We've Reached 'Peak Screen'. So What Comes Next? (wral.com) 100
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."
Nice try (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
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Multiple. TTS & STT can be run entirely locally.
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Yep. This is just "visionary" wank.
Making everybody walk around with headphones on and shouting at invisible people hidden in their lapels won't improve anything.
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Total sensory control is coming (Score:5, Funny)
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Smart glasses, individual and unique fitted by an optometrist, for your vision and putting a 125" screen at instant access. Glasses will be light and drawing current and data from a unit you will slip into your pocket, with a limited control screen only. Control likely best by wearing rfid rings on your fingers that the glass can location track, maybe with a push button on the rings depending on size. That is the logical next step part of the selling point will be protecting you eyes, they would effectively
Books (Score:1)
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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Like ebooks without the electrons? What happens if there's no Wi-Fi?
You can read sci-fi without wi-fi. High five!
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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...
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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 m
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 versio
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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
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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
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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.
Seriously? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Yeah, thanks for your observation (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Must be written by a millennial. Growing up pre-smartphone we read books, newspapers, played board games or stared out the window. This isn't a problem to be solved, it's an evolved improvement. We can do all those things in a fraction of a time compared to the previous mode switching required. Setting up an old fashioned board game requires 10 minutes or so, there's always bitching about cheating, modern technology solves all of that. Looking out the window at something interesting required going some
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Screens are not a replacement for board and card games.
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I remember in the 1970s people were ranting about youth that read so much and how it was bad for their eyes. Ever since the 1980s people were ranting about how youth didn't read enough. And now they read more than ever and people still complain.
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Telescreens and listening devices (Score:5, Insightful)
1984 is here and large parts of the population are volunteering to be a part of it.
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1984 is here and large parts of the population are volunteering to be a part of it.
Yup, and Senator Amidala was right, liberty actually seems to be dying to the sound of thunderous applause.
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The 2nd Amendment is America's stopgap towards the true death of Liberty. If things ever got to the book burning history-rewriting phase, there'd be another revolution (likely with the help of members of the military - sworn to uphold the constitution and all that). The leader of the military is the President, but what if the top generals simply said no? And the best encouragement of that no response is having to gun down the very people you're supposed to be protecting.
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The worst part is the sheer volume of information collected is detrimental towards pro-active use of it (eg:Parkland shooter) and that leaves only the negative sides of it - person X is in a position to uproot the establishment, let us find all we can about person X and bury them via things they've said/done in their past.
So the listening devices will never be used to catch potential criminals, just enemies of the state, and the company gathering the data.
And yet people clamor for all-encompassing big gover
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The charm of 1984 is that the book is so generic and vague that anyone can use it to paint any social development he does not like as "becoming like 1984".
Re: Telescreens and listening devices (Score:2)
If you say so.
The next hip trend (Score:3)
Oh we've peaked? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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This article is asinine.
Indeed. I am sitting in front of a 39 inch 4K external monitor, with about 5 square feet of pixels, and TFA is telling me that a 4 inch phone is "peak screen"?
Where's my Holodeck?
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I was waiting for 40" 8K but the new Google/LG goggles give me that view and I can throw it in my laptop bag. Maybe cheaper even. Anyway, 8K will probably be peak screen for me either way. I calculated that back in the 90's just on first principles and it's almost here (I didn't guess about the goggles though).
Body Powered Contact Lenses (Score:1)
"Peak Screen'? 8K HDR? (Score:2)
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They need to figure out the soap opera effect though. So far, I prefer 60Hz for TV and movies.
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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.
perhaps momentarily (Score:2)
Peace (Score:2)
Mental peace in our time.
Oversimplication: I dub thee "verbal command line" (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [slashdot.org] 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.
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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
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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 have peak stone (Score:2)
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 like
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Nothing really new here (Score:2, Insightful)
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, sel
How is this better (Score:2)
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 th
ZeroScreen (Score:2)
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 n
1:1 aspect ration monitors, I HOPE! (Score:2)
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.
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As far as I can tell, Eizo is still in business and is still making eye watering expensive (but very good) monitors. I don't think they are making that 1:1 monitor anymore, though they are one of the few still making a 4:3 monitor (4:3 monitors are pretty rare nowadays - almost all the remaining non-widescreen monitors are actually 5:4).
A SMALL, rugged, sturdy phone (Score:1)
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.
tmux? (Score:3)
tmux [superuser.com].
Peak vs. 'Suck' (dumbed down idiot) screen (Score:2)
(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 [reddit.com] . 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 [reddit.com] ~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.
voice assistants? (Score:2)
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.
A bigger.better screen, duh! (Score:2)
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.
I need more (Score:1)
A real evil_endeavor (Score:1)
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.