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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.
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.
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...
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.
tmux.