• 30 Posts
  • 134 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 24th, 2023

help-circle

  • No such thing as “smartphone addiction” anyway. Not liking boredom is a fairly normal human instinct and the fact that we can now at almost all times use smartphones to get rid of boredom is a good thing. Quick reminder that “Internet addiction” started out as a satirical concept. Addiction is normally about substance use, maybe gambling; calling all hobbies or habits “addictions” completely devalues the concept.

    Digital technology can be used for so many different things in so many different ways that it’s completely stupid to demonize it in general. I acknowledge that watching a steady stream of short videos (on TikTok or similar) for hours isn’t a very productive way to spend one’s time, but there are so many other things that can be done on screens!







  • I was already posting on web forums (also wikis) before Facebook or Twitter became popular, when the Internet was not yet very established and posting things on it oneself was something only few people thought of doing.

    I was outright excited when I saw “social media” becoming more mainstream. I thought at the time, at least more people are using the Internet, even if it’s “just” Facebook or Twitter (which I didn’t and still don’t see much value in), at least it’s the Internet, that’s a good thing because the Internet is a great and exciting thing for society and a wonderful source of entertainment!

    Now we live in a world where the general public mostly only knows how to operate social media apps, otherwise has no tech proficiency at all, doesn’t even know what else is out there on the Internet, and doesn’t know or care how the social media apps they’re using are designed to manipulate them. And politicians are busy working to make it harder for good idealistic people to solve those problems. :(
















  • France: wants to switch to open source software

    also France: wants to ban social media for young people

    Do they, in all seriousness, not see exactly how fundamentally contradictory those things are? Open source software development depends on it being possible and relatively easy to host websites that allow the general public to participate so that they can collaborate on open source software development on such websites. Banning “social media” (not endorsing that term) for young people means requiring such websites to implement age verification systems, making it much more difficult and expensive to start such websites and make it possible to collaborate on open source software development. I cannot believe that this is so hard to understand for politicians.