Tech Industry: Industry Insiders Don’t Use Their Products Like We Do. That Should Worry Us - by Eleanor Cummins

Apple founder Steve Jobs didn't let his kids use the iPad, or really any product their dad invented, according to a 2014 report from Nick Bilton in The New York Times.

"They haven't used it," Jobs told Bilton. "We limit how much technology our kids use at home." Every night, the family had a phone-free dinner together, according to Walter Isaacson, author of the definitive biography Steve Jobs. "The kids did not seem addicted at all to devices," Isaacson told Bilton.

Read more at: Industry Insiders Don’t Use Their Products Like We Do. That Should Worry Us.

Facebook Addiction: 9 Signs and Treatment Tips

Ever close Facebook and tell yourself you’re done for today, only to catch yourself automatically scrolling through your feed just 5 minutes later?

Maybe you have a Facebook window open on your computer and pick up your phone to open Facebook without really thinking about what you’re doing.
 
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Facebook Addiction: 9 Signs and Treatment Tips

Addictions: My Life Without Sugar

My plan was to have a sugar-free month. But now I feel so much better that I can’t imagine going back.

Read more at:
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/my-life-without-sugar?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Internet: The truth about our Wi-Fi society: What the quest for constant connection really means - by Andrew Leonard

Beware the dark powers of Netflix. There I was, last Sunday morning, reading the news of actor James Garner’s death on my laptop and nostalgically recalling how much my father, a longtime TV critic, had loved Garner’s benchmark 1970s-era private-eye drama, “The Rockford Files.”

 But my memories of the show were vague — I was 12 when it premiered. I wondered idly if Netflix might carry it. Because isn’t that what our contemporary digital lifestyle is all about? Access to whatever we want, whenever we want. Time has no meaning in 2014  – get me the 1970s, now!

Before I could check myself, I was sucked down a time-warp rabbit hole, a fact I could not easily explain to my 16-year-old son, who was curious, and perhaps slightly alarmed, as to why I was spending a Sunday afternoon binge-watching car chases. I had expected to be charmed by James Garner. I didn’t expect to become obsessed with the question of how Jim Rockford’s adventures in L.A. would be different if he had owned an iPhone.

The wide-lapel shirts. The endless car chases. The shocking lack of racial diversity in Los Angeles as presented on 1970s television. There are plenty of obvious differences between the America of 40 years ago and the America of right now.

But I couldn’t stop fixating on just how often everything stopped in its tracks so that Jim Rockford could put a dime in a payphone: multiple times an episode. Without those payphones, the plot wasn’t going anywhere. But in between those payphones, Rockford lived in a kind of L.A. limbo-land, his whereabouts gloriously unknowable. No one is as isolated today as Rockford was in his Plymouth Firebird on an L.A. freeway.
Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes uses a smartphone just as you would expect a genius detective to, with the entire Internet at his disposal to assist in the deductive process. It’s clever, but it always seemed like cheating. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock didn’t need no stinkin’ smartphone! A few puffs on his pipe was all that was necessary!

It was hard for me to avoid the sinking feeling that Jim Rockford with an iPhone would no longer be Jim Rockford. Always-on Wi-Fi would accelerate his genial slouch. The languid ocean outside his trailer would end up a trivialized mote in his Instagram-feed. The string of dames in distress wouldn’t appear unannounced at his door; they’d find him on Tinder first.

Reasd more: The truth about our Wi-Fi society: What the quest for constant connection really means - Salon.com

The Netrherlands Drug Addiction: Only in the Netherlands Do Addicts Complain About Free Government Heroin - Thijs Roes

It was in the 1990s when the Netherlands started a program that provides long-term addicts with free government heroin.

In practice, this means that addicts are allowed to inject or smoke heroin three times a day in a solemn, no frills room in a building run by municipal health services.

Combined with a specified care program, it has been responsible for almost the complete disappearance of heroin addicts from public view.

In the United States, heroin is on the rise like it's 1983, while an ever-shrinking group of Dutch addicts is only getting smaller and older.

In a 2002 study, there were an estimated 25,000 addicts in the Netherlands (out of a population of more than 10 million), but only about 2,000 were considered hardcore addicts, according to the Central Committee on the Treatment of Heroin Addicts.

Heroin use under the age of 40 is practically non-existent, according to Amsterdam's health services.

Read more: Only in the Netherlands Do Addicts Complain About Free Government Heroin | VICE News

EU-Digest: How can we get our children to "kick the habit" of electronic addiction and to being normal children again?

A special report on the excessive use of technological gadgets by teenagers

How can we get our children to "kick the habit" of electronic addiction and to being normal children again?

Alarmed by a study that said teens spend less time with books, which is helping to create a nation of poor readers, English teacher Brenda Durkacs at the Coral Springs High school in Florida challenged her students to step away from the computer keys for a full week as part of a project she began in November to get students to read, react and question.

During this project, she helped her class develop an awareness of technology's sometimes intrusive nature, pointing not just to the number of hours video games, text messaging or television can drain out of a day, but also to serious concerns about how technology can invade privacy.

Many students found it very hard to "kick the habit" because as one of them said "It just feels so natural to use technology for everything".

Brenda Durkacs got the idea last year when a friend e-mailed her an analysis from the National Endowment for the Arts. The study showed that as young people read less, their comprehension skills deteriorate. Part of the problem is that there are so many things vying for students' leisure time. Instead of picking up a book, students now turn on the computer, DVD player or iPod — maybe all three simultaneously, the study said.

As part of her program Brenda Durkacs had her students document every text-message, phone call and download they used for one week in November. During this exercise some students even found out they played Xbox, used the computer and watched the TV at least 10 hours if not more a day.

Soon Brenda Durkas got the class even more interested to abstain from using the electronic equipment after she made them read Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury's science fiction novel, where books are burned, critical thought suppressed and television reigns supreme.

It was extremely difficult to for us to "kick-off" some of the students said, but despite their urges to check e-mail, they realized the benefits of occasionally disconnecting. Some students voluntarily deleted their MySpace accounts, put down their video games and turned off the television. Instead, they started playing football, soccer and other sports, but best of all many picked up reading again.

One student commented "If you can't read, then you can't write. And if you can't write, then you can't express yourself", as she looked up from a copy of 1984, the class' current assignment about the technological balance between personal privacy and state security.

In another assignment the students had to read George Orwell's novel about the peeping eye of "Big Brother". Following that assignment the students were told to chart the technology they could identify in their own local area, which was used to watch, spy and track them. Their lists quickly filled with items such as security cameras at the gym, toll-road transponders, ATM camera's, and personalized spam e-mails. As the program progressed the students also realized that they had been ignorant to the fact that all privacy is relative. Computer systems can match images caught by security cameras against digital mug shots of criminals. The ink from some color printers acts as a digital license plate, helping identify the machine. Some of them also heard for the first time that the US federal government and other countries in the world have secret wiretap programs.

For a generation of students who have been growing up on-line, logging off for a week seems almost impossible. Our hat goes off to salute Brenda Durkacs and her class of freshmen at Coral Springs High School in Florida. They managed to survive seven days of writing with ballpoint, pencils and paper, reading books, chatting face-to face and actually going outside to play. It is an example we should also follow in Europe, where the addiction of kids to electronic games and a host of other electronic gadgets has also gone totally out of control.