I have never truly known a period of time without a smart device. The last watch I had was when I was a small child and it was only a few years ago I found a street "atlas". I have a feeling that I've missed a building block of the digital age by not experiencing an evolutionary phase.
The pre-LTE era was quite the experience as a teenager, and it wasn’t until the iPhone 5 when smartphones became a ubiquitous and affordable thing (or justifiable) for many of my friends. I didn’t have a smartphone until my junior year of high school!
SMS feature phones like the sidekick, with physical keyboards, ruled the day and many of my classmates actually disliked smartphones because of the lack of physical keys!
> The pre-LTE era was quite the experience as a teenager
You all had it made. I'm sure any younger person can vouch for the social issues that come along with every teenager having a smartphone, but your cohort also missed out on family-shared landlines and all of the issues attendant with them. Calling your date and finding yourself forced to make small talk with her dad the phone bouncer, for example.
Who's alone? I've got people around me all the time who understand and support my decision.
It may be hard for some people, but if you really want to do it, keep at it and don't give up. Seven generations from now, do you think smartphones will still have this hold on humanity? We just can't continue this way; it's an unsustainable form of society. Even movies made in 2021 do not depict smartphone usage anywhere close to the frequency and intensity they are used now. People will wake up from this collective dream one day; I'd rather wake up now and get started early on building something that works, wouldn't you?
Tried it, hated it. Everyone is using WhatsApp, Telegram, whatever. Try typing a sms with those tiny buttons, it sucks. There is a reason why some people have a smartphone but not a computer.
I think they mean you can mostly get along without a computer if you have a smartphone, but not vice versa, because the modern world assumes you've got a smartphone in your pocket at all times.
Pretty sure the person you are responding to was not suggesting continuing to use WhatsApp, Telegram, whatever. Getting off those was kind of the point.
Unfortunately you can't; society has changed too, in many ways. Even some government services now require either an iOS or Android device to access (like vaccination records here in BC).
A dumb phone does less for you now than it did in 2005, just like a horse does less for you now than it did in 1895. Even if you really like horses, you can't ride them on the same streets you once could.
You can't go back though, not really. Like if you got lost pre-smartphones you would find a gas station and the person there would rattle off a series of turns you had to memorize on the spot or would pull out an atlas and walk you through directions - this was normal. Now, they would look at you like an alien.
There was a culture of nudging people along to the right place. Even as a kid you would be asked for directions from time to time and have to sort out how many blocks to go before the next turn and all that, often without ever having seen an actual map of your own town.
As a side effect of being a big city, I'm constantly asked for directions that could easily be found by opening a smartphone. Hell, I do it myself sometimes, especially about things like bus or subway lines I'm not familiar with.
I have a friend who did that. It's pretty irritating trying to remember his unique constraints on communication that I need to know in order to reach him.
Some people conflate authenticity for interactions with others who are willing to go way out of their way to spend time with you.
Aligning the infrared ports of two phones until max speed was achieved and being extremely careful to not move them for minutes which felt like ages to just send over a polyphonic ringtone..
A couple of stand-out memories from the olden days (and I don't consider myself particularly old):
Getting a call in a restaurant. Only happened to me once but I certainly felt like a VIP.
Carrying a tiny map book of London around with me while cycling around. Missing turn after turn until finding there was a canal which basically took me from the center to my uncle's house.
Arranging to meet a friend and then being late. Really late. 1 hour late. He was still there, waiting for me.
Yeah I remember waiting for people - I got a smartphone at 16, in 2004, something like that, so it's hard to really imagine how it was for adults...
My parents told me they spend evenings at the phone booth talking to each other - but even that is ultra convenient compared to my grandparents sending letters :D
But I think it's better anyway - we sample mating candidates more, we cycle through faster, we can stop and try anew nearly any time until 50, and with some difficulty above.
I mean my aunt had a crushing divorce when she had 3 young children and stayed alone working with all 3 until the internet arrived and she could find a partner much faster...
> My parents told me they spend evenings at the phone booth talking to each other - but even that is ultra convenient compared to my grandparents sending letters :D
No need to get to the grandparents' generation, I was the letter writer of my family :) I wrote letters to uncles/aunts/grandpa - mostly at the command of my mum or grandma and sometimes for myself. I remember rushing to the window when the postman yelled and dropped letters through the grill - sometimes there would be more than one! The excitement was palpable - now we sigh with annoyance at the barrage of nonsense and spam that flows into our inbox. Truly a case of quantity over quality.
>But I think it's better anyway - we sample mating candidates more, we cycle through faster, we can stop and try anew nearly any time until 50, and with some difficulty above.
On the other side, we self report more isolated, depressed, friendless and dissatisfied than ever in the past decades, have record levels of depression prescriptions and opioids, and people get discovered dead after a month or so when somebody complains about the smell...
Combined with empirical observation, what we've used to call "having a look for yourself", they're quite potent. That said it's not like hard numbers like prescriptions and case stats haven't got up, including numbers of people living alone, etc.
Before opiods, we had cocaine, valium, morphine, and so on... We just didn't keep so many records back then, especially during the times they were legal. With Valium, folks got it from their doctor.
Did we track depression before like we do now? Were folks comfortable talking about it or would they lie when they self report?
I'm pretty sure that in the past, folks got discovered dead because of the smell.
Is it worse or are we just getting better data on it? It seems just as likely that these states simply went unreported due to having nobody who was interested in listening. Might be that the quiet desperation has always been there, but now it gets voiced to a receptive audience.
I mean it does sound crazy to me now. But back then it was just a fact of life that both smokers and non-smokers didn't spend much thought on. I flew before I picked up smoking myself, and it didn't really feel something unusual, precisely because it was common everywhere.
There have to be other daily habits now that going to be seen as disgusting in a few decades too. Maybe things like eating non-cloned meat.
Common in restaurants as well. It's downright bizarre to think about now, but I remember as a child, at family restaurants like Friendly's and Howard Johnson's (which itself is an anachronism), being asked by a cheery-faced hostess whether we wanted "smoking or non-smoking".
It was interesting especially juxtaposed on current reality. I hated smoking (ok I hated 2nd hand smoke as a non-smoker). But somehow, it was the right of the individual to smoke; when, where, and how they pleased. It didn't matter that other people in the space shared the air. Compared to present when the world is looking to bend over backwards to avoid putting smoke in someone else's air on a plethora of different topics. Many, that I've never contemplated. Like, for instance, I never thought I could get yelled at for using what I thought to be the correct pronoun while saying "yes sir, thank you". I'd think they'd just recognize my attempt canned politeness and say "you're welcome" and recognize why people think of them as a "sir" during casual brief interactions (because they were wearing men's clothes & had facial hair).
Oh boy. Was on a school trip to Greece in the mid nineties. ~35 teenagers and some teachers as guides and chaperones.
We were 16+ so basically drinking free booze on the plane while smoking our hearts out. We actually drank all the beer on the plane. It looked like a smoke bomb went off.
It must have been the flight from hell for other passengers. Completely unimaginable right now. Thank you Sabena Airlines for this core memory of my youth and not having us arrested in Athens.
Smoking in bars still exists in many places in the US. Granted in Texas for example, in jurisdictions where it's still legal, seems like at least 90% choose not to allow it by choice of the business owner.
Some time in the 90s I caught what I was told was Alitalia's last smoking flight from Australia to Italy before it was phased out. Christ, it was horrendous. There was a smoking section up the back of the plane, but try telling that to the smoke. It was like being fumigated for 24 hours. Hard to believe that was real now!
I know that's the way we say it, but maybe I've seen Airplane too many times to ignore the potential difference between literal and figurative for anything plane-related. So I just pictured you taking a drag, wind in your hair, sitting on the wing of the plane and yet somehow not falling off as it went along it's way.
In 1989 I wrote a letter (i.e., mailed) to a friend from grad school (ASU) pursuing her studies at a Northern UK university. I sez we will meet you at the center of Piccadilly Circus at such and such a time, on such and such date. She wrote back, "of course." This took a month or so. We flew over, and showed up. So did she. I still remember meeting up: it was no big deal.
We had also written to Czech friends from grad school (U FL) that we would show up in Olomouc on such and such date (Jun 1989, interesting times). They were visiting relatives and we showed up. And were whisked off to 5 days of whirlwind touring the soon to be de-Sovietized Czechoslovakia.
We hosted quite few Eastern Europeans in the '90s, all arranged over snail mail. There was a sense of responsibility that we don't really experience today when dropping in on travels. All the modernity in the world, and nowadays we occasionally get ghosted, even after making repeated prior arrangements using the latest hottest smart phone technology.
I will say this: google translate + maps are the two great inventions we appreciate most. The rest is a solid meh. We have a theory that maximized immediate convenience has an unanticipated effect of atomizing and devaluing some relationships.
Per the parent, I too remember those paper maps while cycling. As in, riding from the Portland Airport to Arcadia and down to LA, using a tour guide, quite tattered at the end. Most of the times before an extended trip (100+ miles) I would memorize the route the night before. This worked fine for 25 years.
The thing that rings out for me in this essay: "Once plans were made, I showed up without any further contact to check whether we were, in fact, “still on for tonight,”" I miss that. Used to be that if you made plans to meet someone, they would come to that time and place. Amazing! And the difference is not even limited to your friends and dating. Now we can't even count on regularly scheduled activities to happen as planned. Public schools cancel classes with a voicemail and less than an hour's notice, under the assumption that everyone will get the message.
(Pre cellphones, early 90s era) My problem with that is that my friend group were not exactly punctual (myself included). So that meant a lot of waiting around, and in some cases, your group may not show up. Being near a pay-phone or begging a phone call from an establishment helped some.
Also - you remembered your friends phone numbers (or had a black book).
Man, using a pay phone with a card instead of coins felt like the future, ha ha.
Also, if you went out without telling your family where, you became unreachable for the whole day(s). Going dark that way nowadays is almost unthinkable.
Even in the 90s you'd be glued to the local weather report on TV and get maybe 30 minutes notice before the bell whether school was off or not. I remember them not even calling sometimes and having to see the anchor announce the closure.
Weather is one thing, but I never lived in a city that had weather. These days my daughter’s classes and activities get canceled ad hoc on zero notice. Like they will just dismiss school at lunch without announcing it in advance.
The unmentioned thing here is why? Why does the world with a smartphone and today's hyper-connectivity seem so different now compared to what it used to?
Did people feel the same way when the railroad and other forms of rapid transport showed up?
What makes things feel so different? Is it more competition, and for what? Is it that things are just faster, and the certainties have changed? Has it fundamentally changed how we experience relationships with people?
Are our standards now higher, and is that a good thing?
In the pre-Internet era, rumors, incidents, conspiracies, book and movie opinions were passed on verbally. I saw an article nobody else in my circle ever read; a friend watched a movie nobody else is going to see any time soon, etc. There were endless opportunities to get together and talk.
We were each other's Internets.
Do people talk less these days? I certainly do but that might be due to my age. But I'm genuinely curious if the topics of conversations are as intellectually fulfilling as they used to be.
People talk online. Whether that's equivalent is up for debate.
There might be an argument that our new online/text based discussions have changed the dynamics (some could argue hindered, but I don't) of face to face communication.
I still occasionally marvel that I can wake up at 4:30am in Denver and be in Very Rural Virginia by 5pm...and that's with stopping over in Atlanta first.
It's not the travel, or the time, it's the 'it's more efficient to go thousands of miles out of the way due to logistics.'
This has not been particularly new, but I can still marvel at it.
Having fixed plumbing, I'm reminded that the current iteration is as a result of 2000 years of refinement.
I have a lathe, manufactured in 1966, it still holds tolerances, and I refer to a book (how to run a lathe) that's first printing was at the turn of the 20th century (1912 or thereabouts)
Yeah, clearly old things were fine, or in many case quite good.
I think comparing the advances in mechanical precision to changes in society shaping technological advances is not a fair comparison. I would argue that it's exactly that mechanical precision that started with gauge blocks that has facilitated all our advancements.
I think it's just a different "system of measures" when talking about societal/social impact on our human interactions. People's minds and feelings don't fit into technical descriptions.
But, to agree with you, just like basic technology changes slowly, human nature barely seems to change at all.
Because we went from living in a world where information about the world around us was hidden, to suddenly having access to all of it. It's surprising, jarring and overwhelming and it's probably going to take multiple generations for people to figure out how to use it effectively, ignore the noise, and deal with the social issues created by it.
Yes, but also, as the author points out in several places, we lived in a world of serendipity, patience, boredom (in a good way ... something that might lead to a kind of forced contemplation?).
One wonders the degree to which our mental health actually thrived better with that extra time, accidental rather than deliberate discovery.
> Did people feel the same way when the railroad and other forms of rapid transport showed up?
To some extend yes. When I was a kid, we'd rarely go to the only major city in our part of the country. Maybe two times a year. Now I live in that area, but I can easily go visit my parents for dinner, just because someone decided that a motorway was a great idea. It cut somewhere like 40 minutes to an hour of the drive.
It still boggles my mind that 30 years ago we considered it a day trip, but with a shorter distance, faster speeds, in a better car, it's just a quick drive, allowing my daughter to see her grandparents way more often than I saw mine.
You know, that's another thing that has changed a lot. Modern TV writer just can't stop himself from using the mobile phone as a device to advance the story. We have to watch some guy in a TV show sending iMessages. That is so boring, and as a caveman from the pre-cellular era it takes me out of the show and makes me want to turn it off. A recent offender in this regard was the Amazon show "Bosch". If you made a supercut of the titular detective answering his iPhone, it would be almost as long as the series itself. This is particularly irritating since the Bosch novels were written in the 90s, before the smartphone era, in the car-phone era at the latest.
Whats interesting to me is the transition period in screenwriting. From the early 2000s to the early 2010s, characters would be shown carrying phones but would still get into situations which could be solved easily with their mobile. But they’d act as if they didn’t have it. I found interesting watching the writers adjust their tropes over time.
It’s also interesting to me that this problem, of storytelling in a world of instant communication, was first addressed in the original Star Trek. Various adventure story tropes had to be adjusted for communicators and transporters. Roddenberry et al admitted it was a headache sometimes.
Just as obnoxious is the character seen constantly vaping with a huge lightsaber of a vape. "I care a lot" was especially bad with this. What did that add to the plot?
Also 'Romeo and Juliet' (tragedy occurs because a message isn't delivered), 'Assault on Precinct 13' (gang cuts the phoneline to a besieged police station) and the opening credits of Terry and June (couple can't find each other in a shopping centre)
> * Inane arguments in pubs about facts that couldn't be instantly googled.
I don't miss those. Before the Internet, if it wasn't on an encyclopedia and you weren't at the library, you had no way of corroborating information.
On the other hand, since facts are so accessible right now, those arguments have shifted to voicing their feelings and wishes because those can't be falsified.
Perhaps 'inane arguments in pubs' isn't the best framing, but I do find the ability to ~instantly search for an answer online kills a lot of discussion.
I find it quite irritating sometimes - can we not just talk about it! - and it's not like I have a long memory before it was possible. (I grew up with phones certainly, was in school when they became 'smart'.)
The issue isn't that people are just huffing, crossing their arms, and crying fake news. The issue is that they are able to bring up 100 different sites supporting their claims. The person they are arguing with, obviously knows that the other is an idiot because they have 100 different sites supporting their claims!
In a way, we've regressed back before we had the answer machine at our fingertips. You don't really know who's correct. It's just changed from 'Well, I heard xyz from my friend's aunt's sister, so I'm right. Oh yeah! Gary just said the opposite yesterday, so you're wrong' to something a little bit different.
It's like we're reaching the times when we should again start thinking more for ourselves, given the information at hand: make assumptions, try to prove them, try a reductio ad absurdum etc.
But unfortunately people's brains are fried because of the constant social media bombardment.
I see that happening too, but tbh, I see it happening even without evidence. Its almost like some weird form of "thinking for yourself", but taken to the point of rejecting any evidence that doesn't match the preconceived notion. There doesn't even need to be evidence on the other side.
Humanity as a whole is still learning to cope with the Internet. We're still learning that it has beautiful and disgusting things, many hiding as the other.
The fundamental way that humans begin bonding is through favor exchange. I give you something. You give me something. Back and forth until eventually we lose count and realize we have become fast friends.
Information sharing is an extremely low barrier kind of favor because when I give you some information, I still have it too. When we no longer need each other to learn about that hole in the wall restaurant, that new band, how to fix a leaky sink, we have also lost important tools to forge connections with each other.
I worry a lot that the Internet and cheap consumer goods has essentially knocked the bottom rungs off the ladder of human relationships. I don't need others to find a place to eat or live, or to learn a new skill or hobby. But I do still need them to share my feelings and worries with. But it's really hard to jump straight to the level of relationship where you can talk about those things without going through several rounds of "Hey, can I borrow your drill?" and "Do you remember who voiced Fred Flintstone?"
>When we no longer need each other to learn about that hole in the wall restaurant, that new band
And yet the best information is still person-to-person, old school. It lives in the cracks that software misses and where review systems are gamed. Finding good Indian food is hard - but the locals know. Who has an open mic night? Hard to say without connections. Maybe the ultimate example is real estate - deep knowledge of any given place comes after you've lived there, and understand it's history, is life. And that's impossible to represent online.
>cheap consumer goods
Yes: making everything in Shenzen is a problem because now it's the only community that knows how to make and fix things. (Obviously its not 100% the case, but its mostly the case.) That lack of distributed ability has follow-on effects that we don't understand yet -- most worryingly having to do with national security, but also about agency and curiosity and self-determination. Maybe we should have to pass a test before being allowed to use any particular object, showing that we at least know how its made and where it's constituent parts come from.
Or, at least in the U. S., "summer reruns". The show would still be parked in the same time slot, but since production didn't run year-round, episodes from the last season would be rerun over the summer before the fall T. V. season started.
But that was the last chance before you had to wait 25 years for the Dukes of Hazzard DVD box set.
Just a random thought you inspired. If any "collective consciousness" ideas are grounded at all in reality does missing the shared episode experience negatively change it?
I remember that the Game of Thrones red wedding event still seemed to happen at the same time even though it was re-watchable on demand.
Another thing was regional music. I used to hear about GoGo music in DC, but I couldn't get access to it on the West Coast. People who had access to lots of different music were the music elites. I worked in college radio and set up the college's first Real Audio server and that was a game changer (we were admittedly late to the game, but the whole notion was a game changer).
This is even worse across language boundaries. Everyone everywhere seems to listen to the same Anglophone bands these days. In most European countries there used to be different sound you could get coming from local acts. They still exist, but their airtime is much reduced. Also a lot of them play songs in English, I guess to satisfy the customers and just in case they manage to break into the big time.
I have a rule when in pubs - no Googling answers to the inane argument. Inane arguments in pubs aren’t about getting the right answer, they’re about the tangents you end up going down from them, something that’s lost if you can just immediately get the answer.
I don't miss these arguments: I much prefer a short stint of BS, followed by searching for facts - which is often followed by a different conversation. Before it was just folks trying to convince others that they were right with no conclusion.
I've heard this from several generations that the time when you were still under the protection of parents, but not their attention are the "good old days" of your life - like if your biggest worry if you flipped a car was "My dad will kill me!" and not "phew, not a scratch on me & my friends are all alive".
Must be the youth and opportunity of that phase of life rather than the actual era in the world (just look at a "2007 was the best year in video games" for an equivalent for a late millenial).
The music was better, the cereal crunched better, all your friends lived nearby & were always free to hang out, the TV shows were made for your eyes and talking about your dreams was the thing you did without any irony.
Also there was a lot that affected you that you just didn't know yet. You weren't even aware of your ignorance & all knowledge was just within reach.
> I didn’t think about wage gaps, redlining, gerrymandering, or the intricacies of romantic encounters.
> Things weren’t fluid and there was no spectrum. I assumed the police were telling the truth. I was unaware of how frequently powerful men answered the door wearing nothing but a towel.
Oh, there was definitely a spectrum (Rain Man came out in the 80s). Rodney King was before the iPhone. LBJ was already showing people how everything in Texas was bigger (Doris Kearns Goodwin has a laugh about it, but we'll never know if she cringed).
I'm too young to remember all this, because it was before my time, but I sort of went into the part 2 of "We didn't start the fire" here.
It's practically nonsensical. I had a "dumbphone" up until 2011. I'm not even a luddite, I just did everything on my computer (and still pretty much do) because the general early phone OS experience was vastly inferior. 'Life before smartphones' was thus almost essentially the same going back to like 1996. I still spent all day on the internet, except now I can read it while I take a dump I guess.
Yeah, doesn't it seem natural that being around a persistent social group and spending the majority of the day hanging out made us happy? Seems like pretty much what we evolved for.
You can still live like what's described in this article. Get yourself a dumbphone and a paper atlas, only pay with cash, avoid loyalty cards, read paper books, newspapers, etc
Now and then I do that, just to switch off from our hyper-connected world. Switching off is the new peace of mind.
Much like living outside the Matrix, would you really want to go back, knowing what you know?
Yes, you can use a paper atlas. I have an 8-year-old car with GPS, and a 34-year-old car without. I bought a map book for the 34-year-old car, thinking it'd be a "period accurate" way of driving it; it's anachronistic at best, and frustrating at worst - can you read the street signs, and did you drop your compass under the seat? In the 8-year-old car, I can hit a button, say "Navigate to (an address)" _while driving_, and it figures it out.
Some of these I do on principle (only pay with cash, avoid loyalty cards, etc.), and I accept a compromised UX as a result. Your mileage may vary, depending on how much you get out of these things, but the immediate impact of them seem generally negative.
You can get battery powered compasses that you stick on your dash. :)
My car's review mirror has a compass in it and I use it for navigation quite often.
Places I had to drive to before GPS are places I have a better understanding of how to get to. I have a friend who refuses to use GPS and his knowledge of the city is far far ahead of mine.
Of course I am lucky to live in a place built on a true x-y coordinate grid system where given any address you can navigate to it w/o issue using, well, just a compass. :)
I wouldn't try that trick in London! :) (There is a cool documentary about London cab drivers and what they have/had to go through to memorize the entire city)
You can't really. People think it's simply a matter of getting rid of all the new tech.
It isn't. You'll just be an anachronism. If the entire world isn't living the same way then you are only getting a superficial experience. Instead of living a genuine life, you are merely pretending for a while.
And the world knows that everybody has a smartphone. The last restaurant I went to had QR codes on the tables rather than paper menus. Of course, I could have asked for a paper menu but they didn't provide one by default and it would have added a new extra step. It isn't a big deal of course, just slightly slower restaurant service, but a million little deals like that add up to a hassle.
I'm very happy to have gotten into a committed relationship right before online dating apparently became mandatory, although also vaguely curious what the experience is like. It seems like such a personal thing was suddenly connected to the internet, which is fascinating. Although also terrifying. I'm glad I don't have to actually deal with it.
IG is used for messaging, so the inability to text back and forth is the issue, with or without the rant. Attractive people are reluctant to give out their phone numbers and SMS is uncool.
The thing about technology is that even if you don't change everyone else will.
Sure, it might still be technically legal to ride a horse down the street. But soon enough, people started putting in multi-lane highways. Also, stores took out their hitching posts. Then we started designing cities around the car, so what used to be a mile away is now 10. And half of that distance is consumed by parking lots.
Honestly, if you hitched your horse to the side of where they have the shopping carts, or even a lamp post, not only would most not mind, most would think it was cool, and if they really hated it, wouldn't know who was responsible for/had had the right to remove the horse.
I haven't ridden a horse since I was 3 or so, but I rode a steam train through town last Sunday, which would be period accurate with your horse, and people smiled. They waved and took photos and thought it was really cool. Which it was.
It isn't practical, as you say, but it is pretty awesome. And because of that people will accommodate you.
You can sell your car, get a horse, and travel around like it is the 19th century. Of course, nothing around you will be like the 19th century. Not that it isn't worth doing for other reasons, but moving your tech backwards doesn't move the world around you backwards.
Likewise; you don't have to accuse me of lying to make a point. Almost all of the arguments in favor of smartphones in this thread are based on caving to social pressure. Cell phones and texting are sufficient. And by the way, it's called hyperbole.
> But smartphones are delivering no benefit to mankind. At all.
This statement may be hyperbolic, but at its core is not wrong. Smartphones are very easily a net negative in terms of cost/benefit to society. They're ubiquitous because they're addictive, not because they're so wonderful. Everyone used to smoke too, then we came to see the massive damage cigarettes were doing. Smartphones are just cigarettes for the brain.
Smartphones are simply tools. I use mine as a flashlight, notebook, calculator, camera, phone, book, and compass even without access to the internet. People would have lined up to buy an affordable device that did all of that in 1990.
The internet is also more than just mindless entertainment and social media. GPS isn’t necessary, but they do more than just find stuff they also route you around traffic accidents and locate the closest drug store on a trip. Downloading an instructional YouTube video really helps with home repair, etc.
In app purchases are toxic, but you can also just download a free chess app no gamification required.
> But smartphones are delivering no benefit to mankind. At all. The only compelling reason to use them is social pressure.
Benefit? Probably not. Social Pressure? I'd say it's mostly the same addictive behavior that's built into slot machines.
There's been a lot of high speed evolution that has gone into modern products. Fast food, social media, the perfection of pop music production. The unsuccessful die off.
> But smartphones are delivering no benefit to mankind.
All those billions of fools being tricked into using them! I can see an argument that the downsides of social media outweigh the benefits of access to nearly unlimited knowledge, but I don't even agree with that argument. I spent more of my life without smartphones than with, and I still 100% would rather have them than not. The access to the knowledge alone is amazing. Stuck out in the middle of nowhere? A quick google search gets you home. Traveling around in the middle of nowhere without a map isn't actually that great of a life lesson after the first time or two. And I live in the "first world" - the benefits to third world countries are profound.
> moving your tech backwards doesn't move the world around you backwards.
The OP point doesn't seem to be about moving anything backwards, but moving yourself forward by selectively disengaging from certain things.
My PhD advisor once went to a beach resort with his family. Fifteen days in a remote venue without wifi nor cellphone network. He was the kind of person who replies a saturday midnight mail with an absurdly technical and detailed answer, within less than one hour. I thought it would be torture to him. When he came back he told me that it was the most productive two weeks on his life. He wrote two nearly complete paper drafts and proved several theorems. Some things that he couldn't check on the literature were carefully noted.
After that he realised how absurd and unproductive it is to spend your whole life connected to the email and subject to excessive social pressure. I guess having email-free days, or even mornings, would be a productivity boost to many intellectual jobs (unless your job consists in actually replying to mails).
> You can still live like what's described in this article. Get yourself a dumbphone and a paper atlas, only pay with cash, avoid loyalty cards, read paper books, newspapers, etc
I've been doing this a fair amount lately, particularly when I go on vacation. It's glorious.
There are some inconveniences, for sure, but the good outweighs the bad. Most of what drives my tech use these days is 1) My job, and 2) The social expectations of others. On balance smartphones and ubiquitous internet have benefits, but the bad far outweighs the good. Unfortunately, once a technology is embraced by enough people, you're more or less forced to use it if you want to live in mainstream society.
That's pretty much me, except for reading a couple of websites (like this) , online banking, and pirating e-books for my Kindle.
I'll fire up a machine for video or photo editing once in a while or sheet music work, but otherwise they're not much use.
One problem is being too old to care about video games. When Space Invaders came out I couldn't imagine that people would choose that over pinball or foosball. My loss I guess.
Very nicely written. Made me feel nostalgic of the faint memories when I was a kid.
Not really the main theme of this article, but I guess I do lack the courage of approaching a woman for her number and asking her out these days. Can't imagine how hard that is in real life.
Now I feel old. I remember vividly running around with my first camera, looking for objects worthy of being photographed. The film cost money, so did developing it into pictures. I really had to weigh the pros and cons of taking a particular picture. And in a class of ~25 kids, I was one of three who owned a camera. Not that it was such a luxury item, but most people weren't into that.
These days, (nearly) everyone carries a camera around all the time, and one that is quite probably much better than the one I had in 1992. They can take dozens, even hundreds of pictures without breaking a sweat, and it does not cost anything.
Nostalgia is a very warped mirror. Back then, I did not miss the ability to take dozens of pictures at no cost, because the option did not exist. Was it better? Worse? Neither, I think. But this is the first time I feel old and appreciate it for the history I have lived through. Getting old is weird, but it sure is interesting. (For reference, I'm 40. "That's not old", I hear someone say, but I have never been this old before, so for me it's all new.)
I remember back when I got my first digital camera, people would routinely ask me "ok but how do you look at the pictures? Do you just print them out?". Looking at them on a screen was almost unfathomable.
Nowadays, a physical album seems to have taken the place of your camera in the 90s. Not quite a luxury item, but you'd have to be "into that" to go to the trouble of making a physical album.
Not all of us. I too grew up when screen time meant a few hours of TV a week, tops. And having a connection to another world of opinions or clubs or virtual activities is better than the past without them.
My kids have limited screen time, not unlike my parents pushing me outside to play. Until they have mature impulse control and a variety of experience I'll continue to guide them. But without all the judgemental 'lessons' and talking down to that I experienced.
I once sent a friend a photograph I had taken of them on black-and-white film (Olympus XA with Kodak Tri-X). They were flabbergasted when they asked for the full-color version and I told them it didn't exist.
People our age only have a few childhood pictures, and they are warped by time on analog media. Those pictures of us as a kid look really old because they are naturally filtered. Soon people will wonder WTF old-pic filters are for, and some historian will have to explain why it's blurred and the colors are faded. Also why did people have clothes for each decade?
Our kids, by contrast, have had pictures taken of them every week at least. With metadata so you know where you were. And they're digital images that won't fade. When our kids are 40, they can look at an archive of how they looked pretty much every week of their lives. Not only that, they can already search the archive for particular situations.
This seems at least somewhat cultural. My family was big on photo albums so nearly everything had at least a cheap disposable camera picture taken. It wasn't to the extent it is now but you still got multiple pictures per year for birthdays, holidays, school awards, extracurriculars like ymca sports, etc.
Looking back, I wish everyone had taken pictures of everyday life (probably with an Instamatic). Christmas pictures, awards, meh. What I really want are pictures of the halls in high school, street racing, parties with giant bonfires and beer.
I feel like the optimal living-documenting ratio was right before the advent of digital cameras: photography was accessible enough, but there was enough disconnect between the event and the record to be present. Now it's much easier to live through the phone's what-you-see-is-what-you-get viewfinder [1].
Related to this: it worries me that on vacation it seems my relationship with sight seeing is mainly through the phone's camera. I'm constantly seeing opportunities to take pretty snapshots, I worry that people "get in the way", I wonder about the sun messing with my photo...
...and in the end I forget to enjoy the view. Before digital cameras and mobile phones, I would just marvel at the view and enjoy it. Now I only really see it when I'm back home, flipping through digital photos (and sometimes not even that, how many photos we take that we never look at again?).
Agreed! But before phones, taking a camera and gear with you was so much trouble you often decided against it. Now taking a phone with you it's the default, and this makes taking photos frictionless, which brings me back to my original point.
There's been some studies on the effects of this which have been mixed for-or-against [1-3].
I do a lot of photography and this is a conundrum that many in my circle are aware of. My solutions:
- Use a (pseudo)rangefinder camera like a Leica or Fujifilm X100/X-Pro with an optical viewfinder. Even pre-digital SLRs would subject you to, in the moment of photographing, looking at the photograph. With an uncoupled optical viewfinder, you look at life [4]. While the photograph is a powerful simulacrum, it is not life itself; the wall-sized print of the sunrise from the top of Mt. Fuji that hangs in my living room is merely a visual paraphrase of the experience.
- Shooting film and the friction that goes into handling, developing, scanning, and (hopefully, eventually) printing brings some of the Benjaminian aura back to the visual record [5].
- Reading about Japanese aesthetics, specifically the notions of imperfections and impermanence, has helped me be more present and aware of the transience of the moment [6].
I like making photos of landscapes as a hobby. I have a big dSLR camera, nice digital p&s, and my phone. Every time I go out (eg. on a hike) I have to force myself to consider if this is a "photo trip" or a "leisure trip". Am I going to be switched on, take a ton of gear, and be trying to make photos? Or am I going worry less about it, try to enjoy the moment and maybe grab a few non critical snapshots with whatever I have (usually just phone).
Even when going someplace new as a tourist, it's tempting to worry too much about photos. If I really want to play the aspiring travelling landscape photographer it would be work, a lot of it.
With a modern phone camera, for the purpose of a "I was here, I did/saw this" snapshot for posterity, it's pretty hard to mess up a photo so bad that it is worthless as long as it's pointed in the right direction. Take a few shots, but don't worry too much about quality or quantity.
This is a problem for historians as well. What you want to figure out is how average people lived, but all the historical texts that survived describe the feats and feasts of the 1%.
One thing I noticed when looking through my parents' (pre-digital) home videos and photos from my childhood is that 90% of the subjects are me, and 10% anyone else, while what I want to see is the inverse of that. I want to see everyone else, mostly.
I try to keep that in mind when snapping photos or taking videos of my kids, and pan over to the oldsters in the room from time to time, even if all I want is to record the kids.
> What I really want are pictures of the halls in high school, street racing, parties with giant bonfires and beer.
Can confirm that a couple really, really long shots with the camera rolling for no particular purpose and capturing normal stuff happening (mostly just the audio) were among the best parts of the home videos, IMO.
Nobody ever takes pictures of normal things. If you just looked at photos you'd think all my male ancestors ever did was fell trees and pour concrete and all the women ever did was hang out together drinking coffee and smoking.
As a high school yearbook editor and photo editor in college I think you got a lot of fairly day to day photos. You don't get that in the professional sphere as companies (probably even today) aren't that big on random photos of the workplace.
I have a deliberately created Year in the Life type book from a company I used to work for that was made a couple of years before I joined the company. But it's a very atypical work.
And because you only have a few rare childhood photos I expect you value them highly. The next generation, who will inherit thousands of photos of themselves and their lives, will feel no rarity or shortage, and probably won’t value them as much.
It's already at the point where you have to spend lots of time to manually make them rare (pare them down to no more than a hundred or two per year, max) or rely on ML to generate highlights for you, for things like photos of kids.
Google uses AI to pick out the highlights from the junk. Loads of factors to use like the geotag to show this looks like a holiday, this is a photo at the beach vs this is a boring photo of a desk.
So there is a load of data but ever improving AI will get better at showing you the cool stuff.
> "Our kids, by contrast, have had pictures taken of them every week at least. With metadata so you know where you were. And they're digital images that won't fade"
They might still wonder "Why only 8K resolution?! Why aren't they in 3D and interactive?!"
I think years from now people looking at old photos will marvel at the high resolution for such old pictures. Starting around 1999 they'll see fuzzy 1.2 MP digital pictures, but then over the next ten years picture quality improves and teh amount of pictures increases. So from 1999 to about 2009 will be the "fuzzy ages".
This is so true for me, only had yearlies and occasional family events. It’s really cool to be able to look back through the years of pics I’ve taken of my kids.
They might not fade, but they are augmented by noise filtering algorithms, HDR and other tech that still subtly affects the picture quality and perception.
Google photos does a great job of this. They assemble albums of "This is what you were doing this week 6 years ago". They are pretty cool and a regular source of "oh wow I remember that"
And he doesn't even mention that you could just be outside, and be unreachable and not able to reach other people too.
As a kid I used to play outside a lot, and my mother had no clue where I was, nor could she easily find out. I could be outside all day without her worrying that I'd be abducted or involved in an accident.
Now that all has completely changed, and my mother has too. Some years ago when I walked into the hallway of my house I coincidentally noticed a lot of people in front of my door. So I opened it, and it was the police that was about to bust the door with a battering ram. As it happened I hadn't answered my phone in a couple of hours. After multiple calls unanswered, my mom had called 911 on me. And my doorbell was broken, police didn't even knock.. they wanted the action, probably.
I was just freaking programming with the deep-work-destroying phone thingy on silence (where it should be most of the time, imho).
That's terrifying, I'm sorry that happened to you.
Something I have done (accidentally at first, now on purpose) is to not respond to messages (personal) quickly, most of the time. People adjust to that rather fast and stop worrying so much. People in my circles know now that I am rarely going to answer within a few hours and expectations are adjusted. So then going outside for a few hours with no phone is no longer a "thing" - you just do it and people will expect you to get back to them when you do.
I do that too. My phone is still on silent most of the time. It is funny the reactions you get when people aren't yet used to not getting a quick response. They are sort of outraged and questioning: "I called you, but you didn't answer??".
Also I go outside without a phone on occasion. That feels like you leave a burden behind, and you are somehow more free. The phone is that easy thing you just grab to do a quick check of something on Wikipedia, or you happen to notice a notification. It is a distraction-device, keeping you busy. And among strangers, feeling less comfortable, well you can grab your phone and start staring at it. This behavior is like with smoking. Just like the relaxed cigarette cowboy in the ads, but now you casually light up the screen and be cool.
I like to run, but take the phone with me because it's my tracking device and music while running. I've been trying "do not disturb" mode, and it seems to be a positive. I don't get intermittent notifications that someone is trying to reach me - I don't want to be reached right now. The DND mode has probably been around for a while, I've just recently (last few months) gotten used to actually enabling it. What will be nicer is (eventually) have the device learn the times you don't want to be disturbed (beyond 'sleeping'). Or perhaps I'll just leave it on all the time....?
I do this with my WearOS smartwatch (gen 4 Fossil Sport). It works pretty well overall, although I had to find a third-party app (WMusic) to allow copying music to the watch and playing without an active connection to the phone.
Maybe it's an age thing. Maybe if we're coordinating an imminent get-together, but for the most part no one I know expects anything other than a telephone call to be immediately answered and even then understands reasons why it might not be.
Seconded. I made the step a few months ago, too; I turned off all "last seen" and "read"-notifications as well as uninstall my mail client from my phone [0]. I also intentionally did not respond as fast (at least on cold conversation starts). Once people get used to the fact that you might not respond in a few hours, they stop worrying so much about it when it happens.
[0] I know I still have IMs, but mails tend to be things I need to do at a computer and seeing them only stresses me with things to do for later.
One would hope the cops at least apologized for nearly destroying your front door all because you didn't answer the door. It's not like they had a warrant for your arrest or something!
My home insurance would cover police damage unless I was the person they were after. It’s still likely I would have to cover the deductible. You could probably take the presumed criminal neighbor to small claims court and try to get back the deductible. I’d bet any decent judge would be sympathetic to the home owner.
Makes sense. Seems like the incentives will be problematic either way.
Personally, I'd just have the state cover it, but explicitly not have it come out of the police budget. A reimbursement check or tax credit could work.
In the event that malice is suspected on the part of any involved party (police department, property owner, 911 caller, home invader, etc.), it would be on the state to press charges and recoup its loss.
I didn't see anything about guns drawn or anything like that. Presumably if they were police in the US, however, I assume they were "armed." That said, I frankly expect this would not be the reaction in most places. That would probably be more along the lines of "If you still haven't heard from him in 48 hours give us a call back." It seems weird that police would come to break down a house's interior door when there were no other indications of e.g. someone armed barricading themselves in a room or in distress in some other manner.
He said they were going to break down the door. Police in the US will never do that without guns drawn. Maybe he was confused about the exact circumstances though.
I wanted to say this. I hate how small the world has become and how we're supposed to be "reachable" all the time.
Some of my friends will freak out if I don't text back in as little as 5 minutes. A particular needy friend once tried to get me to "promise" that I would always return her texts within 10 minutes.
I said "hard no" explaining that it meant that it meant that I could never watch a movie uninterrupted, read a book, take a nap, etc. Also, Driving. I don't answer texts while I'm driving because I literally got in an accident texting (it was a freak circumstance, but these things do happen).
I have purposefully started training my friends by being erratic with my texts/messages/e-mails.
I have another friend who always calls on his commute home and gets offended when I don't answer. The idea alone that someone is obligated to answer the phone is insane. What if I don't want to spend an hour shooting the shit with you because I'm doing something else?
I miss the days when I could just walk away from contact.
even if you ignore addiction , mobile phones have been integrated into society in so many infrastructure-like roles that they are hardly at all optional or 'ignorable' at this point.
When you live in a world that requires bills to be paid via mobile, rent to be paid via mobile, mass transit tickets bought via mobile, physical location reservation via mobile, as well as any customer service only available via mobile... who cares about personal addiction; normal life isn't feasible without a mobile phone at that point, and very few (if any at all) mobile phones are designed from the premise that they should respect your attention.
The mobile phones that are designed to preserve the users attention are widely incompatible with any functions that the user needs (billpay/specific group apps, whatever) to stay integrated with the systems being forced upon them, so those options are already non-starter.
That means this problem is worth discussing -- non-compulsive normal people as well as compulsive addicts are being affected by the lack of 'respect for attention' that mobile phones have, and this problem intersects with the 'required prevalence' of mobile phones across the world.
And there are quite a few anecdotes on how to prevent people from forcing you, some of them written by me :)
My overall point, however, is that there will never be an external negative reinforcement to look on your phone. We all have it internalized already and that's far more compelling than any external pressure ever could be.
It's not just training ourselves, it's companies training us. When people talk about dopamine hits from getting a like on a post, or feeling a buzz from an app, they are explicitly setting out to create a behavioral pattern that benefits them in some way. They are training us like Pavlov's dogs, and while humans are smarter, we do respond to operant conditioning.
At the end of the day, we as people have to react to this environment that's been created, but the people who created it knew what they were doing.
> I have purposefully started training my friends by being erratic with my texts/messages/e-mails
I would very much like to do what you say but with a million interrupts a day, it is now or never. If I neglect / defer something now, I would likely get back to it next week. Even for work. I do find time to focus 4 hours on some work activities but those are just the high priority visible stuff otherwise maybe if someone did not remind and make it a priority maybe it was anyways not a priority. But then things slip through the crack once in a while.
> If I neglect / defer something now, I would likely get back to it next week.
As someone that lives life like this, yes, that's the point. If it's really important, they can ping me again and remind me to respond. Or when I have some downtime I'll peruse through my messages and emails again and stumble upon it and remember to reply.
Pinging me again sometimes makes sense (if we have a relationship and it's important) but it doesn't scale well. As someone who gets a lot of outside requests to do things, second and third emails to ask "did you miss my email?" get tiresome in a hurry.
(Sometimes I genuinely missed something interesting but this is rare.)
> I would very much like to do what you say but with a million interrupts a day, it is now or never.
The secret is to not be interrupted. If you're already reading the text, you might as well go and answer.
If you want to change something you will need to stop being interrupted (close the IM window, put your phone on silent, ...) and check once you have time. If you don't have time for a while, possibly give it a quick skim in case something important happened.
Things will always slip through the cracks. If you attend every interruption, it will once in a while interrupt an interruption itself and you're at status quo. At worst, put things on a todo list.
I make heavy use of email scheduling (and more recently Slack message scheduling) and will often schedule messages to go out in a few hours or the next day. That way, I can get my thoughts down in the moment, but not get sucked into a back-and-forth when I don't have time for it. I work with students and have found that delaying my responses tends set their expectation that they're not going to get a quick answer and train them over time to spend a bit more time trying to find an answer themselves because they can't depend on me for an immediate response.
Curious what your situation is. If it was personal stuff, I would honestly just mute anyone who is too noisy, and then check in periodically. If you don't like them, well they get a large period in between check-ins :). Over time, they come to expect it, and realize it's not personal. If it's work stuff, maybe you could figure out a scheduling system (like a lightweight ticketing system or inbox maybe.)
My million dollar app idea-- which I can't write because the OS's won't allow it... is I'd like fine grained control over my notifications. I used to do the Pomodoro thing and found it quite effective-- Id like to apply the idea to notifications as well.
It would work like this:
A list of firewall rules about who/what was able to send notifications. The firewall would be able to bump up or down the priority of a message, or discard them. Including rules being able to match say a regex inside the text, sender, time of day filtering.
And then at some specified interval (I would use 25 mins), I get all my notifications that didn't meet the emergency criteria in the firewall.
I've setup my iPhone to not display any notifications except for the red circles next to the app icon. I move all Apps that create notifications into a separate folder on the last home screen. That way I never receive interrupting notifications, and I have to proactively check my Whatsapp/Mail etc.
Agreed. I've been missing this since AIM went bust.
I also wish there were a way for me to send a low-priority message to my wife so that it didn't notify her regardless of her notification settings. We send each other news articles throughout the day but don't really want to interrupt each other. It would be great if there were a sender-side option that could enable this.
I've thought about using a shared document in the Notes app, or just use a different messaging app for low-priority stuff, but it seems like too much overhead. Does anyone else have a way of handling this?
When we're on our computers, email notifications come up unless we're in DND (and even then, they show up whenever your email client is visible regardless).
Fair enough! I don't think email threads are best for daily spousal communication, but perhaps for some people this could work. It sure would be easier to search than Apple Messages!
DND should be default and there should be custom sounds for different contacts. Ofc its not our computer anymore, you are not in control. Still, its weird that our digital overlords didn't implement this. Is it copyrights? Are ringtone purchases such good money? I have no idea.
You could create a group with only the both of you in your messaging app and set that group to not have notifications, then you keep the direct messages for urgent stuff. You could even have more than one group to keep conversations on separate topics organized.
Then it had better be really urgent unless you're one of a handful of people. Even as an older person, I mostly ignore phone calls if I don't recognize the caller ID--and, even then, unless it's a call I know I want to take for whatever reason.
ADDED: Where I work, chat is a more time sensitive than email but basically no one phones out of the blue.
Focus mode is better because you do not get distracted at all by the ping. This allows people to send you a message at any time and you will see it at some regular interval. I'm fine checking messages once an hour but currently they come in at random times regularly. One 10 message ping is much less distracting than 10 pings.
I would much rather someone press a button to say "This is very important, send it now" over calling me where I have to scramble to turn off my music, put my headphones on, etc before answering.
>I don't answer texts while I'm driving because I literally got in an accident texting (it was a freak circumstance, but these things do happen)
I'd like to address this in a non-judgemental way: not answering texts while driving should be the norm. It's not possible to operate a vehicle in motion and text simultaneously in a safe manner.
> "It's not possible to operate a vehicle in motion and text simultaneously in a safe manner."
This statement has been proven true by multiple studies now, many of them coming to the conclusion that texting while driving can be as dangerous or more dangerous than driving drunk.
If you could turn off being drunk at any point when you felt you needed more concentration -- foggy night, urge to speed, narrow turns -- it would be far safer to drive when drunk.
There are many reasons why the chart of auto fatalities is dominated by those with less than high school degrees[1], but one is that accurate risk assessment and good choices matter. For example, "Should I send a text one word at a time once an hour on a straight road going through Nebraska in broad daylight, or should I text continually with both hands in heavy traffic?" The first is a risk easily worth taking, even with other people's lives.
And all the drunk driving studies are proven false by my [unspecified relation family member] who also somehow suffers no consequences. Keep on gambling with other people's lives, it's definitely the important thing you should defend.
Where I live, Ireland, it is illegal to operate a phone while driving and you will get a fine + penalty points on your license if you are seen. This includes holding the phone up to your ear on a call.
I assumed it was the same in most countries, at least I'd expect so for other European countries.
I live in California and it has been illegal since 2009, but our society is in shambles as you are no doubt aware, enforcing cell phone laws is the least of our worries...
This was also probably no more than 2009 anyways as I was literally trying to get a date with my now ex-wife.
In Washington, DC, it is illegal to operate a phone. But if you walk three or four blocks downtown looking at the passing cars, you are pretty sure to see more than once person driving and holding a phone.
This is something I've been personally trying to get better at. As someone who did a lot of instant messaging in the 90s (think ICQ and IRC) I would think nothing of shooting off texts to people whenever I felt like it via SMS. There was never an expectation of immediately being answered back then and I always thought of messaging as 'write it while you remember and don't expect a response until whenever'. If something was truly urgent I'd call.
Except that's not how other people would perceive it. I've since learned that it can be incredibly annoying to others, to the point where some people would actually get distressed thinking they would have to answer the texts. Couple that with a bad habit of sending many short texts (it's how you'd write on messaging in the old days) and you have one REALLY REALLY ANNOYING FRIEND (regrettably I was that annoying friend).
So I guess I just want to apologize profusely from the other side of the fence. I'm trying to be much more mindful these days about whether that chit-chat message REALLY needs to be sent RIGHT NOW, or can it just wait for a conversation at a later time?
I'm trying to be much more self-aware in this regard.
In my view, if people are getting annoyed you're texting them, it's on them. They're the ones assuming you expect an immediate response, unless you're complaining about it. If you're getting annoyed about them not replying, that's on you.
I think for many people, especially parents, they feel an obligation to at least read texts immediately to see if some action is required, and for whatever reason they are not up to the task of setting up different notifications for their kids and spouse.
In my circles text is generally for when you want to get the message to someone right away, and email is for when they should read at their convenience.
> text is generally for when you want to get the message to someone right away, and email is for when they should read at their convenience
I wish messaging apps gave the sender the ability to hint at urgency, like the priority header that some email clients support, and then the recipient would be able to use that (or choose to ignore it) instead of the relatively rudimentary controls typically available today.
A recipient can put their whole phone silent mode, vibrate mode, or ringtone mode; use DND mode, perhaps with a schedule, perhaps with exceptions for contacts; specify a ringtone per contact; mute specific group messages -- all of these have one thing in common, which is that if the sender has something unusually important or unusually unimportant to say, they're stuck with generating whatever type of notification the recipient already decided is appropriate for a typical message from that sender.
Using phone calls for higher urgency and email for lower urgency is usually good enough, but achieving that same effect in-band through a messaging app for continuity of history would be even better.
I find it helpful to actively (and when I first introduce myself) online is to also have a disclaimer on how I communicate and to let me know if I need to change my patterns to accommodate someone. This information up front (and regular reminders about my lack of offense at not being responded to immediately) is often extremely reassuring to others rather than a source of anxiety. Because now I’ve ensured we’re all on the same page.
My ex wife was like that. One reason she's an ex wife. I lost a job due to her once because she phoned the office after I didn't respond to an SMS while I was in a very tough meeting with a client.
I now have my phone on do not disturb 24/7. I will choose when I participate in messaging. I also disable iMessage on my Mac. If someone comes up to me and talks to me, I may not even respond immediately.
I took this to extremes and a couple of weekends back I actually went for a day long solo hike with zero technology with me at all past a torch, map, compass and alcohol stove. I didn't even have any way of telling the time with me. It was invigorating with the obligation to communicate and steal my attention removed. What was most surprising was the removal of a camera and watch. Rather than being focused on recording my journey and keeping to a schedule I was focused on enjoying it. This has led to considerably more vivid memories and a much higher level of satisfaction. A trip I will always remember.
The only reason I take my phone with me on hikes is for the camera. One day I’d like to get a dumbcamera and leave my phone behind more. I don’t take a ton of pictures but do like to have the option.
Yeah. If you're genuinely concerned about being able to call for help, you should absolutely be carrying a PLB--though I don't. A smartphone may work. A PLB also may work but for higher values of may. Especially in more remote areas where injuries are probably a bigger deal, phones often can't be counted on.
My other feelthy trick is, for the D conferences, I make sure all the steenkin' badges have the names written large on them, and on both sides. That way, the peanut butter side always lands face up (or face down, if you prefer!). It ensures I never forget a name!
So I left one story out of my little rant-- which was my ex-wife would do exactly what you described. She would text and then if I hadn't responded in a few minutes she'd call the receptionist and/or my desk phone. It was infuriating because she rarely answered a text in less than a few hours.
She said that it upset her when she couldn't reach me--and that's one of the reasons she's an ex-wife. Her go to manipulation tactic was this sort of ask for some sort of compromise or make some sort of promise with absolutely not intention of keeping her end of the bargain.
She has not, but she's living with someone. I have not met him, but I can tell he's falling for the manipulation because I'm picking up my daughter from HIM most days instead of her (meaning, he's doing her dirtywork like driving our daughter places).
She was the kind of person, if you weren't doing exactly what she wanted you to, you were a piece of shit. Once I realized what was going on (our early relationship was much, much different, I would have never married someone like this) I stopped paying this game and it infuriated her to not have power over me.
Could I throw something at you-- I am sorry to be rude-- could it be your wife thinks you are cheating or is cheating herself? This was what I think was driving my ex-wife's behavior. One, to verify that I was at work and not cheating, and to make sure I was at work so she could cheat herself.
Man, so many similarities with my life. This were only clear once I was out of her sphere of influence and only then I was able to see the manipulation and gas-lighting.
Now she tries to use our child as a manipulation tool, as that is the only aspect of my life that she has any input to.
The ex moved 45 mins away and insisted I pick up and drop off the child. When I started refusing, she just abandoned the kid at her mothers house, betting correctly that I would comply (which i had to).
We had a legal agreement at my ex's insistence that we wouldn't disparage each-other. Now and then I hear from my daughter how I'm a "bad daddy"-- I have never said a single bad thing about my ex to my kiddo despite her cheating, stealing money, using my family and lying to not only our friends and family but the police to get custody.
If you need support or anything, I'm happy to lend an ear.
We might have been married to the same person... The lying is the kicker.
We had an agreement that the kid will go a certain school, after I bough her half of the house, someone changed their mind. I complied and moved to be in the zone of the new school, then someone changed their mind again. But the 2nd time it is go as court/lawyers sided with me.
I never discuss her with the kid, but I get same tidbits from him as you from your daughter. Children know a good parent, so just do your best. They will love you regardless of what they hear.
The latest thing was her not wanting to handover his medication on handover.
> If someone comes up to me and talks to me, I may not even respond immediately.
Maybe I’m too old fashioned, but there’s world of difference between ignoring someone contacting you through an async communication channel like SMS and them literally standing next to you and speaking to your face.
I agree, though I certainly will finish my thought, typing a sentence or two, before stopping and saying something like "I'm sorry, what were you asking?"
There used to be an old-fashioned, well-known hand-signal for this situation. You pause long enough to hold up one finger for a second or two, then return to what you were doing. The polite would then poke around or sit down or return in a half-minute or minute to see if you'd paused. The impolite would get barked at.
However, I wish our culture considered it rude to just walk up to someone in the middle of deep work and ask them something - unless it’s really important and time critical. It could be a simple as sending a message first “free for a quick chat?”
My counterpoint would be that before the widespread availability of chat and things like that, it was considered perfectly normal in most workplaces to swing by someone's desk. The modern obsession with "deep work" in some circles is mostly a modern invention. (At least in places that didn't commonly have offices where you could open or shut the door as a signal.)
I should have been more explicit but it does indeed depend on the context. If I’m in the middle of something I will acknowledge the person and defer the question until I’m done politely. But I won’t drop everything and context for ad-hoc stuff.
> Some of my friends will freak out if I don't text back in as little as 5 minutes. A particular needy friend once tried to get me to "promise" that I would always return her texts within 10 minutes.
This is on you. Plenty of people manage it. Try turning your phone of.
Unknowingly, I've trained my friends and family to assume they aren't going to get an answer immediately. They now text to call when I have time. Or they immediately get to the point: "wanna go riding tomorrow" instead of "hey whats up". Some people are put off by this and others find it endearing, I couldn't care less what they think. My time is my time and I do with it what I please. That means being there for others when they need it, which means being the hell off my phone when I am there.
> I have purposefully started training my friends by being erratic with my texts/messages/e-mails.
This is the way. My whole family is like this, and it's awesome. Sometimes people are too busy and don't reply, but no one gets offended. It can be annoying when planning, but overall it's great.
> I have another friend who always calls on his commute home and gets offended when I don't answer.
Similarly, we have a rule that it's not rude to call to shoot the shit, but it's also not rude to send the person straight to voicemail for any reason. It's so nice to just be able to call my sister out of the blue and know that if I'm bothering her, she won't pick up.
It was life and perspective changing. I hate that because of work and personal circumstances I cant do it now, but there is so much value in completely disconnecting when you need/want to.
We shouldnt feel ashamed that this feels wierd to us ~Xennials(+-10yr) having grown up in a time of landline only pots (and phreakin!)
Frankly, as Snowden recently said, our phones are probably our greatest security threat as a country. Going off the digital grid is almost impossible, but knowing how is a matter of national security...
Which is why breaches like OPM etc are so egregious; because once the data is out there, its too late to take back.
My problem is that listening to Drake and Binney, it seems greed was allowed to take over policy decisions in order to maximize kickbacks while failing to protect americans privacy.
There's been a complete shift in mindset. As a kid during the summer in a semi-rural area, I'd be away for hours. My grandmother had no idea where I was and my mother was at work. At one point, I had a fairly bad fall out of a tree but was able to get back to the house.
In a similar vein, if you were in the wilderness you were on your own. If you were in a group, you could send someone for help. If you were on your own you self-rescued or hoped someone found you. Now, the default assumption is you can call for help--which isn't always the case. More likely with a personal locator beacon but even that isn't a guarantee in canyons or in bad weather.
I was on a sea kayaking trip in Alaska in the early 90s. The guide had a VHF radio but, basically, had anything happened you'd have been waiting for the bush plane to return in a week.
> Now, the default assumption is you can call for help--which isn't always the case.
Exactly. I had an emergency situation where I needed to be taken to the hospital over a decade ago. I had a satellite phone on me, yet it was still difficult to get help due to a combination of satellite coverage (Iridium phones would have periods of no coverage due to satellite orbits) and just having a number to call (great thing about 911 is that it works from almost any phone in the US, except satellite phones).
>Almost everyone texts or emails and I’ve never had anyone freak out if I didn’t reply quickly.
email/text response time is very much a metric on many employee evaluation systems.
you might not have gotten anyone to 'freak out', but I guarantee that slow response times will get you lower performance reviews at many establishments.
(should it? absolutely not, I am entirely against the practice.)
> And he doesn't even mention that you could just be outside, and be unreachable and not able to reach other people too.
Or you could be at home and ignore the phone. People used to arrange a time to call or know when to call. It used to be considered impolite to let the phone ring more than 4 or 6 times unless the call was urgent. People never expected you to call back after an unanswered call, since answering machines and caller ID were rare.
> Now that all has completely changed
I find the change immensely frustrating. It isn't so much the expectation of others for an immediate response that bothers me as an internal desire for an immediate response from others. Sure, those feelings may only pop up when something genuinely important pops up. On the other hand, the other person doesn't know that until they check their messages.
Although my experience, especially pre-answering machines, was that a phone call was something that many people felt absolutely had to be answered no matter what you were doing.
I have a somewhat similar anecdote. At a previous job, I would frequently work late nights and weekends (honestly more for fun than anything). Around the end of one week, I ended up pulling a few consecutive all-nighters.
Unbeknownst to me, my mom on the other side of the country had been calling intermittently throughout those days (I keep my phone on silent). After a certain point, she called security at my apartment complex to check in on me. Of course she was then informed that my room mates hadn't seen me in several days.
By the time I noticed and returned the missed calls, apparently my mom was just about ready to call the police.
This is the worst change in my opinion. People assume the worst if you don't answer the phone. This also ruined instant messaging for me. Some people get angry or interpret something weird into it if you don't reply within 30 seconds.
It really depends on the crowd, some people don't mind and get on with their lives and don't answer until next week. I love these people.
> And he doesn't even mention that you could just be outside, and be unreachable and not able to reach other people too.
Because he's specifically talking about smartphones, not cell phones. He's talking about the information and attention economy, not the more simple highly available reachability.
> These days, (nearly) everyone carries a camera around all the time, and one that is quite probably much better than the one I had in 1992. They can take dozens, even hundreds of pictures without breaking a sweat, and it does not cost anything.
...and despite that, pictures of UFOs are as awful as ever. ;)
I tried taking a photo of the moon a while ago on my phone, and I couldn't really get it to look decent. I don't know if most smartphone users even know how to adjust the exposure setting even if any of that helped. And if they saw something as interesting as a UFO, I don't think they would figure it out on the spot either. I'm not sure if automatic settings would cut it on a fancier phone.
It is because of focal length. Although phone manufacturers started to put “tele” cameras, primary camera is wide. Wide lenses mean there will be more coverage but things will get smaller, which happens with moon.
Back in 1992 when I was 10 years old we went to Disney World with my family (as a middle class Mexican family, that was one of 2 out of the country trips in our childhood).
My brother (2 years older) and I had a mechanical camera with rolls of I think 12 or 20 photos (with this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/110_film ) . We've got at most 30 pictures of that trip in our family albums. I wish we had taken more pictures as my memory of the trip has faded away quite a bit.
I had a Polaroid Swinger. Few of its pictures survive to this day. "It's more than a camera... it's almost alive! It's only nineteen dollars... and ninety-five!" In those days this was not cheap. And... after _every_ picture you had to carefully take the photo by the edges, then open the film canister of the special Polaroid photo preservative and take out the foam sponge and carefully wipe it across the photo a couple of times for complete coverage and then wait half a minute for it to dry before doing anything with it. Sorta lessened the spontaneity of owning a Polaroid.
I wish my parents had smartphone camera when I was small because amount of pics/video I capture of my kid and feel so excited about the thought that he could view his entire childhood . I remember few things from my childhood but it would been really fascinating to view that
One thing I've noticed is that while everyone can take photos and video anytime they want to, many folks simply forget to. How many people have you seen who have timelines of only selfies, food, and/or cats/dogs. I've been making a point to take just a few photos or videos while spending time with friends after a show and many of my friends are thankful when I do and share them (directly, not online and tagging them).
I can second that - My first camera was a 110 toy camera (I once got a flip flash for it!). My second camera was a point-and-shoot APS camera. Even many of the photos I took with my early Sony Ericsson phone cameras (K800) were better
I don't know - smartphone cameras are at least as good or better than disposable cameras were. The same can be said for the quality of camera most folks had. I remember that little camera that took 110 film.
And oh, I've seen many: I worked at a pharmacy, where one of my duties was developing film and helping folks print digital prints. As digital cameras grew better, cheaper, and more widely distributed (thanks in no small part to smartphones), regular film just dropped sharply.
A few folks care, and will sometimes get a fancier digital camera if they can afford it. The vast majority of folks, though, don't seem to care as long as they have the pictures. Realistically, all a lot of folks want is an instant point and click.
There was a short doc about a young analog photographer who said that the freeness made him hoard shots. And that the film development plus the necessity of choosing shots made the whole activity a lot deeper for him.
I deeply believe that we need structures and limits otherwise it's too easy to become metaphorically obese.
I do take significantly more pictures than I would with a film camera, but this also affords me the freedom to take the pictures right there and then, and not agonise over whether "a shot is worth it".
And yet, I don't end up with thousands or even hundreds of pictures. Almost a full year of 365 challenge somehow taught me to look out for actual good shots, and not obsessively hold the shutter button to everything.
Maybe is just me but I read this as a satire of modern days and not as a satire of the old days. Most things the author hints as awkward in the past, the “optimized” version sounds frivolous.
I’m not a zealot of old times but if we are honest with ourselves we realize that most new stuff is crap. 90% somebody said. Few changes are net improvements.
> I was not archived, nor was I searchable; things I said just disappeared forever.
> I had no influence and never disrupted anything. Strangers did not wish me a happy birthday or “Like” me. My personal brand was invisible.
> I did not take photos of myself, was not filtered
These things have always been happening; society just previously only had enough resources to set its scorching eye on politicians, nobles, and celebrities, in such a way as to force these thoughts and behaviors as reaction. Now there's enough attention for everybody, whether they like it or not.
> There was no surveillance of the streets.
Sure there was. It was just the unreliable and biased eye-witness kind of surveillance. One of the main purpose of the "city guard" was patrolling and noting down suspicious behavior.
Pre-globalization, many large cities would by default have border walls and border checks, where you'd have to state your purpose of visit and get your entry/exit recorded in a logbook.
Also, there were a lot of curfews. Curfew laws used to be pretty common, enabling city guards to treat anyone who is out at night as a de-facto criminal, enabling immediate search-and-seizure.
> News was not breaking
Sure it was. There was less space to fill, and so "breaking news" was limited to things of wider relevance, but it still happened, and still spread quickly. Even pre radio, there was "breaking news" in newspapers, pushed into the edition at the last minute. The whole value-prop of the telegraph was to spread "breaking news."
> The only content users generated was letters to the editor.
Depending on the era, you're forgetting about:
• Usenet
• Public-access television
• Call-in radio shows
• Open-participation scientific journals and "societies of letters"
Also, people could just sit down and write a book. Or, more likely, a memoir. The interesting ones would eventually get discovered and published, if perhaps post-humously.
> I rarely got to feel outraged by the words of people I’d never met.
They were there, in books/memoirs. People who read a lot of this generally made a career (in Literary Criticism) out of it.
> The only bingeing I did involved alcohol. I’d wait an entire week to watch the next episode.
You could have been binging serial novels!
> acquaintances never asked me to finance their ... back surgery
Sure they did; they likely did it through by presenting their problem to the local church, who then asked you to donate on their behalf. They're still doing that, in fact. GoFundMe is communal charity for non-religious people.
> I didn’t think about wage gaps, redlining, gerrymandering, or the intricacies of romantic encounters.
People have been talking about all of these things (perhaps under different names) for centuries. They're hard to avoid, in fact, if you read the writings of "statesmen" of previous eras.
> My desk’s height did not adjust; I just sat in a chair and took it.
You could have just had one short desk and one tall one. Or a writing desk. Most people didn't, though. The real modern difference is a self-interested motivation to have good ergonomics.
> butts that were incapable of functioning as shelves.
Such butts certainly existed; they were just not evenly distributed. :)
IMO the big thing is not being bored. Someone is late for a meeting? Doesn't matter, you've got HN to read. On the back seat for a long drive? Doesn't matter, you can answer emails. Or play a game.
The whole psychologically weird phase of "hmm I'm here and waiting, and all I can do is watch paint dry" seems to have vanished.
I'm not sure what people prefer more though. Say you're waiting for a date, do you feel best breaking off directly from your reading of the dragon book, or would you feel best just doing nothing until they showed up?
> The whole psychologically weird phase of "hmm I'm here and waiting, and all I can do is watch paint dry" seems to have vanished.
I dunno. Infinite scrolling sure feels like watching paint dry to me... but as a teenager my idea of a good time was finding an isolated bit of woods, and sitting still enough for the fauna to ignore me. Actually, that's still my idea of a good time, but I'm too busy and the woods anywhere nearby are too crowded.
After getting vaccinated I was sitting in the waiting area, for the 15 minutes our suppose to stay, in case you get an allergic reaction and I noticed that most people where NOT looking at their phones. They where just sitting, doing nothing. I did the same, and honestly, it was absolutely wonderful just to have 15 minutes where you did nothing.
I'm not saying I wouldn't get bored just waiting for extended periods of time, but sometimes it's nice to know that for the next 10 - 20 minutes, you just have to exist in this spot, and that's all that's really expected of you.
When I go to the gym I don't bring my phone with me, and when I am resting in-between sets I just sit there. Sometimes my mind will wander, but often I just sit there and my mind is pretty much blank. I find it very relaxing.
I do like having a timer and gym log built in my phone. But +1 to not always having content streaming. Turning off music + youtube gives my mind a break.
I miss being bored. I used to go out of character and explore things when I got bored, now I don't remember the last time when I was bored for prolonged time.
I mean I get bored of a game or an article etc. but I would immediately seek refuge in something else that is easy to reach.
Before constant connectivity, I would have attempt to cure my boredom in much more hardcore ways.
As someone with ADHD, this has been the most advantageous change for me. Another things I can do now is play a game on my phone during meetings - it may be counter-intuitive to others, but occupying my visual cortex and hands with a simple game allows me to pay attention to what someone is saying without having my mind wander.
> "hmm I'm here and waiting, and all I can do is watch paint dry" seems to have vanished.
Theres several influencers whose whole bit is centered around mixing paint, and I don't know how many channels on youtube dedicated to the sound it makes when you cut sand with a knife. So don't despair, I'm absolutely certain there is a channel out there dedicated to watching paint dry, on demand in byte size vids with tons of userengagement, for those long drives when you just want to pull the plug and watch paint dry.
This reminded me of Sitting and Smiling [0]. It's just a dude sitting there for hours and smiling. Once a burglar actually entered his home and was scared of by, well, nothing, so I guess it checks the user engagement part, too ;)
People weren't necessarily "bored"-- remember that the boredom one feels when not hyper stimulated is due, at least in part, to adaptation to their peak/typical stimulus.
People probably got sufficient dopamine, from "less exciting" things such as small talk, looking at the clouds, contemplating the meaning of their life while waiting for an interview to begin etc.
I've been intentionally cutting things like TV or internet out of my life at certain times, and can definitively say I'd rather be bored. All these things I tell myself I want to do are actually not that hard when I'm bored. Writing, drawing, having more conversations with loved ones. It's a lot easier when I can't say "let's watch the new episode while we eat" or "I'll surf HN for a bit." The boredom builds until it finds release, eventually being high enough to do the things I actually want to spend my time on.
If all I can do is watch paint dry, I'll find something else, whether it's rewarding or just mindless dopamine.
That said, I'm totally addicted and cutting out the internet is extremely hard when I sit in front of it for work and my computer and phone are where a lot of the rewarding things are too (e.g. cell phone drains time, but you need it to text friends). I feel like an alcoholic working as a bartender also required to take just a teeny sip of whiskey every time I talk to someone.
"Apathy's a tragedy and boredom is a crime" - Welcome to the Internet by Bo Burnham[1]
This new song from Bo's covid-lockdown inspired special "Inside" hits this right on head. The Internet, particularly when paired with mobile devices just tries to suck up so much attention, because that's exactly what we made it do.
What I've been enjoying lately is purposely not taking my phone off when I have a minute or two to kill. Just look around, think about things, it's very relaxing to me.
I do remember however being bored to hell as a teenager, I would not want to live in that world, I really hated it.
I've read far too many cereal boxes and shampoo bottles in my lifetime. Instead of getting annoyed at my unexpected 10 minute wait somewhere, I can just play a game. So many minor annoyances, gone due to the little pocket miracle. I can always choose not to pick it up, after all, but at least I have the choice now.
I gotta laugh at this. Being someone that's from a working town and being from a working class family, cops weren't to be trusted. Cops lied even back then. Life wasn't better back then. The fact he seems to mock gender fluidity and polyamory really shows how much has changed for the better. People who didn't fit in with the gender constructs then were out of luck. Either you were forced to be lgb or if you were trans you had to fit the gendered mold; no androgyny unless you're doing it as part of a musical act.
See also "being elite was good" and "I wasn't polyamorous." It's a whole article of "I only knew how to be a vanilla white guy. And that was a good thing!"
Interesting, I came away with the impression that the author was implying that some of these changes (i.e. better understanding of toxicity, therapy, wage gaps, redlining, gerrymandering) to be positive changes to provide more nuance in their post than just a list of raw nostalgia.
"Were those the good old days? It’s tough to say."
It's as if there were advantages and disadvantages. It's easy to view the past as "good" but the reality, as presented in this article, was really a mixed bag.
Because if multiple consenting adults love each other and want to form amorous relationships between then, that should be ok and accepted since it hurts nobody?
I think that was meant to call out the highly modified people that are shown on Instagram. I don't use Instagram, so that comment stuck out to me as well, but I see where the author is coming from.
Things I enjoy about my life now, after having ditched my smartphone:
* Being fully into a stimulating conversation with friends for an hour or more, without constant interruptions for people to check their phones and then change the subject to something irrelevant and mildly infuriating.
* Being able to go for random/spontaneous drives with my family in the car and negotiate where we're going next without having to pull over to update Google Maps or hear the phone bark "Make a U-Turn" a zillion times until I do.
* Looking forward to social interactions being events where I enjoy doing things I like with people whose company I value, instead of a constant stream of bullshit, dueling ego trips, and disconnected conversations where both parties spend more time correcting the other person about what they meant than actually saying something.
* Waking up in the morning earlier than planned, full of energy, then sipping my coffee slowly as the sun rises, because I got good, restful sleep last night.
* Not having to face surprise criticism about something I said X days ago, because most of my statements are verbal, only reach the people they were intended to reach, and are not preserved after that.
* Not having to spend more time taking pictures of an activity than actually doing the activity.
* Not being in a constant state of annoyance all the time due to a distinct lack of time spent correcting typos, fat-fingering menus, waiting on things to load, and dismissing popups.
* Tasting true solitude (not just alone time) once in a while.
About 2.5 years ago I struggled a bit with smartphone addiction. All the screen time limitation apps didn't work out for me and I decided the smartphone had to go. Instead I bought the then newly released Nokia 8110 4G, which is a so-called featurephone. This phone really worked out well for me.
It had great battery life of up to a week, WiFi, 4G and supported Whatsapp. You could take an occasional snapshot with it's 2MP camera and if you really wanted to, browse the internet on a tiny 2.45" screen. Also you could connect it with you Google account to sync contacts and email.
With these features it allowed me to do the beneficial things you use an internet connected phone for, like staying in touch with my peers and looking for directions. But I was no longer able to mindlessly scroll the internet for hours each day because it was just not possible.
So if you're also not happy with your smartphone usage, I can really recommend you to give a featurephone a try. At ~60€ it is cheap enough to try it for 2 weeks and put it in some drawer if it doesn't work out.
Disclaimer: 1,5 years later I started using a smartphone again because I had a kid and wanted to be able to take better pictures.
I grew up in Washington and I remember biting into a red delicious apple was like biting into a water balloon they were so juicy. They were always super crisp and crunchy too, big chunks would break off as you bit them. Now when I get them (I don’t live in WA anymore) they are always mushy and gross. Is this what we are talking about?
Not really to do with Smartphone, but before the Smartphone era, having a phone call is pretty damn nice. Now it is all robocalls. I dont even remember the last time I had a real person calling me. The people I know, or even those I dont such as job agents, will leave a whatsapp message.
I also used to think having a decent digital Camera on a phone would be insanely great. It turns out not so, at least not any more. Every single god damn digital photo are now either some stupid "computational" photography enhanced, some are enhanced with AI or whatever Machine Learning. Apple used to be on the realistic camp but now even they are joining the profile of instagram generation. ( I have been told customer want these sort of features as they think it is better photo, and sell better ) And if that is not enough most of them are posted with some editing or filters. To the point nothing in the photo I saw is real.
I remember dreaming about online MMO on a phone. That was UO / World of Warcraft era. May be in ten to fifteen years time a Pocket Computer with Wireless Network. That would be so much fun. But gaming now has becomes a casino with lots of gambling options to win the game. It is also time sink for many of us to escape into the "metaverse". ( Metaverse is the new VC hype of 2021 ). They are no longer the same.
I remember I really really wanted IRC, ICQ and later MSN on a Smartphone. It didn't work. I have to hack an O2 Atom ( made by HTC before they become a brand of itself they used to be a ODM like Foxconn ) and it was a battery drain. Now it is largely replaced by all sort of instant messenger. But we dont give ICQ numbers or your MSN handle to anyone anymore. It is all "phone" numbers. So it is more of a "real world" connection rather than some "Internet identity" we used to have.
Speaking of O2 Atom, I have been looking for a smartphone, or a pocket computer that uses 2G GPRS as Data Connection and slowly browse the Internet on the street. So I could sit in a Cafe and use some remote server that will send me the .MHT version of a website so I only use one connection. ( Multiple connection on GPRS are bound to fail ). iPhone was everything I wanted I remember vividly how Apple nailed it. From capacitive Touch Screen to all the small UX. Most people didn't get it. As it wasn't the first "Smartphone", you have Nokia Symbian and something like the Sony Ericsson P900 at the time. Most people were like Steve Ballmer and laughing at it. But for those who were looking for it for so long. iPhone was "it".
I would have thought with Smartphone, people would listen to even more music, as it replaces mp3, or MiniDisc. Where we curate our own collection very carefully to try and fit in how tiny amount of storage we had. Turns out people are consuming more Video and other forms of Media. Music isn't "dead", but it certainly didn't bloom like many expected. From a high level prospective, all forms of media are competing for your attention and time.
Computational photography (what you call "some are enhanced with AI or whatever Machine Learning") is a perfectly legitimate evolution in the field of consumer photography. I'm not sure why you are so critical of it.
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[ 0.15 ms ] story [ 415 ms ] threadSMS feature phones like the sidekick, with physical keyboards, ruled the day and many of my classmates actually disliked smartphones because of the lack of physical keys!
You all had it made. I'm sure any younger person can vouch for the social issues that come along with every teenager having a smartphone, but your cohort also missed out on family-shared landlines and all of the issues attendant with them. Calling your date and finding yourself forced to make small talk with her dad the phone bouncer, for example.
It's great. Engage with others more authentically, more meaningfully, and more consistently.
It may be hard for some people, but if you really want to do it, keep at it and don't give up. Seven generations from now, do you think smartphones will still have this hold on humanity? We just can't continue this way; it's an unsustainable form of society. Even movies made in 2021 do not depict smartphone usage anywhere close to the frequency and intensity they are used now. People will wake up from this collective dream one day; I'd rather wake up now and get started early on building something that works, wouldn't you?
> That last sentence is the most confusing thing I’ve read today, and I still don’t know what you mean by it.
I think ahofmann is referring to people who have a smartphone but not a desktop / laptop or similar.
A dumb phone does less for you now than it did in 2005, just like a horse does less for you now than it did in 1895. Even if you really like horses, you can't ride them on the same streets you once could.
There was a culture of nudging people along to the right place. Even as a kid you would be asked for directions from time to time and have to sort out how many blocks to go before the next turn and all that, often without ever having seen an actual map of your own town.
Some people conflate authenticity for interactions with others who are willing to go way out of their way to spend time with you.
And if the bell rung, well, you were out of luck
Getting a call in a restaurant. Only happened to me once but I certainly felt like a VIP.
Carrying a tiny map book of London around with me while cycling around. Missing turn after turn until finding there was a canal which basically took me from the center to my uncle's house.
Arranging to meet a friend and then being late. Really late. 1 hour late. He was still there, waiting for me.
My parents told me they spend evenings at the phone booth talking to each other - but even that is ultra convenient compared to my grandparents sending letters :D
But I think it's better anyway - we sample mating candidates more, we cycle through faster, we can stop and try anew nearly any time until 50, and with some difficulty above.
I mean my aunt had a crushing divorce when she had 3 young children and stayed alone working with all 3 until the internet arrived and she could find a partner much faster...
No need to get to the grandparents' generation, I was the letter writer of my family :) I wrote letters to uncles/aunts/grandpa - mostly at the command of my mum or grandma and sometimes for myself. I remember rushing to the window when the postman yelled and dropped letters through the grill - sometimes there would be more than one! The excitement was palpable - now we sigh with annoyance at the barrage of nonsense and spam that flows into our inbox. Truly a case of quantity over quality.
These days, I feel like that when I get a physical letter that isn't sent by a machine.
On the other side, we self report more isolated, depressed, friendless and dissatisfied than ever in the past decades, have record levels of depression prescriptions and opioids, and people get discovered dead after a month or so when somebody complains about the smell...
Did we track depression before like we do now? Were folks comfortable talking about it or would they lie when they self report?
I'm pretty sure that in the past, folks got discovered dead because of the smell.
similarly it was amazing to smoke in bars, but it's great to not have smoke filled bars
There have to be other daily habits now that going to be seen as disgusting in a few decades too. Maybe things like eating non-cloned meat.
We were 16+ so basically drinking free booze on the plane while smoking our hearts out. We actually drank all the beer on the plane. It looked like a smoke bomb went off.
It must have been the flight from hell for other passengers. Completely unimaginable right now. Thank you Sabena Airlines for this core memory of my youth and not having us arrested in Athens.
We had also written to Czech friends from grad school (U FL) that we would show up in Olomouc on such and such date (Jun 1989, interesting times). They were visiting relatives and we showed up. And were whisked off to 5 days of whirlwind touring the soon to be de-Sovietized Czechoslovakia.
We hosted quite few Eastern Europeans in the '90s, all arranged over snail mail. There was a sense of responsibility that we don't really experience today when dropping in on travels. All the modernity in the world, and nowadays we occasionally get ghosted, even after making repeated prior arrangements using the latest hottest smart phone technology.
I will say this: google translate + maps are the two great inventions we appreciate most. The rest is a solid meh. We have a theory that maximized immediate convenience has an unanticipated effect of atomizing and devaluing some relationships.
Per the parent, I too remember those paper maps while cycling. As in, riding from the Portland Airport to Arcadia and down to LA, using a tour guide, quite tattered at the end. Most of the times before an extended trip (100+ miles) I would memorize the route the night before. This worked fine for 25 years.
Also - you remembered your friends phone numbers (or had a black book).
Also, if you went out without telling your family where, you became unreachable for the whole day(s). Going dark that way nowadays is almost unthinkable.
Did people feel the same way when the railroad and other forms of rapid transport showed up?
What makes things feel so different? Is it more competition, and for what? Is it that things are just faster, and the certainties have changed? Has it fundamentally changed how we experience relationships with people?
Are our standards now higher, and is that a good thing?
In the pre-Internet era, rumors, incidents, conspiracies, book and movie opinions were passed on verbally. I saw an article nobody else in my circle ever read; a friend watched a movie nobody else is going to see any time soon, etc. There were endless opportunities to get together and talk.
We were each other's Internets.
Do people talk less these days? I certainly do but that might be due to my age. But I'm genuinely curious if the topics of conversations are as intellectually fulfilling as they used to be.
There might be an argument that our new online/text based discussions have changed the dynamics (some could argue hindered, but I don't) of face to face communication.
It's not the travel, or the time, it's the 'it's more efficient to go thousands of miles out of the way due to logistics.'
This has not been particularly new, but I can still marvel at it.
Having fixed plumbing, I'm reminded that the current iteration is as a result of 2000 years of refinement.
I have a lathe, manufactured in 1966, it still holds tolerances, and I refer to a book (how to run a lathe) that's first printing was at the turn of the 20th century (1912 or thereabouts)
Old stuff is remarkable, too.
I think comparing the advances in mechanical precision to changes in society shaping technological advances is not a fair comparison. I would argue that it's exactly that mechanical precision that started with gauge blocks that has facilitated all our advancements.
I think it's just a different "system of measures" when talking about societal/social impact on our human interactions. People's minds and feelings don't fit into technical descriptions.
But, to agree with you, just like basic technology changes slowly, human nature barely seems to change at all.
One wonders the degree to which our mental health actually thrived better with that extra time, accidental rather than deliberate discovery.
To some extend yes. When I was a kid, we'd rarely go to the only major city in our part of the country. Maybe two times a year. Now I live in that area, but I can easily go visit my parents for dinner, just because someone decided that a motorway was a great idea. It cut somewhere like 40 minutes to an hour of the drive.
It still boggles my mind that 30 years ago we considered it a day trip, but with a shorter distance, faster speeds, in a better car, it's just a quick drive, allowing my daughter to see her grandparents way more often than I saw mine.
So the change in the "underlying" doesn't have to be 10x to have a 10x effect on the relationships.
> I didn’t think about wage gaps,
I think that this and other similar examples are confusing the Internet and smartphone
A recent example:
George's GF wants a "no phones at dinner" rule. G: "We had a good thing going, Jerry! Now we're supposed to talk? That can only end badly!
https://mobile.twitter.com/seinfeld2000
It’s also interesting to me that this problem, of storytelling in a world of instant communication, was first addressed in the original Star Trek. Various adventure story tropes had to be adjusted for communicators and transporters. Roddenberry et al admitted it was a headache sometimes.
* Half of the population watching the same episodes of the same programme simultaneously. If you missed an episode, it was gone forever
* Inane arguments in pubs about facts that couldn't be instantly googled.
I don't miss those. Before the Internet, if it wasn't on an encyclopedia and you weren't at the library, you had no way of corroborating information.
On the other hand, since facts are so accessible right now, those arguments have shifted to voicing their feelings and wishes because those can't be falsified.
I find it quite irritating sometimes - can we not just talk about it! - and it's not like I have a long memory before it was possible. (I grew up with phones certainly, was in school when they became 'smart'.)
In a way, we've regressed back before we had the answer machine at our fingertips. You don't really know who's correct. It's just changed from 'Well, I heard xyz from my friend's aunt's sister, so I'm right. Oh yeah! Gary just said the opposite yesterday, so you're wrong' to something a little bit different.
But unfortunately people's brains are fried because of the constant social media bombardment.
Information sharing is an extremely low barrier kind of favor because when I give you some information, I still have it too. When we no longer need each other to learn about that hole in the wall restaurant, that new band, how to fix a leaky sink, we have also lost important tools to forge connections with each other.
I worry a lot that the Internet and cheap consumer goods has essentially knocked the bottom rungs off the ladder of human relationships. I don't need others to find a place to eat or live, or to learn a new skill or hobby. But I do still need them to share my feelings and worries with. But it's really hard to jump straight to the level of relationship where you can talk about those things without going through several rounds of "Hey, can I borrow your drill?" and "Do you remember who voiced Fred Flintstone?"
And yet the best information is still person-to-person, old school. It lives in the cracks that software misses and where review systems are gamed. Finding good Indian food is hard - but the locals know. Who has an open mic night? Hard to say without connections. Maybe the ultimate example is real estate - deep knowledge of any given place comes after you've lived there, and understand it's history, is life. And that's impossible to represent online.
>cheap consumer goods
Yes: making everything in Shenzen is a problem because now it's the only community that knows how to make and fix things. (Obviously its not 100% the case, but its mostly the case.) That lack of distributed ability has follow-on effects that we don't understand yet -- most worryingly having to do with national security, but also about agency and curiosity and self-determination. Maybe we should have to pass a test before being allowed to use any particular object, showing that we at least know how its made and where it's constituent parts come from.
But that was the last chance before you had to wait 25 years for the Dukes of Hazzard DVD box set.
You skipped right over syndication, which is what every series was aiming for (and Dukes of Hazzard definitely attained.)
I remember that the Game of Thrones red wedding event still seemed to happen at the same time even though it was re-watchable on demand.
And now music really knows no bounds.
I'd probably just veer off by mentioning that Sissy Spacek is Rip Torn's cousin (wait! who is Rip Torn? who is Sissy Spacek?)
I set VHS recorder just in case.
It was really a bummer to miss something. It was probably going to be years, or at least seasons, until you got to see it again.
I don't know.
Ok. Another round?
I did relate to it though. It would be apt for a video about things you'd only understand if you're a millennial.
I've heard this from several generations that the time when you were still under the protection of parents, but not their attention are the "good old days" of your life - like if your biggest worry if you flipped a car was "My dad will kill me!" and not "phew, not a scratch on me & my friends are all alive".
Must be the youth and opportunity of that phase of life rather than the actual era in the world (just look at a "2007 was the best year in video games" for an equivalent for a late millenial).
The music was better, the cereal crunched better, all your friends lived nearby & were always free to hang out, the TV shows were made for your eyes and talking about your dreams was the thing you did without any irony.
Also there was a lot that affected you that you just didn't know yet. You weren't even aware of your ignorance & all knowledge was just within reach.
> I didn’t think about wage gaps, redlining, gerrymandering, or the intricacies of romantic encounters.
> Things weren’t fluid and there was no spectrum. I assumed the police were telling the truth. I was unaware of how frequently powerful men answered the door wearing nothing but a towel.
Oh, there was definitely a spectrum (Rain Man came out in the 80s). Rodney King was before the iPhone. LBJ was already showing people how everything in Texas was bigger (Doris Kearns Goodwin has a laugh about it, but we'll never know if she cringed).
I'm too young to remember all this, because it was before my time, but I sort of went into the part 2 of "We didn't start the fire" here.
Now and then I do that, just to switch off from our hyper-connected world. Switching off is the new peace of mind.
Yes, you can use a paper atlas. I have an 8-year-old car with GPS, and a 34-year-old car without. I bought a map book for the 34-year-old car, thinking it'd be a "period accurate" way of driving it; it's anachronistic at best, and frustrating at worst - can you read the street signs, and did you drop your compass under the seat? In the 8-year-old car, I can hit a button, say "Navigate to (an address)" _while driving_, and it figures it out.
Some of these I do on principle (only pay with cash, avoid loyalty cards, etc.), and I accept a compromised UX as a result. Your mileage may vary, depending on how much you get out of these things, but the immediate impact of them seem generally negative.
You can get battery powered compasses that you stick on your dash. :)
My car's review mirror has a compass in it and I use it for navigation quite often.
Places I had to drive to before GPS are places I have a better understanding of how to get to. I have a friend who refuses to use GPS and his knowledge of the city is far far ahead of mine.
Of course I am lucky to live in a place built on a true x-y coordinate grid system where given any address you can navigate to it w/o issue using, well, just a compass. :)
I wouldn't try that trick in London! :) (There is a cool documentary about London cab drivers and what they have/had to go through to memorize the entire city)
Also google corrects car review mirror to rear view. :)
It isn't. You'll just be an anachronism. If the entire world isn't living the same way then you are only getting a superficial experience. Instead of living a genuine life, you are merely pretending for a while.
That's usually the point where I go into my "facebook is spyware" spiel, with predictable results.
Sure, it might still be technically legal to ride a horse down the street. But soon enough, people started putting in multi-lane highways. Also, stores took out their hitching posts. Then we started designing cities around the car, so what used to be a mile away is now 10. And half of that distance is consumed by parking lots.
I haven't ridden a horse since I was 3 or so, but I rode a steam train through town last Sunday, which would be period accurate with your horse, and people smiled. They waved and took photos and thought it was really cool. Which it was.
It isn't practical, as you say, but it is pretty awesome. And because of that people will accommodate you.
But smartphones are delivering no benefit to mankind. At all. The only compelling reason to use them is social pressure.
You know better than that. You don't have to lie to try and make a point.
This statement may be hyperbolic, but at its core is not wrong. Smartphones are very easily a net negative in terms of cost/benefit to society. They're ubiquitous because they're addictive, not because they're so wonderful. Everyone used to smoke too, then we came to see the massive damage cigarettes were doing. Smartphones are just cigarettes for the brain.
The internet is also more than just mindless entertainment and social media. GPS isn’t necessary, but they do more than just find stuff they also route you around traffic accidents and locate the closest drug store on a trip. Downloading an instructional YouTube video really helps with home repair, etc.
In app purchases are toxic, but you can also just download a free chess app no gamification required.
Benefit? Probably not. Social Pressure? I'd say it's mostly the same addictive behavior that's built into slot machines.
There's been a lot of high speed evolution that has gone into modern products. Fast food, social media, the perfection of pop music production. The unsuccessful die off.
All those billions of fools being tricked into using them! I can see an argument that the downsides of social media outweigh the benefits of access to nearly unlimited knowledge, but I don't even agree with that argument. I spent more of my life without smartphones than with, and I still 100% would rather have them than not. The access to the knowledge alone is amazing. Stuck out in the middle of nowhere? A quick google search gets you home. Traveling around in the middle of nowhere without a map isn't actually that great of a life lesson after the first time or two. And I live in the "first world" - the benefits to third world countries are profound.
The OP point doesn't seem to be about moving anything backwards, but moving yourself forward by selectively disengaging from certain things.
My PhD advisor once went to a beach resort with his family. Fifteen days in a remote venue without wifi nor cellphone network. He was the kind of person who replies a saturday midnight mail with an absurdly technical and detailed answer, within less than one hour. I thought it would be torture to him. When he came back he told me that it was the most productive two weeks on his life. He wrote two nearly complete paper drafts and proved several theorems. Some things that he couldn't check on the literature were carefully noted.
After that he realised how absurd and unproductive it is to spend your whole life connected to the email and subject to excessive social pressure. I guess having email-free days, or even mornings, would be a productivity boost to many intellectual jobs (unless your job consists in actually replying to mails).
I've been doing this a fair amount lately, particularly when I go on vacation. It's glorious.
There are some inconveniences, for sure, but the good outweighs the bad. Most of what drives my tech use these days is 1) My job, and 2) The social expectations of others. On balance smartphones and ubiquitous internet have benefits, but the bad far outweighs the good. Unfortunately, once a technology is embraced by enough people, you're more or less forced to use it if you want to live in mainstream society.
I'll fire up a machine for video or photo editing once in a while or sheet music work, but otherwise they're not much use.
One problem is being too old to care about video games. When Space Invaders came out I couldn't imagine that people would choose that over pinball or foosball. My loss I guess.
Ditto for most restaurant menus in a lot of places: they are QR codes now, that point to URLs.
Airlines will only let you book with cards, no cash.
Not really the main theme of this article, but I guess I do lack the courage of approaching a woman for her number and asking her out these days. Can't imagine how hard that is in real life.
These days, (nearly) everyone carries a camera around all the time, and one that is quite probably much better than the one I had in 1992. They can take dozens, even hundreds of pictures without breaking a sweat, and it does not cost anything.
Nostalgia is a very warped mirror. Back then, I did not miss the ability to take dozens of pictures at no cost, because the option did not exist. Was it better? Worse? Neither, I think. But this is the first time I feel old and appreciate it for the history I have lived through. Getting old is weird, but it sure is interesting. (For reference, I'm 40. "That's not old", I hear someone say, but I have never been this old before, so for me it's all new.)
Nowadays, a physical album seems to have taken the place of your camera in the 90s. Not quite a luxury item, but you'd have to be "into that" to go to the trouble of making a physical album.
My kids have limited screen time, not unlike my parents pushing me outside to play. Until they have mature impulse control and a variety of experience I'll continue to guide them. But without all the judgemental 'lessons' and talking down to that I experienced.
People our age only have a few childhood pictures, and they are warped by time on analog media. Those pictures of us as a kid look really old because they are naturally filtered. Soon people will wonder WTF old-pic filters are for, and some historian will have to explain why it's blurred and the colors are faded. Also why did people have clothes for each decade?
Our kids, by contrast, have had pictures taken of them every week at least. With metadata so you know where you were. And they're digital images that won't fade. When our kids are 40, they can look at an archive of how they looked pretty much every week of their lives. Not only that, they can already search the archive for particular situations.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27697921
...and in the end I forget to enjoy the view. Before digital cameras and mobile phones, I would just marvel at the view and enjoy it. Now I only really see it when I'm back home, flipping through digital photos (and sometimes not even that, how many photos we take that we never look at again?).
I do a lot of photography and this is a conundrum that many in my circle are aware of. My solutions:
- Use a (pseudo)rangefinder camera like a Leica or Fujifilm X100/X-Pro with an optical viewfinder. Even pre-digital SLRs would subject you to, in the moment of photographing, looking at the photograph. With an uncoupled optical viewfinder, you look at life [4]. While the photograph is a powerful simulacrum, it is not life itself; the wall-sized print of the sunrise from the top of Mt. Fuji that hangs in my living room is merely a visual paraphrase of the experience.
- Shooting film and the friction that goes into handling, developing, scanning, and (hopefully, eventually) printing brings some of the Benjaminian aura back to the visual record [5].
- Reading about Japanese aesthetics, specifically the notions of imperfections and impermanence, has helped me be more present and aware of the transience of the moment [6].
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09567976135044...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22113...
[3] https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/74825
[4] https://youtu.be/kueqi8A3LQc?t=254
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_...
[6] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/911856.A_Tractate_on_Jap...
Even when going someplace new as a tourist, it's tempting to worry too much about photos. If I really want to play the aspiring travelling landscape photographer it would be work, a lot of it.
With a modern phone camera, for the purpose of a "I was here, I did/saw this" snapshot for posterity, it's pretty hard to mess up a photo so bad that it is worthless as long as it's pointed in the right direction. Take a few shots, but don't worry too much about quality or quantity.
I try to keep that in mind when snapping photos or taking videos of my kids, and pan over to the oldsters in the room from time to time, even if all I want is to record the kids.
> What I really want are pictures of the halls in high school, street racing, parties with giant bonfires and beer.
Can confirm that a couple really, really long shots with the camera rolling for no particular purpose and capturing normal stuff happening (mostly just the audio) were among the best parts of the home videos, IMO.
I have a deliberately created Year in the Life type book from a company I used to work for that was made a couple of years before I joined the company. But it's a very atypical work.
https://photooftheday.hughcrawford.com/
So there is a load of data but ever improving AI will get better at showing you the cool stuff.
They might still wonder "Why only 8K resolution?! Why aren't they in 3D and interactive?!"
They might not fade, but they are augmented by noise filtering algorithms, HDR and other tech that still subtly affects the picture quality and perception.
As a kid I used to play outside a lot, and my mother had no clue where I was, nor could she easily find out. I could be outside all day without her worrying that I'd be abducted or involved in an accident.
Now that all has completely changed, and my mother has too. Some years ago when I walked into the hallway of my house I coincidentally noticed a lot of people in front of my door. So I opened it, and it was the police that was about to bust the door with a battering ram. As it happened I hadn't answered my phone in a couple of hours. After multiple calls unanswered, my mom had called 911 on me. And my doorbell was broken, police didn't even knock.. they wanted the action, probably.
I was just freaking programming with the deep-work-destroying phone thingy on silence (where it should be most of the time, imho).
Something I have done (accidentally at first, now on purpose) is to not respond to messages (personal) quickly, most of the time. People adjust to that rather fast and stop worrying so much. People in my circles know now that I am rarely going to answer within a few hours and expectations are adjusted. So then going outside for a few hours with no phone is no longer a "thing" - you just do it and people will expect you to get back to them when you do.
Also I go outside without a phone on occasion. That feels like you leave a burden behind, and you are somehow more free. The phone is that easy thing you just grab to do a quick check of something on Wikipedia, or you happen to notice a notification. It is a distraction-device, keeping you busy. And among strangers, feeling less comfortable, well you can grab your phone and start staring at it. This behavior is like with smoking. Just like the relaxed cigarette cowboy in the ads, but now you casually light up the screen and be cool.
It has WiFi but no cell phone. Really looking forward to just being out for runs, with no possibility of contact or checking notifications etc.
[0] I know I still have IMs, but mails tend to be things I need to do at a computer and seeing them only stresses me with things to do for later.
One would hope the cops at least apologized for nearly destroying your front door all because you didn't answer the door. It's not like they had a warrant for your arrest or something!
We had a SWAT team destroy a fence with an armored vehicle during a standoff and they were just like, "not my problem."
Apparently they don't want to have to make decisions based on cost.
Personally, I'd just have the state cover it, but explicitly not have it come out of the police budget. A reimbursement check or tax credit could work.
In the event that malice is suspected on the part of any involved party (police department, property owner, 911 caller, home invader, etc.), it would be on the state to press charges and recoup its loss.
Some of my friends will freak out if I don't text back in as little as 5 minutes. A particular needy friend once tried to get me to "promise" that I would always return her texts within 10 minutes.
I said "hard no" explaining that it meant that it meant that I could never watch a movie uninterrupted, read a book, take a nap, etc. Also, Driving. I don't answer texts while I'm driving because I literally got in an accident texting (it was a freak circumstance, but these things do happen).
I have purposefully started training my friends by being erratic with my texts/messages/e-mails.
I have another friend who always calls on his commute home and gets offended when I don't answer. The idea alone that someone is obligated to answer the phone is insane. What if I don't want to spend an hour shooting the shit with you because I'm doing something else?
I miss the days when I could just walk away from contact.
Like in 1984. People who want to "spend time alone" are deviant, diseased and antisocial. And must be stopped.
Consider the soft forces of marketing, distraction, conformity, attraction and temptation. They are as real as a twisted arm.
I dunno man. That sounds weird.
When you live in a world that requires bills to be paid via mobile, rent to be paid via mobile, mass transit tickets bought via mobile, physical location reservation via mobile, as well as any customer service only available via mobile... who cares about personal addiction; normal life isn't feasible without a mobile phone at that point, and very few (if any at all) mobile phones are designed from the premise that they should respect your attention.
The mobile phones that are designed to preserve the users attention are widely incompatible with any functions that the user needs (billpay/specific group apps, whatever) to stay integrated with the systems being forced upon them, so those options are already non-starter.
That means this problem is worth discussing -- non-compulsive normal people as well as compulsive addicts are being affected by the lack of 'respect for attention' that mobile phones have, and this problem intersects with the 'required prevalence' of mobile phones across the world.
My overall point, however, is that there will never be an external negative reinforcement to look on your phone. We all have it internalized already and that's far more compelling than any external pressure ever could be.
Not quite. Tech and social media companies have spent billions to make their devices and apps as addictive as possible.
When I had a smartphone, I never told my employer. I told him I only had a Landline, and I had a chatty roommate.
On the days I felt they might call, I just took the phone off the hook.
At the end of the day, we as people have to react to this environment that's been created, but the people who created it knew what they were doing.
I would very much like to do what you say but with a million interrupts a day, it is now or never. If I neglect / defer something now, I would likely get back to it next week. Even for work. I do find time to focus 4 hours on some work activities but those are just the high priority visible stuff otherwise maybe if someone did not remind and make it a priority maybe it was anyways not a priority. But then things slip through the crack once in a while.
As someone that lives life like this, yes, that's the point. If it's really important, they can ping me again and remind me to respond. Or when I have some downtime I'll peruse through my messages and emails again and stumble upon it and remember to reply.
(Sometimes I genuinely missed something interesting but this is rare.)
The secret is to not be interrupted. If you're already reading the text, you might as well go and answer.
If you want to change something you will need to stop being interrupted (close the IM window, put your phone on silent, ...) and check once you have time. If you don't have time for a while, possibly give it a quick skim in case something important happened.
Things will always slip through the cracks. If you attend every interruption, it will once in a while interrupt an interruption itself and you're at status quo. At worst, put things on a todo list.
It's possible to do it.
It would work like this:
A list of firewall rules about who/what was able to send notifications. The firewall would be able to bump up or down the priority of a message, or discard them. Including rules being able to match say a regex inside the text, sender, time of day filtering.
And then at some specified interval (I would use 25 mins), I get all my notifications that didn't meet the emergency criteria in the firewall.
The iOS Focus mode does seem promising though.
I also wish there were a way for me to send a low-priority message to my wife so that it didn't notify her regardless of her notification settings. We send each other news articles throughout the day but don't really want to interrupt each other. It would be great if there were a sender-side option that could enable this.
I've thought about using a shared document in the Notes app, or just use a different messaging app for low-priority stuff, but it seems like too much overhead. Does anyone else have a way of handling this?
IMO, no one should have have email that sends notifications.
If it's urgent, the sender will call.
Text messaging is asynchronous communication, if someone is expecting an immediate response, they should be calling.
ADDED: Where I work, chat is a more time sensitive than email but basically no one phones out of the blue.
I would much rather someone press a button to say "This is very important, send it now" over calling me where I have to scramble to turn off my music, put my headphones on, etc before answering.
I'd like to address this in a non-judgemental way: not answering texts while driving should be the norm. It's not possible to operate a vehicle in motion and text simultaneously in a safe manner.
This statement has been proven true by multiple studies now, many of them coming to the conclusion that texting while driving can be as dangerous or more dangerous than driving drunk.
Please don't put other people's life at risk because you feel smarter. Don't text and drive.
There are many reasons why the chart of auto fatalities is dominated by those with less than high school degrees[1], but one is that accurate risk assessment and good choices matter. For example, "Should I send a text one word at a time once an hour on a straight road going through Nebraska in broad daylight, or should I text continually with both hands in heavy traffic?" The first is a risk easily worth taking, even with other people's lives.
1. https://schultzmyers.com/low-income-missourians-more-likely-...
This was also probably no more than 2009 anyways as I was literally trying to get a date with my now ex-wife.
That being said it was a dumb thing to do.
Except that's not how other people would perceive it. I've since learned that it can be incredibly annoying to others, to the point where some people would actually get distressed thinking they would have to answer the texts. Couple that with a bad habit of sending many short texts (it's how you'd write on messaging in the old days) and you have one REALLY REALLY ANNOYING FRIEND (regrettably I was that annoying friend).
So I guess I just want to apologize profusely from the other side of the fence. I'm trying to be much more mindful these days about whether that chit-chat message REALLY needs to be sent RIGHT NOW, or can it just wait for a conversation at a later time?
I'm trying to be much more self-aware in this regard.
In my circles text is generally for when you want to get the message to someone right away, and email is for when they should read at their convenience.
I wish messaging apps gave the sender the ability to hint at urgency, like the priority header that some email clients support, and then the recipient would be able to use that (or choose to ignore it) instead of the relatively rudimentary controls typically available today.
A recipient can put their whole phone silent mode, vibrate mode, or ringtone mode; use DND mode, perhaps with a schedule, perhaps with exceptions for contacts; specify a ringtone per contact; mute specific group messages -- all of these have one thing in common, which is that if the sender has something unusually important or unusually unimportant to say, they're stuck with generating whatever type of notification the recipient already decided is appropriate for a typical message from that sender.
Using phone calls for higher urgency and email for lower urgency is usually good enough, but achieving that same effect in-band through a messaging app for continuity of history would be even better.
I now have my phone on do not disturb 24/7. I will choose when I participate in messaging. I also disable iMessage on my Mac. If someone comes up to me and talks to me, I may not even respond immediately.
I took this to extremes and a couple of weekends back I actually went for a day long solo hike with zero technology with me at all past a torch, map, compass and alcohol stove. I didn't even have any way of telling the time with me. It was invigorating with the obligation to communicate and steal my attention removed. What was most surprising was the removal of a camera and watch. Rather than being focused on recording my journey and keeping to a schedule I was focused on enjoying it. This has led to considerably more vivid memories and a much higher level of satisfaction. A trip I will always remember.
Of course, today only old people like me wear a watch. Curses!
She said that it upset her when she couldn't reach me--and that's one of the reasons she's an ex-wife. Her go to manipulation tactic was this sort of ask for some sort of compromise or make some sort of promise with absolutely not intention of keeping her end of the bargain.
She was the kind of person, if you weren't doing exactly what she wanted you to, you were a piece of shit. Once I realized what was going on (our early relationship was much, much different, I would have never married someone like this) I stopped paying this game and it infuriated her to not have power over me.
Could I throw something at you-- I am sorry to be rude-- could it be your wife thinks you are cheating or is cheating herself? This was what I think was driving my ex-wife's behavior. One, to verify that I was at work and not cheating, and to make sure I was at work so she could cheat herself.
Now she tries to use our child as a manipulation tool, as that is the only aspect of my life that she has any input to.
The ex moved 45 mins away and insisted I pick up and drop off the child. When I started refusing, she just abandoned the kid at her mothers house, betting correctly that I would comply (which i had to).
We had a legal agreement at my ex's insistence that we wouldn't disparage each-other. Now and then I hear from my daughter how I'm a "bad daddy"-- I have never said a single bad thing about my ex to my kiddo despite her cheating, stealing money, using my family and lying to not only our friends and family but the police to get custody.
If you need support or anything, I'm happy to lend an ear.
We had an agreement that the kid will go a certain school, after I bough her half of the house, someone changed their mind. I complied and moved to be in the zone of the new school, then someone changed their mind again. But the 2nd time it is go as court/lawyers sided with me.
I never discuss her with the kid, but I get same tidbits from him as you from your daughter. Children know a good parent, so just do your best. They will love you regardless of what they hear.
The latest thing was her not wanting to handover his medication on handover.
Maybe I’m too old fashioned, but there’s world of difference between ignoring someone contacting you through an async communication channel like SMS and them literally standing next to you and speaking to your face.
However, I wish our culture considered it rude to just walk up to someone in the middle of deep work and ask them something - unless it’s really important and time critical. It could be a simple as sending a message first “free for a quick chat?”
This is on you. Plenty of people manage it. Try turning your phone of.
This is the way. My whole family is like this, and it's awesome. Sometimes people are too busy and don't reply, but no one gets offended. It can be annoying when planning, but overall it's great.
> I have another friend who always calls on his commute home and gets offended when I don't answer.
Similarly, we have a rule that it's not rude to call to shoot the shit, but it's also not rude to send the person straight to voicemail for any reason. It's so nice to just be able to call my sister out of the blue and know that if I'm bothering her, she won't pick up.
It was life and perspective changing. I hate that because of work and personal circumstances I cant do it now, but there is so much value in completely disconnecting when you need/want to.
We shouldnt feel ashamed that this feels wierd to us ~Xennials(+-10yr) having grown up in a time of landline only pots (and phreakin!)
Frankly, as Snowden recently said, our phones are probably our greatest security threat as a country. Going off the digital grid is almost impossible, but knowing how is a matter of national security...
Which is why breaches like OPM etc are so egregious; because once the data is out there, its too late to take back.
My problem is that listening to Drake and Binney, it seems greed was allowed to take over policy decisions in order to maximize kickbacks while failing to protect americans privacy.
In a similar vein, if you were in the wilderness you were on your own. If you were in a group, you could send someone for help. If you were on your own you self-rescued or hoped someone found you. Now, the default assumption is you can call for help--which isn't always the case. More likely with a personal locator beacon but even that isn't a guarantee in canyons or in bad weather.
I was on a sea kayaking trip in Alaska in the early 90s. The guide had a VHF radio but, basically, had anything happened you'd have been waiting for the bush plane to return in a week.
Exactly. I had an emergency situation where I needed to be taken to the hospital over a decade ago. I had a satellite phone on me, yet it was still difficult to get help due to a combination of satellite coverage (Iridium phones would have periods of no coverage due to satellite orbits) and just having a number to call (great thing about 911 is that it works from almost any phone in the US, except satellite phones).
Almost everyone texts or emails and I’ve never had anyone freak out if I didn’t reply quickly.
email/text response time is very much a metric on many employee evaluation systems.
you might not have gotten anyone to 'freak out', but I guarantee that slow response times will get you lower performance reviews at many establishments.
(should it? absolutely not, I am entirely against the practice.)
Or you could be at home and ignore the phone. People used to arrange a time to call or know when to call. It used to be considered impolite to let the phone ring more than 4 or 6 times unless the call was urgent. People never expected you to call back after an unanswered call, since answering machines and caller ID were rare.
> Now that all has completely changed
I find the change immensely frustrating. It isn't so much the expectation of others for an immediate response that bothers me as an internal desire for an immediate response from others. Sure, those feelings may only pop up when something genuinely important pops up. On the other hand, the other person doesn't know that until they check their messages.
Although my experience, especially pre-answering machines, was that a phone call was something that many people felt absolutely had to be answered no matter what you were doing.
Unbeknownst to me, my mom on the other side of the country had been calling intermittently throughout those days (I keep my phone on silent). After a certain point, she called security at my apartment complex to check in on me. Of course she was then informed that my room mates hadn't seen me in several days.
By the time I noticed and returned the missed calls, apparently my mom was just about ready to call the police.
It really depends on the crowd, some people don't mind and get on with their lives and don't answer until next week. I love these people.
Because he's specifically talking about smartphones, not cell phones. He's talking about the information and attention economy, not the more simple highly available reachability.
...and despite that, pictures of UFOs are as awful as ever. ;)
Today if you hovered a UFO over any city over 1000 people you will get endless footage of the event.
I’m waiting for said event.
How poetic
My brother (2 years older) and I had a mechanical camera with rolls of I think 12 or 20 photos (with this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/110_film ) . We've got at most 30 pictures of that trip in our family albums. I wish we had taken more pictures as my memory of the trip has faded away quite a bit.
And oh, I've seen many: I worked at a pharmacy, where one of my duties was developing film and helping folks print digital prints. As digital cameras grew better, cheaper, and more widely distributed (thanks in no small part to smartphones), regular film just dropped sharply.
A few folks care, and will sometimes get a fancier digital camera if they can afford it. The vast majority of folks, though, don't seem to care as long as they have the pictures. Realistically, all a lot of folks want is an instant point and click.
I deeply believe that we need structures and limits otherwise it's too easy to become metaphorically obese.
I do take significantly more pictures than I would with a film camera, but this also affords me the freedom to take the pictures right there and then, and not agonise over whether "a shot is worth it".
And yet, I don't end up with thousands or even hundreds of pictures. Almost a full year of 365 challenge somehow taught me to look out for actual good shots, and not obsessively hold the shutter button to everything.
I’m not a zealot of old times but if we are honest with ourselves we realize that most new stuff is crap. 90% somebody said. Few changes are net improvements.
But I appreciate the balance of the author, reminding us that there were shortcomings: always trusting police comes to mind.
> I had no influence and never disrupted anything. Strangers did not wish me a happy birthday or “Like” me. My personal brand was invisible.
> I did not take photos of myself, was not filtered
These things have always been happening; society just previously only had enough resources to set its scorching eye on politicians, nobles, and celebrities, in such a way as to force these thoughts and behaviors as reaction. Now there's enough attention for everybody, whether they like it or not.
> There was no surveillance of the streets.
Sure there was. It was just the unreliable and biased eye-witness kind of surveillance. One of the main purpose of the "city guard" was patrolling and noting down suspicious behavior.
Pre-globalization, many large cities would by default have border walls and border checks, where you'd have to state your purpose of visit and get your entry/exit recorded in a logbook.
Also, there were a lot of curfews. Curfew laws used to be pretty common, enabling city guards to treat anyone who is out at night as a de-facto criminal, enabling immediate search-and-seizure.
> News was not breaking
Sure it was. There was less space to fill, and so "breaking news" was limited to things of wider relevance, but it still happened, and still spread quickly. Even pre radio, there was "breaking news" in newspapers, pushed into the edition at the last minute. The whole value-prop of the telegraph was to spread "breaking news."
> The only content users generated was letters to the editor.
Depending on the era, you're forgetting about:
• Usenet
• Public-access television
• Call-in radio shows
• Open-participation scientific journals and "societies of letters"
Also, people could just sit down and write a book. Or, more likely, a memoir. The interesting ones would eventually get discovered and published, if perhaps post-humously.
> I rarely got to feel outraged by the words of people I’d never met.
They were there, in books/memoirs. People who read a lot of this generally made a career (in Literary Criticism) out of it.
> The only bingeing I did involved alcohol. I’d wait an entire week to watch the next episode.
You could have been binging serial novels!
> acquaintances never asked me to finance their ... back surgery
Sure they did; they likely did it through by presenting their problem to the local church, who then asked you to donate on their behalf. They're still doing that, in fact. GoFundMe is communal charity for non-religious people.
> I didn’t think about wage gaps, redlining, gerrymandering, or the intricacies of romantic encounters.
People have been talking about all of these things (perhaps under different names) for centuries. They're hard to avoid, in fact, if you read the writings of "statesmen" of previous eras.
> My desk’s height did not adjust; I just sat in a chair and took it.
You could have just had one short desk and one tall one. Or a writing desk. Most people didn't, though. The real modern difference is a self-interested motivation to have good ergonomics.
> butts that were incapable of functioning as shelves.
Such butts certainly existed; they were just not evenly distributed. :)
The whole psychologically weird phase of "hmm I'm here and waiting, and all I can do is watch paint dry" seems to have vanished.
I'm not sure what people prefer more though. Say you're waiting for a date, do you feel best breaking off directly from your reading of the dragon book, or would you feel best just doing nothing until they showed up?
I dunno. Infinite scrolling sure feels like watching paint dry to me... but as a teenager my idea of a good time was finding an isolated bit of woods, and sitting still enough for the fauna to ignore me. Actually, that's still my idea of a good time, but I'm too busy and the woods anywhere nearby are too crowded.
I'm not saying I wouldn't get bored just waiting for extended periods of time, but sometimes it's nice to know that for the next 10 - 20 minutes, you just have to exist in this spot, and that's all that's really expected of you.
I mean I get bored of a game or an article etc. but I would immediately seek refuge in something else that is easy to reach.
Before constant connectivity, I would have attempt to cure my boredom in much more hardcore ways.
Theres several influencers whose whole bit is centered around mixing paint, and I don't know how many channels on youtube dedicated to the sound it makes when you cut sand with a knife. So don't despair, I'm absolutely certain there is a channel out there dedicated to watching paint dry, on demand in byte size vids with tons of userengagement, for those long drives when you just want to pull the plug and watch paint dry.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitting_and_Smiling
People weren't necessarily "bored"-- remember that the boredom one feels when not hyper stimulated is due, at least in part, to adaptation to their peak/typical stimulus.
People probably got sufficient dopamine, from "less exciting" things such as small talk, looking at the clouds, contemplating the meaning of their life while waiting for an interview to begin etc.
If all I can do is watch paint dry, I'll find something else, whether it's rewarding or just mindless dopamine.
That said, I'm totally addicted and cutting out the internet is extremely hard when I sit in front of it for work and my computer and phone are where a lot of the rewarding things are too (e.g. cell phone drains time, but you need it to text friends). I feel like an alcoholic working as a bartender also required to take just a teeny sip of whiskey every time I talk to someone.
Sometimes it's good to sit down 15min and rethink stuff
This new song from Bo's covid-lockdown inspired special "Inside" hits this right on head. The Internet, particularly when paired with mobile devices just tries to suck up so much attention, because that's exactly what we made it do.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU
I do remember however being bored to hell as a teenager, I would not want to live in that world, I really hated it.
I've read far too many cereal boxes and shampoo bottles in my lifetime. Instead of getting annoyed at my unexpected 10 minute wait somewhere, I can just play a game. So many minor annoyances, gone due to the little pocket miracle. I can always choose not to pick it up, after all, but at least I have the choice now.
* Too worried to take a picture because I might ran out of film.
* Too worried about screwing up the flash light because I didn't have enough film.
* Recording important things (like my class) was too big of a hassle and too expensive (Not enough tapes).
* SMS was a cost that I always had to worry.
* Books are much lighter now because they are now digital.
* Podcast was such a hassle before because of carrying around tapes.
* Laptop was a thing but nowhere as convenient as a smartphone to look up a reference.
I gotta laugh at this. Being someone that's from a working town and being from a working class family, cops weren't to be trusted. Cops lied even back then. Life wasn't better back then. The fact he seems to mock gender fluidity and polyamory really shows how much has changed for the better. People who didn't fit in with the gender constructs then were out of luck. Either you were forced to be lgb or if you were trans you had to fit the gendered mold; no androgyny unless you're doing it as part of a musical act.
Interesting, I came away with the impression that the author was implying that some of these changes (i.e. better understanding of toxicity, therapy, wage gaps, redlining, gerrymandering) to be positive changes to provide more nuance in their post than just a list of raw nostalgia.
The article literally questions that conclusion.
"Were those the good old days? It’s tough to say."
It's as if there were advantages and disadvantages. It's easy to view the past as "good" but the reality, as presented in this article, was really a mixed bag.
* Being fully into a stimulating conversation with friends for an hour or more, without constant interruptions for people to check their phones and then change the subject to something irrelevant and mildly infuriating.
* Being able to go for random/spontaneous drives with my family in the car and negotiate where we're going next without having to pull over to update Google Maps or hear the phone bark "Make a U-Turn" a zillion times until I do.
* Looking forward to social interactions being events where I enjoy doing things I like with people whose company I value, instead of a constant stream of bullshit, dueling ego trips, and disconnected conversations where both parties spend more time correcting the other person about what they meant than actually saying something.
* Waking up in the morning earlier than planned, full of energy, then sipping my coffee slowly as the sun rises, because I got good, restful sleep last night.
* Not having to face surprise criticism about something I said X days ago, because most of my statements are verbal, only reach the people they were intended to reach, and are not preserved after that.
* Not having to spend more time taking pictures of an activity than actually doing the activity.
* Not being in a constant state of annoyance all the time due to a distinct lack of time spent correcting typos, fat-fingering menus, waiting on things to load, and dismissing popups.
* Tasting true solitude (not just alone time) once in a while.
I could go on and on.
I guess the wisdom here is to know yourself and your limits and whether you have an addictive personality.
It had great battery life of up to a week, WiFi, 4G and supported Whatsapp. You could take an occasional snapshot with it's 2MP camera and if you really wanted to, browse the internet on a tiny 2.45" screen. Also you could connect it with you Google account to sync contacts and email.
With these features it allowed me to do the beneficial things you use an internet connected phone for, like staying in touch with my peers and looking for directions. But I was no longer able to mindlessly scroll the internet for hours each day because it was just not possible.
So if you're also not happy with your smartphone usage, I can really recommend you to give a featurephone a try. At ~60€ it is cheap enough to try it for 2 weeks and put it in some drawer if it doesn't work out.
Disclaimer: 1,5 years later I started using a smartphone again because I had a kid and wanted to be able to take better pictures.
[0]: https://www.nokia.com/phones/en_int/nokia-8110-4g/specs
I also used to think having a decent digital Camera on a phone would be insanely great. It turns out not so, at least not any more. Every single god damn digital photo are now either some stupid "computational" photography enhanced, some are enhanced with AI or whatever Machine Learning. Apple used to be on the realistic camp but now even they are joining the profile of instagram generation. ( I have been told customer want these sort of features as they think it is better photo, and sell better ) And if that is not enough most of them are posted with some editing or filters. To the point nothing in the photo I saw is real.
I remember dreaming about online MMO on a phone. That was UO / World of Warcraft era. May be in ten to fifteen years time a Pocket Computer with Wireless Network. That would be so much fun. But gaming now has becomes a casino with lots of gambling options to win the game. It is also time sink for many of us to escape into the "metaverse". ( Metaverse is the new VC hype of 2021 ). They are no longer the same.
I remember I really really wanted IRC, ICQ and later MSN on a Smartphone. It didn't work. I have to hack an O2 Atom ( made by HTC before they become a brand of itself they used to be a ODM like Foxconn ) and it was a battery drain. Now it is largely replaced by all sort of instant messenger. But we dont give ICQ numbers or your MSN handle to anyone anymore. It is all "phone" numbers. So it is more of a "real world" connection rather than some "Internet identity" we used to have.
Speaking of O2 Atom, I have been looking for a smartphone, or a pocket computer that uses 2G GPRS as Data Connection and slowly browse the Internet on the street. So I could sit in a Cafe and use some remote server that will send me the .MHT version of a website so I only use one connection. ( Multiple connection on GPRS are bound to fail ). iPhone was everything I wanted I remember vividly how Apple nailed it. From capacitive Touch Screen to all the small UX. Most people didn't get it. As it wasn't the first "Smartphone", you have Nokia Symbian and something like the Sony Ericsson P900 at the time. Most people were like Steve Ballmer and laughing at it. But for those who were looking for it for so long. iPhone was "it".
I would have thought with Smartphone, people would listen to even more music, as it replaces mp3, or MiniDisc. Where we curate our own collection very carefully to try and fit in how tiny amount of storage we had. Turns out people are consuming more Video and other forms of Media. Music isn't "dead", but it certainly didn't bloom like many expected. From a high level prospective, all forms of media are competing for your attention and time.