You're looking back with rose-coloured glasses. I did the same thing with ICQ, MSN Messenger, etc. for chat. I did the same thing with Ultima Online and Counterstrike for gaming. I mean shit, there was a few weekends where my best mate from school and I camped a spawn of particular monsters in UO such that we spent about 17 hours total there each day of the weekend for a few weekends. When one needed to go (dinner, lunch, toilet) the other controlled their pets and vice versa. Why? Cause we were teens with heaps of spare time and no commitments.
Teens go through this phase. They're time-rich, money-poor and have few commitments and obligations. In the 70s and 80s they spent the time at an arcade becoming savant-level good at pacman or asteroids or whatever. A natural part of leaving your teens is slowly inheriting a bunch of obligations that you must meet (bills, employment, etc.) which take away the free time you had to utterly saturate yourself in whatever hobbies you had, and thus you become more selective in what sinks you plough your time into (and the depth of those sinks).
This is no worse than what any other generation went through. There'll be outliers of whatever time sinks in any generation. Don't sweat it.
We're all addicted to a million things (by this definition of addiction)
It's only negative when that becomes a problem somehow in your life.
It's not even clear to me that we'd be better off with a fully mindful approach to every pleasure and activity.
What is unhealthy though, is disparaging everything other people enjoy. Especially when you don't have the courage to say "I don't like it" but couch your disapproval in terms of concern for their "addictions"
I don't think so. When I was a teenager I spent hours talking on the phone with friends (even though I had just seen them that day at school) then later on AOL then instant messenger (I'm old). At that age your world revolves around your friends and communicating with them is important. Later we all get jobs and spend most of our time doing other things and it doesn't seem as important to be constantly talking to our friends. We also don't have the common social environment of high school or college with all that entails to talk about.
Reminds me of Brave New World, where the general population lives in a shallow lifestyle void of any meaning.
Seem like a pattern, predicting that future, is emerging. E.g. My parent's teenage hobby was musical instruments. Mine was playing video games. Kids today it seems is responding to selfies.
pg also has a good essay on the Acceleration of Addictiveness* that seems relevant.
> Which is more social than either of the other hobbies you mentioned.
The girl in TFA just dumps the snapchats she's sent, flicking through them just to be rid of them. She's not being social, she's just incrementing a counter to boast about. Well, unless you're calling the boasting the social part, I guess, but I wouldn't say that that was more social than learning a musical instrument.
On the other hand, they have a lot of free time, and need to find ways to get social validation. I used to spend hours on ICQ or whatever, and there will always be something they use for that point. All in all, its something that is socially important for them right now, but that doesn't matter on the long view
Later on in life, when they 'grow out' of snapchat, they will replace the addiction with something else - some other app, but also food, drugs or sex.
Whatever thing they will find interesting, they will pursue it with the same pattern that they learn with these apps / games.
This future generation will have to find a way to live with all this addictive technology and survive in the real world.
Might well be that Snapchat (and others) will be looked at as we're now looking at cigarettes.