Ben Weintraub – NU Sci Magazine

When Smartphones Make Us Dumb

Technology / Ben Weintraub / September 20, 2021

In a 2017 interview with The Guardian, software engineer Loren Brichter said “smartphones are useful tools, but they’re addictive. Pull-to-refresh is addictive. Twitter is addictive. These are not good things.” What makes this quote significant is the knowledge that it was none other than Brichter who invented pull-to-refresh, a feature now ubiquitous among smartphone apps. […]

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A brief history of memes: The forgotten past of an internet phenomenon

In February 2015, the internet was afire with debate about a dress. #TheDress, as it became known, was a picture of a dress that people either saw as black and blue or gold and white. A matter of chromatic perspective, and certainly a problem with no right answer, #TheDress was the subject of heated debate