with fluff, which is why there was an adage that still holds true - on a computer, when a youtube video starts, press "3" to skip the irrelevant stuff (hey guys its... hit the like and...).

Tiktok and instagram have brought back the drive-by short videos, youtube attempted to capitalize on the short video craze (originally vine et al started the trend, but further back even ytmnd and .webm did it as well), and now it's a race to the bottom. I fully expect the most popular video by view count and impact to be less than 8 seconds long in 2022.

atomicnumber3• 4 years ago

I'm currently watching a major military conflict unfold in near real-time via Reddit, so I'm going to go with either no, or yes but the definition of pacifier is really weird.

Glibness aside, I think sure, for some people all of the time, and for all people some of the time, a phone is just a pacifier. But it's also our window into basically the entire wealth of human knowledge, indexed better than it has ever been in all of history. So I really think that's something worth not selling so short.

jt2190• 4 years ago

But it's also our window into basically the entire wealth of human knowledge…

Yes, true, but the article discusses how physical presence of the device itself reassures its owner, and conversely how upsetting it can be for the owner to be without their device. Part of that reassurance may come from, as you say, having a window into the entire wealth of human knowledge, or from having a connection to friends and family, etc.

AniseAbyss• 4 years ago

I recall that the Japanese were the first to make waterproof mobile phones so that people could keep chatting while taking a shower.

On a personal observation: in the beginning I frequently forgot my phone. Now it is as standard to me as a wallet or keys. I can subconsciously feel its weight in my pocket.

fein• 4 years ago

But it's also our window into basically the entire wealth of human knowledge

If you're consuming all of your coverage through reddit, I think you're conflating one side's propaganda with "knowledge". It (the internet) used to be a window into a wealth of human knowledge, but at the current state of things it is merely another vector to help you mainline <insert large company's> propaganda engine and, for most that don't run ad blockers, stuff you full of advertisements.

Ten, maybe 15 years ago your statement would have been more true, but the internet has become progressively smaller and the content more curated by big money interests than any time in the past.

fartcannon4• 4 years ago

Reddit and Facebook basically the same thing these days. Both seem to have audiences 35+, both are full of PR/propaganda and both have valuable niche information.

The internet sucks now, basically.

shadowgovt• 4 years ago

The Internet used to be full of potential, but very empty. I remember.

It took a ton of human labor (literal billions of human-hours) to get as much on as we have now. Unfortunately, that, of course, means for any given topic, the signal-noise ratio suffers (consider, in one's own mind, how much knowledge is useful and how much is pop music lyrics).

warner252• 4 years ago

Do you say this because the people producing the content are using smartphones to post videos and live updates?

Because I can access the entire wealth of human knowledge just fine by sitting down with my laptop, avoiding some of the issues with having a smartphone on me at all times. I'm currently listening to Digital Minimalism (audiobook on my smartphone, haha) and Cal Newport makes the case that most things should wait until you can get home and use your laptop.

krallja• 4 years ago

I put a label “INTERNET HATE MACHINE” on my iPad after a while, because what I really used it for was getting outraged by crap on Twitter instead of going to bed. I deleted Twitter.app and started playing casual games instead, and slept slightly better. Finally I got rid of the iPad and moved my phone charger to the far side of my bedroom. My sleep improved a lot. Then I had another baby! All I have the energy for now is shallow web browsing and memes.

zeroonetwothree2• 4 years ago

Pacifiers aren’t necessarily bad. We all need some help feel better

chiefofgxbxl• 4 years ago

The analogy to pacifiers may be overly condescending (equating adults to children), but in general I have adopted the view that smartphone usage in public is essentially second-hand smoke, and that hopefully within the next 1-2 decades the public will finally begin to recognize this as widespread addiction and begin setting some limits.

I got into computers when I was in early elementary school, and that began my track toward exploration and software development. There's no doubt that my mom's worries of me being addicted to the computer were absolutely true - entire summers were spent on the computer.

What's different about computer addiction and smartphone addiction is that computer usage is more limited in where you can do it. My computer-addicted young self would not have been able to whip out a desktop computer at a restaurant, barbershop, or waiting in line to pick up an order. But with smartphones essentially being "pocket computers", people can use them anywhere - even driving.

I do believe in personal choice, so I don't want to be heavy handed, but I imagine our society will need to grapple with this problem. I see couples on dates with each other in restaurants, both on their phones nearly the entire time scrolling through endless feeds. I watch sports events where any small break in play people need to pull out their phones. There is no presence anymore, and public space (along with suburbanization) has rapidly eroded over the past 10-15 years since smartphones were invented. Now commercials for phones/5G normalize the idea that you should be able to download/stream a movie on your phone walking down a sidewalk.

There's a balance that needs to be struck here, and it's going to be difficult to reach because we're still relatively in the infancy of these fancy electronic gadgets. Particularly in the US where individualism and personal choice is so deeply part of our culture, it will be difficult to restore the public space so that we can come to expect if you go out in public, people are actually... present and there. But somehow we eventually came to the same conclusion with banning smoking in restaurants et. al.

themodelplumber3• 4 years ago

essentially second-hand smoke

Even if we took this as a valid statement on its face, it's also

- A personal safety tool used by vulnerable people to protect themselves, from joggers to the mentally ill

- A way of checking in on one's family member suffering from illness

- Access to information that is contextually important like specific venue masking guidelines

- A means of spending time with family; as long as work knows they can reach you, you are good.

Etc.

I think it's a good idea to ask not only if we still want to be "blame the tool" people, or "blame the people" people, but also whether we want to open up this general context where we enshroud efforts to project values in a casement that looks like generalized blame of device and person both.

IMO we can do better than methods that turn into "see something, shame something" especially when so many details matter.

ryandrake• 4 years ago

I'm not sure I agree that it's second-hand smoke to the public, but it's definitely first-hand smoke to the user.

I mean, yea it's great you can use the smartphone to do those noble things you listed, but that's not what 99% of the people standing in line, head crooked down, eyes glazed, thumb flying back and forth are doing. They're scrolling insta or snap, or tiktok, chasing that continuous dopamine drip. I remember pre-pandemic walking past a huge line outside of a movie theater, and every single person was scrolling content, eerily silent, not even talking to the people they were with. These people were not checking in on local safety information.

I'm not going to shame them. If that's how you want to live your life, it doesn't affect me. I don't care if the guy in front of me in line is high on drugs or high on instagram as long as 1. I don't smell it and 2. he moves forward along with everyone when the line moves.

eternityforest2• 4 years ago

I'd hate to see them regulated, or... how would I ever remember anything? With paper? I'd be hosed if I lost it, and I lose... everything.. including my keys and wallet.... all the time, which I also use my phone to find.

The 1990s solution was just to really amplify the public space. Things like the rainforest cafe were very normal aesthetically. We essentially used clickbait in real life.

Smartphones are one half of it. The other half is we have kind of deprecated public spaces as an idea. We hardly even have them besides restaurants!

Even virtually, we don't have anything like true community forms to the degree we used to. Single player epics are a major game genre. Watching netflix is the new pastime, etc. Most of our big cultural things are fairly private now.

We even talk about privacy probably more than any other technical topic, and that is very new. Nobody but pirates would have known what a VPN was till know, and it was common to not care what the NSA knows about you(Ok, a lot of us like me are still like that).

And at the same time, everything has become about sex more than ever before, and even that seems to be more of a private thing than a public Hollywood drama spectacle.

The concept of a "dream job" is widely mocked. Everything seems to be seen as just some infrastructure to support private life.

What do you... do in public exactly? We are told every day it's just place you go to get ready to be at home.

Banning phones would just lead to everyone staring at a wall instead of a phone, until we actually restablish the public sphere as a real thing.

brnaftr361• 4 years ago

We've been very unconscious about our acceptance and deployment of technologies, and I don't know that there's really any way around that. It's sort of a Catch-22, technologies empower the individual. Reflecting on it, they tend to create a path of least resistance which is typically isolated (visiting Radio Shack in person as opposed to online). This isolation is inhumane though, we're social animals at heart, but it's way easier to find exactly what you want in the online catalogue of literally everything than it is to move around in the physical world, dealing with x, y, and z. Ultimately, as an arbitrary unit (society?), we've sort of walled ourselves into a really undesirable landscape that I'd argue we're pretty actually fucking averse to.

We hand off these novelties to future generations without any real bearing, all the organizations, traditions, adaptations, and more or less say "You figure it out." And the craziest thing is just the fucking rapidity of it all. Think of life in the 1920's. People have lived that long, 100 years. Imagine the cognitive whiplash watching highways and motor vehicles emerging, radio, television, the nuclear bomb, commercial airliners and transcontinental travel being trivialized, mass warfare, helicopters, wireless communication, calculators, computers, internet and the list goes on - every alteration of the nuanced fiber weave of the social fabric that all those techniques have shorn, altered or displaced.

We have no real reference point in the here and now that can comprehensively assist us in a meaningful convergence, we've sort of been shot into a dark vacuum entirely unconscious of the consequences with the pretense that it's what we desire. But I think we're quickly coming to find, at least those conscious of the implications, is that what we desire isn't necessarily good for us.

But the thing is, I don't think it's probable that we could really retard the unraveling of a technology. If it wasn't Ford it would've been someone else. I don't think it's possible to limit human curiosity, if not culture A, then culture B will ask the questions.

mellavora• 4 years ago

how would I ever remember anything? With paper?

memory is a skill. Paper is useful.

If I want to remember something I write it down, or I train the memory. The phone is so ephemeral, just a vague cloud without landmarks or permanence-- how would I find the information again after I put it in my phone?

Your system (probably) works well for you, and I'm happy you have something which serves your needs.

SyzygistSix2• 4 years ago

The other half is we have kind of deprecated public spaces as an idea

We used to use the coffee house/bar in my town as the public house, where news was spread and discussions took place. The demise of such places has been very unfortunate and our interaction is now much poorer in both quantity and quality. Facebook/Twitter/Reddit are poor replacements, although I do like my town's subreddit.

I really don't know how we are going to reestablish public places again but I hope it happens. I would love to see something like the cafeterias in Mexico City where people go to have coffee, eat, talk, play games, and catch up with each other.

SweetLlamaMyth• 4 years ago

essentially second hand smoke

This is a weird argument to me, since second hand smoke causes cancer. I agree that we're probably more distracted than is good for us, and there are contexts where that's a public health risk (specifically when driving), but until we see evidence that public phone use causes bystanders to get cancer, equating the two seems hyperbolic.

Freak_NL• 4 years ago

As a parent of a three year old, one of the worst things to me is seeing other parents pushing a pram with the baby facing the parent, but the parent facing their smartphone; their mind somewhere else. I know I'm an outsider on this topic; I don't have a smartphone¹, but I just can't fathom how you can let that thing get between you and your child in that crucial bonding phase babies go through. How is this not an addiction?

I fully agree with your smoking analogy. I wonder how long it will be before the majority sees it that way too.

1: Technically speaking I do, but its a smartphone with Ubuntu on it (Meizu sold them years ago). As it is now long out of updates and as society is pushing hard to have certain apps available (banking, authentication, messaging), I will probably have to get an Android soon. I have no intention of changing my behaviour with these devices though.

spicybright• 4 years ago

I get your sentiment, but treating it like second hand smoke seems a bit silly. There's no health risk if a stranger on the train wants to be on their phone instead of talking to me.

Before covid, I went to a few speed dating events with a "no phone" policy. And no one had any trouble with that. We also already have "no phone" on occasion, like on quiet cars on trains.

So do we need cell phone free spaces enforced by law instead of social politeness? What spaces should be cell phone free.

blululu3• 4 years ago

Quick take: this is second rate research (b-school professors have all the irrelevance of real academics with none of the substance). The research from UPenn seems blissfully unaware of any previous research on attachment objects from psychology. They start with a click bait title and then try to bolt on some poorly construed studies. You would never throw away an attachment object after 2 years. A smartphone is a meta object that acts as a portal to a great variety of potentialities. Trying to describe it in terms of a physical object ignores the last 50 years of media theory.

shephardjhon• 4 years ago

There is the CS's famed eletism and gate keeping. Just because its not Harvard or Stanford its not relevant? I am a CS grad myself but there is so much toxicity in the community when looking at places like HN. And I am not saying anything about your point. Maybe you are right, I just hate that you start off with 'b-school bad' argument.

ciphol• 4 years ago

I think what they actually said was "Just because it's business school it's not relevant"

blululu3• 4 years ago

UPenn is a well regarded school. Its business school is generally regarded to be the best of the lot. Wharton professors are generally not on the receiving side of elitism. This research is simply very low quality. It maybe gratifies a certain sensibility. We all know that using our phones too much can be a problem and this research makes for a pithy form of name calling. But beyond a quick insult against a perceived threat the core thesis just makes no sense in light of the past 50 years of research on psychology and media.

orev• 4 years ago

You would never throw away an attachment object after 2 years.

When upgrading to a new device, even though all the data is copied over and the Home Screen looks identical, I still briefly feel a bit of empathy(?) for the old device as I’m packing it up getting ready to sell it. It’s been in my pocket or at my side pretty much 24x7 for the past 2-3 years, and if nothing else I feel a bit mindful and thankful for its service.

There’s definitely a level of attachment there, even if it doesn’t meet some clinical definition of “attachment object”.

Retric• 4 years ago

It’s common for kids to run through multiple identical attachment objects, especially when they break easily and have therefore been replaced before.

Here’s one study where 5 of 18 kids decide to keep a “new” duplicate in favor of the original item. http://minddevlab.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Childre...

xyzzy123• 4 years ago

I read that study the opposite way around. That children will accept duplicates if an object is "desirable" but they have no particular attachment to it. However if there is a strong existing attachment to a specific object (e.g. security blanket) the copy is less valued.

anothernewdude• 4 years ago

You literally throw away actual pacifiers and replace them.

civilized• 4 years ago

As they say on Twitter: it's bad on purpose to make you click.

themodelplumber3• 4 years ago

It's funny to see words like "isolation" when so many people use their phone for what they'd more likely describe as "solitude," but also "protection," and in many cases things like "connection," etc.

So instead of allowing ourselves to be railroaded by someone's unfortunately one-sided choice of descriptors, maybe we should ask:

- Pacifier _and also_ therapeutic assistant?

- Adult _and also_ continually developing human?

Otherwise, playing one side of the dichotomy is by its nature demonstrating something far worse than a smart phone, which itself is a practical ocean of different engagement levels, options, and tools. It's demonstrating a single engagement level, a single option, a single way of using a tool.

kosasbest• 4 years ago

It amazes me that the form factor of a phone has stayed with us for so long. I genuinely thought there would be some brain-computer interface by now that is invisible and we could interact with Google et al when we needed to quickly summon information about a topic / situation.

beebeepka• 4 years ago

Nueralink and their ilk haven't killed enough animals yet. That's why you don't have these devices attached to your head.

Give it a decade or so

superkuh• 4 years ago

Is radio serving as an adult pacifier? Are newspapers serving as adult pacifiers? Are books serving as adult pacifiers?

They're ways of distributing information and how you use them is entirely up to you. I'm sure some people are. Some aren't. It has very little to do with mobile computers with wireless modems.

spacemanmatt• 4 years ago

Fair point. I might need an actual pacifier that says, "Just look back down to your cell phone" on the front.

vangelis• 4 years ago

If you're at a rave, pacifiers are serving as adult pacifiers.

mickduprez• 4 years ago

It's not the smart phones, it's the social media app's on them. I don't remember anyone staring into their nokia 3110 every 5 minutes (except for a quick game of snake in the waiting line perhaps :) )

ivan_ah• 4 years ago

archive link https://archive.is/QuZGr

kkfx• 4 years ago

I know a thing well: smartphones do serve very well for deep and spread surveillance. They are almost substantially mandatory (many banks in many country mandate their own app for web auth, for instance) and they are macro-spy instead of micro ones, that instead of being payed bye the one who spy are payed by the one that get spied who also ensure proper power and connectivity.

Other side effects are far, far less relevant...

cyanydeez• 4 years ago

is the republican party serving as pacifiers for political action?

bjoli• 4 years ago

Off-topic anecdote: I made one of those smartphone magnetic stands/hand supports with a pacifier just to annoy younger colleagues that were glued to their phones.

I got a pacifier with a solid base, clipped off any small pertrusions, sand papered it flat, drilled a small pit and glued a magnet in. Smoothed out the edges, applied a thin layer of epoxy as lacquer and support.

The best part is that I used a strong magnet so that I could hold the phone in my mouth by the pacifier whenever I needed both hands.

Anyway, fashion changed and suddenly my pockets became a little bit too tight, so I stopped using it.

Are smartphones serving as adult pacifiers?

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