A specialized iPhone app was used to block internet access, recording any time that the feature was disabled.
In numbers, nearly all the participants — 91 percent — improved on at least one of the three outcomes, while around three-quarters reported better mental health by the end.
The findings even suggest that the intervention had a stronger effect on depression symptoms than antidepressants, and was roughly on par with cognitive behavioral therapy.
What’s driving all this? Ward suggests that the simplest explanation is that the experiment forced participants to spend more time doing fulfilling things in the real world.
I’ve been thinking how socialising on the internet with strangers is so hugely different to socialising with people in real life.
In real life you can see someone face to face, you can get a sense of their personality, and you learn to trust them. Those things are harder on the internet. You can’t see a person’s face, or hear their accent. Someone on the internet could be lying when they tell you about themselves, and it’s harder to tell if they’re lying.
Also of course on the internet people are much more willing to be rude and offensive because there are few penalties. If you meet someone in a pub, they probably won’t be rude to you, most of the time. If you disagree about something, you might say “okay, agree to disagree” and move onto another topic. But on the internet people will just be disrespectful cunts because they can get away with it, without negative social consequences for themselves.
In conclusion, internet socialising should be better than it is.
It’s always interesting when people from the Internet meet in-person. It should happen more often to the point when the people become friends and exchange it to real life socialising.
The demand is there and keeps increasing. I even thought about some platform where people from reddit/lemmy type of platform do stuff together like sports, outdoor, going to pub or something like that. I’m writing here about non-mainstream solutions.
SN: Not that I’m a fan of it, but maybe this is one of the benefits of RTO. I have always found that building rapport in person is better than doing it online.
Yeah there’s some truth to that. Working at home can be lonely in my experience. But on the other hand you save all the hassle with commuting.