Mobile usage. When is that much too much? January 15, 2017
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.trackback
Reading various stats recently about mobile phone use little of this came as a surprise.
…half of Irish adults are unable to make it through the night without checking their smartphone or tablet at least once.
Feck you very much to the US Presidential Election for disrupting my sleep pattern for a week or so. Then – as with Brexit, and elections, I woke up numerous times during the night. But generally I turn my mobile off at night to save battery power and only look at my tablet if I wake up and can’t get back to sleep. Actually I’d sooner listen to music on an iPod. What about others?
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 
What’s the limits of checking your phone though, I use mine as a clock, so it gets checked every night; Is that kind of usage enough to put me into the wrong category?
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I think it’s specific usage – where one wakes up to look at news/social media, etc and cannot get back to sleep or never gets to sleep in the first place. Using it as a clock doesn’t count. Also I’d think one can apply quite fluid categories.
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‘Watching Black Mirror at bedtime is, I’ve discovered, unwise. The situations it portrays, the anxiety it inspires, and the adrenaline that it generates seem to worsen the insomnia that I have been fending off (and that a number of friends have reported experiencing) ever since the election. How could it not keep us awake: our sense that science fiction has become a plausible representation of our everyday reality, combined with our growing fear that the imagined dystopian future may be increasingly hard to distinguish from the times in which we live.’
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/01/09/dystopia-in-the-mirror-black-mirror/
Perhaps to understand the new abnormal we need to read PKD.
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He had some genuine insights.
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Not a big phone user for anything other than phone calls, and not great at that. Was an early adopter for work, back in the analog 088 days, but late to the smart phone and not very fond of it. Big hands and eyesight heading for the large print section of the library doesn’t help. I neeed to find my glasses to be ,sure of being able to answer it, or even to be sure that it is, in fact, the phone
So my phone spends a lot of time in places where i left it having forgotten to take it with me. On the other hand, i am almost always within reach of a laptop or tablet. But not while sleeping for the most part.
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Yeah, tablets are ubiquitous. But I have those perhaps/perhaps not apps that alter the light output for late at night and I think they work. Bar US elections or our own or referenda I don’t use it to read news at night. Books, yep. I do read books on it.
I only use the phone for texts, the odd few calls, and a little browsing or posting during the day. I keep getting irritated calls from my ‘service’ provider asking why I don’t go onto a more expensive plan and I just direct them to my usage at which point they accept defeat.
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Here’s a recent report on teens’ screen time, and a positive benefit from moderate use: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-38611006
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In fairness to some of us. We have jobs where we are on call 24/7. Last year there was a domestic water line that broke (act of God type thing) in the NICU where I worked. That broke on Sunday afternoon of New Years weekend. They called around 8pm. So for me it never shuts off.
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I remember when life was like that, though I wasn’t exactly providing essential services. For quite a few years, the phone going off in the middle of the night was commonplace.
Now, thankfully, there are very few critical theory callouts after hours
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Burst pipe at the Grand Hotel Abyss (which I quite liked).
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Didn’t get it for Xmas after all despite hints. Will buy.
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I leave my phone charging in the kitchen overnight. I’ve had bad insomnia for the past few months and part of the approach to combat that is to have what’s referred to as good sleep hygeine, meaning that the bedroom is for sleeping and not for mental stimulation. Also apparently the light from mobile and laptop screens contains “blue light” which is supposed to stimulate the brain for some reason and isn’t a good idea around sleep time. Mind you I didn’t have the phone in the bedroom before the current insomnia round either…
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Regarding the blue light, there are apps (or it may be built in to Android) that will redshift the screen based on time of day, so that it has a warmer colour temperature after sunset, more akin to the lighting you’d have in the house than daylight. Likewise for the computer. I always have these set, and I think it makes a great difference to the glare using devices in the evening.
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Here’s the one for Linux I use:
http://jonls.dk/redshift/
This looks like it does the same thing for Windows and Mac, but I’ve never tried it:
https://justgetflux.com/
For the phone, there seem to be a few in the App store.
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I agree, they really do make a difference those apps. Long overdue.
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