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We've Reached 'Peak Screen'. So What Comes Next? (wral.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the New York Times:
We've hit what I call Peak Screen. For much of the last decade, a technology industry ruled by smartphones has pursued a singular goal of completely conquering our eyes. It has given us phones with ever-bigger screens and phones with unbelievable cameras, not to mention virtual reality goggles and several attempts at camera-glasses. Tech has now captured pretty much all visual capacity. Americans spend three to four hours a day looking at their phones and about 11 hours a day looking at screens of any kind.
So tech giants are building the beginning of something new: a less insistently visual tech world, a digital landscape that relies on voice assistants, headphones, watches and other wearables to take some pressure off our eyes. This could be a nightmare; we may simply add these new devices to our screen-addled lives. But depending on how these technologies develop, a digital ecosystem that demands less of our eyes could be better for everyone -- less immersive, less addictive, more conducive to multitasking, less socially awkward, and perhaps even a salve for our politics and social relations. Who will bring us this future? Amazon and Google are clearly big players, but don't discount the company that got us to Peak Screen in the first place. With advances to the Apple Watch and AirPods headphones, Apple is slowly and almost quietly creating an alternative to its phones... If it works, it could change everything again.
Warning that screens are insatiable vampires for your attention, the piece argues we should be using our phones more mindfully -- and exploring "less immersive ways to interact with the digital world" like Google and Amazon voice assisants.
"The sooner we find something else, the better."
So tech giants are building the beginning of something new: a less insistently visual tech world, a digital landscape that relies on voice assistants, headphones, watches and other wearables to take some pressure off our eyes. This could be a nightmare; we may simply add these new devices to our screen-addled lives. But depending on how these technologies develop, a digital ecosystem that demands less of our eyes could be better for everyone -- less immersive, less addictive, more conducive to multitasking, less socially awkward, and perhaps even a salve for our politics and social relations. Who will bring us this future? Amazon and Google are clearly big players, but don't discount the company that got us to Peak Screen in the first place. With advances to the Apple Watch and AirPods headphones, Apple is slowly and almost quietly creating an alternative to its phones... If it works, it could change everything again.
Warning that screens are insatiable vampires for your attention, the piece argues we should be using our phones more mindfully -- and exploring "less immersive ways to interact with the digital world" like Google and Amazon voice assisants.
"The sooner we find something else, the better."
piece argues we should be using our phones more mindfully -- and exploring "less immersive ways to interact with the digital world" like Google and Amazon voice assisants.
Those voice assistant devices violate your privacy more than your phone's manufacturer even dreamed.
My phone is rooted and under my control. I don't allow apps with ads or those that steal my data. Is anything like that possible with one of those listening devices?
First it will be maximum defentiion screens with graphics on the other side of the uncanny valley. Then your whole sensory system will be contolled for ads and tracking and law enforcement. There will be taste attacks, smell attacks and other sensory attacks by hackers and trolls. shitposting will become literal.
Like ebooks without the electrons? What happens if there's no Wi-Fi?
What in Sam Hill were we all doing with those senses before all this technical shit?
I'm 72 years old and I'm totally guilty of looking at something for 11 fucking hours a day.
How about an article about how dancing the Twist causes injuries?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Here’s a question: Why are we listening to someone rant about "screens"? We get it. You have an observation about modern life and you are sure we all need to hear it. Ok. We heard it. Thanks for your observation. Can we all get back to minding our own business now? Please?
Thanks in advance.
1984 is here and large parts of the population are volunteering to be a part of it.
Focusing on one thing at a time and doing it well. Virtual desktops are great for that. Out of sight, out of mind. Your computer can handle more data than what is immediately visible. If you're more than about 3 years old, you'll understand that things remain in existence even outside your field of view, and you can get back to them when it's time.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Like ebooks without the electrons? What happens if there's no Wi-Fi?
You can read sci-fi without wi-fi. High five!
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
That means there won't be any more increases in the number of screens, size of screens, or time spent looking at screens.
This article is asinine.
Are the next version of screens - as long as Google doesn't go full-douchebag (like they will) and install cameras in them with telemetry.
With all that cinema film cleaned up and made 8K ready.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Eventually, AR will free us from these pocket displays, and we'll start the progression towards ubiquitous always-present AR. It won't peak until it is embedded in our eyeballs or wired to the optic nerve.
True. I used to swear by my Kindle and in the last year and a half I've been reading -- and have bought -- almost entirely only paper books.
Mental peace in our time.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
UX teams at Microsoft, Google and Apple started this downward trend. Junk slowly destroyed our multidimensional interactions by hiding options from our (or, should I say "their") property by removing a visual dimension at a time.
We're devolving from the already-poor web3.0 husks of Menus, Toolbars, and local help files so revered in the eighties and nineties to a place where none of them exist even when a screen is present (your phone is less and less likely to have physical buttons so when on fullscreen you end up pixel hunting, long-pressing the screen looking for hidden popup menus, and quitting a program because settings option only appears from certain hidden contexts... )
So now it's common for the only option to be a blank screen with an ill-placed hamburger menu and minimal output and they're killing even that.* We've fallen a long way down from the days when a rich menu had a Preferences entry that led to a dialog with a multiple rows of tabs.
The commercial world is basically hiding all help files, menus, toolbars and buttons behind a blackbox, offering screenless products that are forcing users to move their vocal cords to trigger little more functionality than a linear command-line. They're stepping back into the DOS days, except worse... those times used to gift us with keyboards and a screen, and obligatory user training on usage and error correction back then. You end up with situations like everyone slashdot who on this week's Google Home outage may have thought of visiting the store because the "Sorry, something went wrong" error for all commands and even involving local alarm clocks or casting. It's the ultimate blackbox-ification since the product is broken without the net (there was really no help or GUI indication of what to do, so it's not hard to empathize with the guy).
We now have the Pebble "smart" watch where the date/time menu makes it impossible to actually SET the date and time. When the device is discharged it resets to 12:00 of some obscure day. A watch with such a reasonable set of hardware buttons shouldn't have to be paired with an app on a phone just to tell it the time, man!
Chromecasts and Fitbits are worse, with no screens. I see more "convenient" Wifi features from printers and recent dedicated cameras that want to roam free on our home networks (along with IoT garbage and Windows 10 and our Sony smart tvs ) and demand installation of an always-on app. There used to be a time when we do a one-time wired setup where a CD installer took care of everything, and then some http maintenance config option would remain for convenience without having the company spy on you.
We even have this little-used WPS button that could get adapted precisely to get past the issue of inputting a Wifi password on a screenless device. Heck,
all bluetooth devices avoid the App trap by having a pairing button and a clear default pin... but no, people just want to plug something in, install an app that will snitch on them, and then be locked out of their verbal command line when the service hiccups.
* And like their Google map page does when you visit blocked scripts "When you have removed the javascript, what remains must be an empty page". Infuriating, considering 20 years ago the word ran maps oblivious to javascript settings, so this "must" is self-imposed, and with ill intentions knowning today's greed for analytics crimes.
Lots of nice shiny pricey rock to work and polish and sell. Far more entertaining than the internet because you truly never know what you'll see when you're finished.
Meanwhile, the internet is pretty easy to break down: Porn, fake news, privacy invasions, idiots everywhere, data mining, advertising, memes, censorship, social justice warriors, control freaks (did I just accidentally repeat myself?) cowardly anonymous fucks that like to claim people are doing things which they themselves are the ones are likely to be doing, religious/spiritual/new wave nutjobs, snake oil salesmen, and rarely do you come across useful information/discourse now thanks to how search engines and most major sites have geared to serve you advertising, not information.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Like ebooks without the electrons? What happens if there's no Wi-Fi?
You can read sci-fi without wi-fi. High five!
Maybe, but you're stuck reading that one book.... That's why I have a Kindle... Download a ton of books once, power lasts for just over a week without a charge (depending on how often you use the back light)... great for camping, vacations, and power outages...
We used to bitch about having to run programs on our desktops so we could bring printed contact and route map information into the field when we needed them. Now we do the same thing on our portable screens. No, we're not becoming zombies because we look at our screens when we need info on the fly any more than we all became addicted to comics in the Thirties or TV in the Fifties.
We already use voice assistants as macros as an alternative to calling up multiple apps successively. I can go into Contacts, select Joseph Blow, tap his address to bring it up in Maps, and then tap the sequence to go into voice navigation. Or I can say, "Hey Siri, navigate to Joseph Blow!" without looking at the screen.
iOS 12 will open Siri up as an API for third-party apps. This will mean a lot more voice macros replacing screen time. Time for a moral panic over Peak Mouth.
True. I used to swear by my Kindle and in the last year and a half I've been reading -- and have bought -- almost entirely only paper books.
Never going back to books, too bulky... I used to buy 10 to 15 books (hardcover and paperback) for summer vacation and have to pack a cardboard box. Now I just throw my kindle into my computer bag. I charge a battery pack with solar and use it to charge the Kindle, which only has to be done once, if that, over a 2 week vacation. Plus, our entire family shares one Kindle account so all of the books we buy are available in one library.
The one thing improvement that I really wish for a future Kindle version would be a high quality full color e-ink display (they are having problems developing this) that shows the cover of the book that I am reading. The cover was always a bookmark in my mind of the story that I was reading. Even if I put down a book for a while, just looking at the cover would bring back the story in my mind and where I had gotten to.
I do miss the visceral feel of turning the page of a book, just not enough to go through the hassle of carrying them around and storing them...
The reason we use visual communication over aural is that it's a lot more efficient. That's why print made such a difference to learning, for example. Being able to get the information you want at your own pace and in the order you want is very helpful.
Anyone here communicated with people who use audio messages on WhatsApp? Imagine the horror of having to go through a multitude of them instead of just glancing over all those garbage messages that form the bulk of the conversation?
Does anyone really think that it would be better if people mumbled to themselves and listened to voices all the time instead of taking out a phone and looking at it?
I do miss the visceral feel of turning the page of a book [from a Kindle]
Then just pack a single good, real book with your ebook. When the urge hits while reading the Kindle, take out the physical book and slowly rub and turn the pages, perhaps occasionally glancing at the Kindle. When it subsides, return where you left off.
As a side node, there was a 50 year old cryptography book at the local library. It was neat, it was understandable, it had heavy pages and (of all things) it smelled wonderful. I checked it out for 2 weeks at a time for like 3x per year for years, then suddenly it was gone. I've always assumed someone swiped it and paid the minor fine, although it might have ended up on the yearly book sale. I have way too many books already, but I still wish I had THAT particular one.
I do still have a near virgin onion-skinned CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics 57th Edition (1975) with over 2,000 pages (random used link.) Constants and trig functions don't change values THAT often. Foo, I say FOO on your HP calculators and slide-rulers!
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
I know there was one model, made by Eizo... but Eiso isn't even in business anymore.
It would be nice if monitor manufacturers started targeting the niche market a bit.
Also, 3:4 aspect ratio, please.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
That's why I have a Kindle...
Be careful though. This works if you have a standalone Kindle (at least one of the older ones that isn't permanently connected to wireless), but I tried this plan with the Kindle app on my notebook and it failed miserably.
A couple of years ago I took a vacation somewhere where wi-fi access was not readily available. In preparation, I downloaded a dozen books to my little Surface 3, planning to read them at leisure. Imagine my surprise: when I tried to open and read the downloaded books the Kindle app told me they're invalid, and I need to remove them from the device and download them again.
An irate phone call to Amazon led to absolutely no resolution, beyond making me believe the issue is by design, and somehow related to DRM - without an internet connection, the app couldn't connect to the mothership to validate the purchase again (and also probably snitch to Amazon about my reading habits) so, to be safe, just blocked my access to the books *I had purchased and paid for*. I had to find a coffee shop with internet access to download them again. The experience seriously soured me on e-books.
Millions of consumers DON'T WANT EVER LARGER, THINNER PHABLETS.
They want a SMALL, rugged, thick, sturdy phone that fits in their back jeans pocket and is safe there.
Manufacturers experiment with every possible form factor for their massive, unusably large, outrageously fragile mini-tablets.
But refuse to deliver a small, thick, rugged phone that will last.
I (don't) wonder why.
You think a week is a long time between charging. I have a backlight-less Kindle that works two MONTHS without charging. That backlight eats current like there is no tomorrow.
-- Cheers!
tmux.
Peak _stupid_ is closer to what is really happening.
Most people are idiots, and they stare at their phones like some kind of animal in a lab experiment, because they are too goddamned stupid to either sit and think or to sit and experience the real world around them. It's going to get worse, because idiots are breeding at a much higher rate than smart people are.
If it's going to get worse then we haven't reached peak stupid yet.
Don't forget high refresh rate. Apple is already moving to 120hz, which makes an incredible difference from 60hz. And OLED, which is still only in a very small number of the highest end phones.
With more notch.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
(if you have a Reddit account and you've disabled 'new' Reddit you'll have to open a private window for these links)
PEAK SCREEN . At my aspect, ~6+ articles per screen. 583 words on screen. Scroll to bottom then click, ensuring you can backtrack a page at a time. Small static memory footprint.
SUCK SCREEN ~2.5 articles per screen. 203 words on screen. Browser crashin' JS stuttering Infinite scroll thumb-stroking smartphone masturbation.
Screens are doing just fine. Designers are deep-throating smartphones.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
I was there once too -- what I didn't expect is that craving for that visceral feeling would over time grow so strong that it would eventually outweigh the hassle. Far outweigh, in fact. At the height of my love with Kindle I loathed the idea moving with all the books and was even considering replacing them with digital wherever I could. (I didn't.) Fast forward to two years later -- I just moved and even the sensation of packing the books in boxes and carrying the boxes and unpacking them again and sorting them on the shelves and the looking at the full shelves in the new home was very pleasant.
Also as the AC below said, I remember what I read better than on Kindle. When I go out of town, I bring one real book and the Kindle, and usually end up only reading the book.
Apple was keyboardless 1st.
Apple will be Screenless 1st.
Adjudged laggards with Siri acquisition from SRI then letting the technology languish, I was wrong to be so hasty. Voice took time for uptake and still itâ(TM)s not evident exactly who, who or which synthesis voice will be âoe itâ. But AI has made it more interesting by adding refinement and logic.
Next may just be less is more functional the same way ditching chicklet keys removed one extraneous layer. Screen may be rendered obsolete next.
How are voice assistants less immersive than screens?
At least if I sit down to my desktop screen, or pull my phone out of my pocket to use its screen, I'm taking positive action to use a discrete device.
An ever listening device that I can talk to would be more immersive, not less.
Until we really have perfect VR-Goggles.
I want to VR-experience a great rock concert in a stadium with 250.000 people and don't want to be a spectator, I want to be Mick Jagger.
That would instantly kill all the Karaoke bars.
The problem here is that this watch is very close to useless without the middle man, as evidenced by its utter inability to tell time.
The problem isn't the pairing, but the ill-intent behind the design causing the need for users to pair it: Why does the WATCH lack an actual internal clock battery so it won't just forget the time when the charge dies? Sometimes a smart watch is just a watch --why should the power to tell time be torn away from you and I with nary a watch-related failsafe?
What am I using the smartwatch without pairing it, AC? Nobody is complaining when others here admit to having a useless tablet bought with promises of yesteryear that was condemned to be repurposed to the living room or kitchen. Besides, pairing to the phone is cumbersome, requires an app that phones home on us and is the equivalent of those mandatory presence checks that required your CD game to take up the CD drive as proof of purchase before the game could be played.
I actually disable text and app notifications and eventually just keep the watch disconnected. Bluetooth actually chews thru the battery on both the watch and phone. I have 2 phones that know of the watch and it's a pain to have them fight for control of the watch. The company is turning off the servers and the forced registration / login and pairing process is now a pain, so I tend to disable the app and it's a bother to have to reenable it just to set the clock.
But going back to my reason and use cases... besides telling TIME, a watch has alarms we might employ as a wakeup call for our jobs. But most people don't have a watch these days. Smartphones aren't advised to be left laying near our heads under under the pillow overnight. So if choose to move the smartphone away from my head at night, I'll lose the utility of the vibration option. I'd need to wake up the rest of the bedroom with an audible alarm. Why must I do that, when the Pebble "smart" watch has this handy vibrating function and might be nice and useful as a cheap, non-smart timepiece?
Besides traveling a few years back in time to cancel my Pebble purchase, I have no other options with the watch other than making use of it. If someone is forced to settle for a smart TV due to lack of other options, there's nobody forcing him to make it "smart" and let it do unknown things on their network by acquiescing to reveal the home Wifi password
Infuriating, considering 20 years ago the word ran maps oblivious to javascript settings
It was equally infuriating to click "Scroll", wait for a full page reload moved by half a screen, click "Scroll", wait for a full page reload moved by half a screen, click "Zoom", wait for a full page reload zoomed in or out by a factor of 2, etc.
I want a screen of any size I designate to pop into existence wherever and whenever that I want with whatever I want on it that only I can see the contents of. That will be peak screen. We're not even close now. I need more.
I heard "books" weigh in on the order of a Kg. Now, they have no electrons. That sounds too hazardous a technology to allow outside the lab.
I like to imagine this reporter had a deadline, but wanted to see Incredibles 2.
So they just wrote up a defense of the philosophy of the villain.
They need to figure out the soap opera effect though. So far, I prefer 60Hz for TV and movies.
I agree for video, but for anything else, 120hz is amazing. Maybe an option to automatically display video at 60hz/fps? I think once we spend enough time watching at 120hz we'll get used to it. I think people like us just grew up with 29.97 fps.
I tried fiddling with settings but there was no option to view at 60Hz on my TV and the others didn't seem to help much. It's great for video games which is fortunately what I mostly use it for. I don't know, maybe I'll get used to it eventually.