Will be looking this up.
Partially why I wrote this post. Too often I’m finding my kid tugging on my leg to get me to not look at the damn thing and be more present.
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Me too. Feel bad for people navigating the dating scene these days.
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Now it’s pee and trash if you do spot one.
My children were born a few years after you.
I’m an anomaly, in that I always hated phones. I could use them with family and close friends. I would walk a mile to avoid calling a stranger. I still hate voice at a distance.
With today’s phone, I can use data, I can text (I wish there were a better way to know which numbers accept SMS). The plan comes with voice but I never use it. I have the ringer turned off, everything goes to voicemail. It’s all spam because no one calls me. If I’m expecting a complex delivery, I will turn the ringer on.
When I was living in NYC, I once tweeted something like “I am on the A train with a supercomputer in my hands, and no one is trying to snatch it, because they all have one also.” But people are a bit too absorbed in their devices. I will look at Elektronauts on the train, but I won’t listen to stored music, because I would probably miss my stop. I never stream, anywhere. Makes no sense to me. I have learned to recognize the weird gait of someone who is paying more attention to their phone than to where they are going, and to steer around them. I am heartened when I see someone reading a physical book.
The precipitous decline of Web search has made the device a little less useful, but GPS + maps is really amazing. I once pieced together a detailed map of Venice from individual panel scans someone had put on a rudimentary Web site, and loaded it into my Newton MessagePad for use onsite. I am going to Venice in February, and won’t even think about worrying about navigation. But my old strategy of taking back streets probably won’t work any more, because everyone else can do it, now.
Being able to easily find someone at a rendezvous, or communicate delays or changes in plan, this is invaluable. Checking with my partner about options at a store. My daughter did two years in Senegal with the Peace Corps. She was in a village of a thousand people, in the desert, 45 minutes by bush taxi to the nearest place that could be called a city. No electricity in her compound. But she had a solar charger for her cellphone, and we could have text conversations in real time. Incredible.
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having grown up in the 70s/80s before computers (let alone smartphones) were even a real thing for us . . . you wouldn’t really remember what your like was life pre-phone anyway. the human mind is infinitely adaptable to change and, for better or worse, we quickly memory hole the “before” as soon as we learn or experience a new way of being.
objectively, i know there was a time in my life that i had to go on road trips without a digital map, or go to the movies by looking up the times in a newspaper, but sitting here now 30 years later it feels more like a miracle that we ever lived without the internet in our pockets. but obviously we did and didn’t think about it any more than we don’t think about reaching for our phone to call, text, or browse today
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Teletext mate.
You could do everything on there…
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Could you buy drukqs?
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Not i, i remember it in detail.
Like when color film photography first became available for everybody.
Or how Kennedy was shot on the PA in the hall at school walking two by two to music class.
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What was Kennedy doing at your school
(Edit: I do not remember learning about Kennedy’s death. I remember watching his funeral. Therefore, I am not a boomer.)
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I grew up in a word before phones. Growing up me and my friends would chat for hours and really enjoy life and our childhoods. We’d go out for entire days with no contact from parents as long as we were home for tea. We used to call each others landlines and chat in the kitchen or the hall with no privacy at all. But it was fun. We used to go to concerts and actually watch the band, go to clubs and dance instead of filming the DJ. We used to take whole films of photos and wait weeks to get them developed and would never know what you’d get. No horrid WhatsApp groups, no emails popping. Life was simple and sweet.
The other day I was in a cafe with my son and opposite us were 4 teenage girls sat around a table having a smoothie… and none of them said a single word to each other the entire time. They were all just glued to their phones. It made me feel sad that children are growing up like this with little to no social skills and with a massively damaging device wired into their brains.
I’m not giving my kids phones. I want them to experience life in full Technicolor. They can have an Apple Watch when they are old enough to call and text us on. But it makes me sad that everyone else they encounter will be looking down.
I think the apex was brick phones. Call and text, nothing else.
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No you actually had to make friends with a nice dealer (or sometimes even a scary dodgy one!) and go round to their house.
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Ceephax.
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The rest of the article (not specifically about phones), in case anybody’s interested: ‘Fame makes you paranoid’: Michael Cera on Barbie, drunk fans – and not owning a smartphone | Barbie | The Guardian
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I can agree to a point. Self restraint is key, but in the past when the option isn’t even there to consider and mindfully attend to I imagine is a bit freeing on some level.
As a counter point I also remember kind of being tied to the house and general location of the phone when expecting a call which is restrictive in comparison.
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I really can’t believe how bad it’s gotten. Google is borderline illegible from a search standpoint.
It is still amazing how far communication has come in such a relatively short time. This also somewhat touches on my thought that these things sort of compress time and space from a perceptual standpoint in a way never achieved before. I wonder if the human experience itself is now “different” (in less obvious ways) than before.
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We are so dependent on it for everything, what would we do with a Carrington Event or an EMP ? Will your car even work then, let alone all telecommunications.
Our technologies were more robust, 35 years ago. So more advanced and more fragile at the same time.
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I think it is. In my life, 1990 to 2010 was a huge change. Different but no less profound in that Senegalese village my daughter lived in. Cheap phones, cheap minutes, and if you didn’t have the equipment, you went to someone in the village who did and worked out a deal. Payment could be done via SMS. On a deeper level, the removal from here-and-now to a place with no physical analogue has got to be having effects whose superficial symptoms we are trying to deal with, without understanding the deeper causes.
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I too think this may have been the golden window of balance.
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My mum is 75 and totally addicted to her smartphone. She had 65 years without smartphones… and even she turned into a phone zombie overnight.
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You have to remember thaf people’s neurotic need to control all aspects of their lives and constant fear of missing that call, opportunity or emergency, are what drove the technology into the mainstream and made it so affordable to where most of the world is now mobile.
There’s a freedom in imagining life without a leash but even without the context of having a physical leash like a mobile phone there is still a mental tether to everything outside of your control. Imagine the call is about your kid or something, that’s why people wanted to take it with them so they could stress about other stuff instead.
The problem is what we did with it and social media screwed everything up and since cell phones and social media services grew up in the same crib, it’s no wonder that the technology panders to it.
But that’s a different thread 
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