A bit dumbfounded and just had to express it.
I had a 7 hour flight a couple of days ago and it had free wifi on the flight. Neat, I get to message people on the plane. However, I feel that for that long you still bring a book, or puzzles, or in my case I brought my Deck and played games for the duration of the flight.
The guy next to me though watched TikTok for the entire flight. 7 hours of constant stream of algorithm content to his face. I kind of understand why it’s so addicting, it just keeps coming and coming with no end. I was just astonished with how he could keep going for 7 hours. An hour fine, it’s a lot but we’ve all lost ourselves for an hour. 7 hours of constant feed though.
Idk, people come here to Lemmy and the Fediverse and say there isn’t enough content. Well if 7 hours of content like that is expected it’s too freaking much. If anything I feel I’m much healthier with social media now. Maybe they’re angry because it feels more like a withdrawal.
No real point to this post beyond that. Just a very interesting thing to witness.
Mine doesn’t have an algorithm that was developed specifically to be addicting so it harvest data and promote ads. I think a single-player story based game is a bit different.
You both sat there for 7 hours straight staring at compelling content on screens.
Apples and oranges. I purchased content and chose to spend my time there. They were presented content that a megacorporation decided they should like, with a constant stream of ads. It’s like saying someone reading a book is the same as someone reading the penny-saver for an hour.
It’s not a criticism of you - just a factual statement about objective reality. A few decades ago, you’d have been sitting there reading a book and feeling superior to someone playing Tetris. I get it. It’s only human. I catch myself doing the same thing all the time. My spending seven hours a day watching long-form YouTube videos is clearly also less bad than someone watching TikTok. And it might be. It’s just the activity itself that to an outside observer looks exactly the same.
That’s not the point I’m making, if they say there for 7 hours on Lemmy or Mastodon or even Loops that would be different for me, it was the shovel-feeding of corporate approved content into their eyeballs at lightening speed.
A book, movie, game are all the same to me, they’re telling a story and most they’ll have is a sponsored item in there or something, it’s the algorithmic addiction I was witnessing in person that I’m commenting on.