Partly agree. I agree that what makes old tech good is agency, but I find it strange that you offer as an example "handing a 5yo a phone with a documentary". Phones give you no agency, other than play and stop. They don't work for you, they work for their master (Google or apple).
I think the point was that the five-year-old will get bored of the documentary, so it's not merely the phone that's addictive, it's the content that the apps have on them.
Indeed, the irony of me complaining that the article confuses problem... only for me to do the same!
Indeed a video on a phone provides very limited agency. I was mostly trying to highlight, as someone else pointed out, that demanding content will not have the same effect. Thus blaming the device itself is wrong.
Edit: shit... now when I acknowledge my mistake I sound like a sycophantic chatbot! Ugh. Edited to replace "You're right" by "Indeed". I'll have to remember that.
It's not controversial, I've heard the same for about 10 years now. I still thinking they're wrong - people who need control cant really on social network apps. People who are just "consumers", sure, but those already don't know what a browser is, so it's not really a prediction about the future it's a statement about the present.
Does tape array replace castor? Just from the names it sounds like tape array is the actual storage, and castor is an abstraction that automatically decides what's kept on disk and what's kept on tape
The abstraction isn’t really a thing any more. It was a nice idea but in practice it’s an operational nightmare not knowing if data is available and for how long it will be. For reference staging can take days during intense activity and you don’t want to loose performance randomly seeking around and switching between tapes.
Screens aren't inherently bad. It's about the quality. I think your instincts are 100% spot on, keep trusting them.
But quality/distractions aside, there are other dimensions to consider. For example, reading does take more effort than most videogames, and that's brain exercise that will make a difference in aggregate (the assumption being that books and videogames are both entertainment, they compete against each other to some degree, and doing a lot of one means you'll do less of the other). So in short, playing videogames a lot isn't bad in itself, depends on the videogames. But on the other hand books have additional positive sideffects on top of the primary effect which is entertainment.
They definitely compete, but reading is somewhat of a "poor hobby" from the social aspect (reading out loud takes away from the experience), but the imagination part of reading is way more than you do in videogames.
At the same time, the "puzzle solving" skill you do in videogames is way more than you'd do in a book, so there is that.
I played Blue Prince with my wife and daughter recently, I think I have 40 pages of notebook written down, along with spy-like photos of everything relevant in the game: that was very intense from the brain perspective.
But I do see your point.
However, I second guess myself constantly, it's really hard, especially because I did go through some form of game addiction and my way out was going very deep until I realized I wasn't even having fun (yes, mmorpg are similar to free-to-play games: compete for your attention).
I push strongly for single-player pay-once videogames, especially indie games, on consoles and PC. Split-screen coop games without online component are great too, or where the online component is a way to "split screen with people not in your home".
Anyway, thank you for the message, gave me some relief I'm not ruining my kids life, lol.
> However, if you actually read any of these papers, they make it quite clear that is impossible to fully separate screen effects from family environment, and effect sizes are often modest.
The "does smoking caused cancer" question took about 20 years to be settled, I believe between 1950 and 70 or something like that. And yet, a lot of people already knew already in the 20s that smoking does all sort of weird things to your throat. So the common sense take got to the right answer much faster than scientists.
Likewise with screens. Common sense tells us that 1) we FEEL the distractions and the addictions, common sense says that children will too, 2) we KNOW that the companies building these products have an interested in distracting us, common sense says that they will act on it.
But then we have takes like "akshually if you read the papers".
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