Everyone's ragging on this article, but it matches my experience exactly. I feel like I can't talk to anyone nowadays without fearing that little buzz in their pocket, at which point they pull out their phone and start playing with it while I'm mid-sentence. And I'm not some grumpy "get off my lawn" old man; I'm barely 25 years old.
Friends say "but it was [such-and-such nonsense]. I had to check my phone!" Really, you had to? Your life depended on you checking that text? People get frustrated with me because my phone is dead all the time (and thus I don't text back immediately), but I hate feeling tethered to some device.
I notice an overwhelmingly huge difference in the quality of my conversations with people when their phone is not present in the room with them.
This isn't to say I'm anti-technology at all — I spend 10 hours a day programming. I just don't attempt to do it while conversing at the same time (nor could I; without uninterrupted focus, I make a lot of mistakes in my code).
Agreed though I don't let it bother me much. I have a front row seat to the internet all day, so the last thing I want to do at lunch is futz with a phone.
This seems like something of a selection bias issue. By the same token, I don't know that I've run into anyone lately who's checked their phones while talking with me. Not to say that it doesn't happen, of course, but you might need to find new people.
> 89 percent of cellphone owners said they had used their phones during the last social gathering they attended.
Right there is where the author looses me. That online collaboration via the phone IS a social gathering unto itself. One is not fundamentally different than the other. Physical proximity is great, but it is a serious limitation. Not everyone has the time/money to physically meet their friends over coffee every twenty minutes. Not everyone lives in downtown Boston or NY.
> They say it’s a skill they mastered in middle school when they wanted to text in class without getting caught.
And why do kids text so much at school? Because they are bored to death by mind-numbing subjects and teaching that doesn't actually teach. Texting is the symptom, not the disease.
The ability to 'not get caught' while communicating with others is a valuable skill for nearly everyone these days. It should be encouraged.
>That online collaboration via the phone IS a social gathering unto itself.
Still the fact is that it is inconsiderate, or plain rude, to be "somewhere else" when you are sitting with other people who all took the time to physically be with each other. If a few people get together and spend large amounts of their time on their phones, then why get together at all?
> And why do kids text so much at school? Because they are bored to death by mind-numbing subjects and teaching that doesn't actually teach. Texting is the symptom, not the disease.
Actually there is plenty of evidence that texting and social media offer a similar kick as several other addictions like smoking, etc. it's akin to blaming teenage smoking on boring classes. Further, the teenage mind is susceptible to getting easily bored and to addiction.
I don't think the author is arguing that online collaboration via phones aren't social gatherings, just that there are appropriate venues for each.
By all means, communicate with your friends over the internet using all the means availed to you by technology. On the other hand, when you're sitting at a coffeeshop with your friend right next to you, that isn't the time to be chatting with someone half way across the country.
"And why do kids text so much at school? Because they are bored to death by mind-numbing subjects and teaching that doesn't actually teach. Texting is the symptom, not the disease."
You seem to have missed a main theme of the article, which was in first paragraph: "Now they use it when they want to be both with their friends and, as some put it, 'elsewhere.'"
>>Because they are bored to death by mind-numbing subjects and teaching that doesn't actually teach.
I would say an illusion of financial security does that too. If your life depended on getting a decent education, petty indulgences like this wouldn't even occur.
eh, kids have been passing notes in class since they had access to paper.
Personally, i've been following the maxim "Prefer a warm body over a cold screen." I turn off (most) notifications. Sure, sometimes i'll pull out my phone to look something up. I'll check from time to time if i'm coordinating with someone, but i try to let my interlocutor know what's going on.
> COLLEGE students tell me they know how to look someone in the eye and type on their phones at the same time, their split attention undetected. They say it’s a skill they mastered in middle school when they wanted to text in class without getting caught.
In my experience, they haven't mastered that nearly as well as they think...
Yeah, I'm a college student and I rolled my eyes at that one. I can think of countless interactions where people think they're discreetly checking their text messages and it is so irritating to be on the other end of that.
The article has a great message, but unfortunately I don't think most people are conscientious enough to deliberately change how they use technology and it is just so easy to check your phone when there is a lull in a conversation. Technology has been beneficial in many ways, but it has a tendency to be incredibly antisocial as well and I don't think we've learned to compensate for that yet.
I feel weird because more and more I start to miss old tech. For many reasons, I feel there were beautiful ideas forgotten too soon (aka AlanKayism). I've also seen a few cycles (from osx aqua, flash, html5, java, js, flat, metro, material, etc, etc) so I'm past being excited for newness. I don't know if it's the absolute natural way of things now that I'm not part the current generation or if there's some value in these thoughts.
It's also natural for some to follow new trends for there's a lot of energy in exploring things 'a la mode'. But also not to be blinded into thinking old is useless. Progress is not an arrow, it's a wiggling hyperplane.
That's not an argument. I mean, there's a similar trap in thinking that anything new is good (or neutral).
I don't particularly care about other people's behavior (and I don't have this problem with friends/family), but I can certainly see how it would annoy people, and probably even detract from the experience of the person who is doing it.
"I'll just disregard your argument without actually considering or engaging with it because you're old and therefore clueless," said every younger generation ever.
Nobody is saying not to use these technologies. We are just trying to figure out as a society what the boundaries are for behavior being OK or being rude. Its kind of like bluetooth headsets or google glass, both of which were questionable at first and later determined by society at large to be rude to use in company.
Humm... if only there was a way to analyze what kinds of behaviours can have a bad impact on society instead of mindlessly writing off arguments because 'hurr you're old'.
Did you read the article? That's not the argument at all. It's about the antisocial effects of technology and how we as a society haven't yet learned how to compensate for those effects.
I'm worried more about the way people are using the web while at work.
If somebody would have said a few decades ago that in 2000, every employee would have a television set on his desk, people would not have believed this person. However, the situation is actually much worse.
What are you worried about? In my experience many jobs simply don't have 8 hours worth of work to do in a day, so there's downtime. (And the ones that do have 8 hours+ worth of actual work to do, without breaks, are the ones that pay near minimum wage and are a bit terrible). Since you're on hacker news I presume you're aware that it is nigh-impossible for a programmer to just program in flow state 8 hours a day every day 5-7 days a week. I usually get 4 hours of good work out of myself on bad days, 6-10 on great days or under deadline pressure, but can't keep that up many days in a row. Slack-ing off and the web help me decompress my brain in between uses.
This isn't unique to millennials. My dad and I had this problem where he would be on his blackberry when talking with me until we had a conversation about it and agreed to be more mindful of being on glowing rectangles rather than present in the conversation.
It's funny. On my development team we have four younger guys (mid-late twenties) and three older guys (35+).
By far the most distracted people on the team are the older ones. In meetings they tend to lose focus, look at their computers, misremembered what's said, or just seem to tune it out. I've made a habit of specifically managing how they are perceiving what I'm saying -- looking at their eyes, seeing if they're distracted, asking lots of confirming questions.
And outside of meetings, they don't pay attention to our online communication channels enough.
If anything, my experience has been that it's the older generation that sucks at paying attention to the right things in the new super connected world.
Turkle has written some good stuff but her recent work has been too close to "Kids these days! Why back in my day..." for my tastes.
(I was going to use that Socrates quote about "Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority" but it turns out not be by Socrates but from someone in 1907 paraphrasing complains from antiquity http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehaving-children... )
We've spent generations filling our every waking moment with more forced broadcast stimuli, I don't blame 'millennials' for wanting to put up a minimum filter and default to their own bubble of controlled media. Why should we talk if you don't have something more interesting to say than my phone?
There are things of value to be learned even in media that doesn't immediately grab and hold your attention. Sometimes learning things requires focus. In fact, probably most things worth learning don't jump out and grab you, but require some effort to keep your attention on them.
If you always optimize your attention towards whatever is most immediately compelling, you'll wake up one day and find out you don't really know anything.
You don't know whether or not I have something more interesting to say if you're dividing your attention between me and your phone.
As the article says, it takes more than 30 second to divine whether or not a conversation is going to go somewhere interesting, and if you stop paying attention at the drop of a hat, it never has a chance.
Exactly this. Some people seem to think that using smartphone means doing something irrelevant, less important than talking to a person. But you know what? On the other side of that phone there usually is a person.
One of the rudest behavior I encounter is people suddenly coming to you and interrupting in the middle of your IM conversation, demanding undivided attention and refusing to accept that you're in the middle of a conversation. IM is not e-mail, it's often as time-sensitive as voice, and quite often that IM conversation is much more important than whatever the interrupter came with.
I am nostalgic for the land before internet. While there are many technological divides and revolutions between generations, not sure many in history compare to the dramatic change to global society and behavior as a result of the internet, and by its extension, the mobile era.
The invention of the car (and then of the plane)? Imagine the nostalgia for times when you had to walk for hours to meet someone across a city, or travels for days/weeks/months to meet far away places. Same with phones (and mobile phones), when you had to stick to a time you decided to meet somewhere, and you didn't show up... Good old times. Transportation and communication are really one thing, and any significant advancement in them will have the feeling. I will be remembering my youth, before VR, before shuttles/portals to Mars, whatever the future will bring.
The way we look at the changes is much more tied to us than the change. You can always flip a coin and think of how marvelous these changes might seem to people in the past: "While I'm sitting in cafe with someone I can simultaneously communicate with someone else half-way across the globe? Wonderful!"
I feel nostalgic for this time too, but in a less clear cut way.
People seem to have forgotten that before the rise of the Internet there was another form of media that dominated our lives, and that was TV. Some of the complaints that apply to the Internet also apply to TV, in that it directed our attention away from life in our immediate vicinity, dominated how we spent our free time, etc...
Even though I basically only watch YouTube now, I remember watching a ton of TV in the 80s and 90s. I have some fond memories of moments spent watching TV, but for the most part I watched a lot of utter dross. The same is true for the Internet now, some fond memories of time spent online but something keeps me looking even when the content is dull.
If I could go back, I'd go back to an alternative reality where pirate radio was the dominant form of mass media. I like radio, and I'd like it even better with a greater variety of output, including easy to find output from those in the local area.
The stereotypical family morning used to involve the father reading the newspaper while eating breakfast. Eating and reading with others is a tradition long predating smartphones.
We're in a golden age of text, with dramatically higher engagement due to an unprecedented access to more useful, interesting and relevant information than has ever been available before.
The title uses a new fancy word, but it might as well say "Stop reading. Let's talk."
One of the basic human needs is to be loved and feel like you belong. We do this by both "keeping in touch", "getting together". The usual assumption is that "getting together" is a higher quality way to meet these needs than "keeping in touch".
Your smartphone represents almost everyone you know. In a face-to-face meeting, the ratio is precisely (n-1)/n. So if you both have 100 friends, realize that you're competing to meet the need of love and belonging against the 99 other people in their pocket, who can also give that to your friend with surprising effectiveness.
(The argument generalizes: you are also competing against every stranger that's ever put anything online - the person who wrote that Wikipedia article or Yelp review has a call on your attention, too!)
IMO, all of this applies to meetings at work as well, which are, after all, conversations. It's hard enough for people to listen to each other when they're actually listening. Throw in a laptop, a phone, and the mistaken belief that a person can 'multi-task' without a quality hit, and its a disaster straight out of the gate.
I'm curious: Does anyone have rules at work around no laptops / phones at meetings?
Lately I've been feeling despair and dread at the scene of hundreds of people glued to their phones .. after a particularly hard week at work I stood at the station and watched the train roll by, full of commuters glued to their little machines. It was an entirely dystopian scene, and as much as I've been a promoter of the technological revolution that is the Internet and all its devices, I'm feeling more and more disaffected with the results of what we've done.
It could be different, but its not. These phones are brick walls, carefully channeling the minds of the enslaved back to the master.
So I started thinking about what I would do to make it different, and really, I think one small tweak to our technology would make a huge difference. Of course, its not in the interests of the manufacturers or network providers: make it possible for phones to auto-discover each other locally, without requiring a server somewhere upstream.
If only we had some way to get people connected to each other - in a local context - i.e. anyone on the train can search for and find others on the same train without requiring a client-server relationship with an upstream connection. Host-AP mode: too restrictive.
We need local peer search and discovery.
About the only way I can think of to get this right now is to man up and put a device in AP mode with some sort of SSID named "LocalUsersNetwork" or something .. some sort of recognizable brand that people can use to connect with their local peers.
It would make the forward march towards further electronic enslavement so much more palatable if it were possible to have at least a local context in which to freely operate.
EDIT: events like this make me think there is a market for "local stranger discovery services", its just nobody has worked out a branding process for it:
While I share your dread and find your idea interesting, I honestly wouldn't use a service like that. "Local stranger discovery service" - why not just strike up a conversation with the person sitting next to you? I do so fairly frequently, and I have had some incredible conversations that way.
I read some years ago about a social dating app in Japan that matched users and when encountered in the wild (or was it the metro ?) the app would trigger some kind of msg or interaction to incite users to get to know each other (based on their dating profile). It used bluetooth.
[+] [-] Xcelerate|10 years ago|reply
Friends say "but it was [such-and-such nonsense]. I had to check my phone!" Really, you had to? Your life depended on you checking that text? People get frustrated with me because my phone is dead all the time (and thus I don't text back immediately), but I hate feeling tethered to some device.
I notice an overwhelmingly huge difference in the quality of my conversations with people when their phone is not present in the room with them.
This isn't to say I'm anti-technology at all — I spend 10 hours a day programming. I just don't attempt to do it while conversing at the same time (nor could I; without uninterrupted focus, I make a lot of mistakes in my code).
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daviross|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lfender6445|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandworm101|10 years ago|reply
Right there is where the author looses me. That online collaboration via the phone IS a social gathering unto itself. One is not fundamentally different than the other. Physical proximity is great, but it is a serious limitation. Not everyone has the time/money to physically meet their friends over coffee every twenty minutes. Not everyone lives in downtown Boston or NY.
> They say it’s a skill they mastered in middle school when they wanted to text in class without getting caught.
And why do kids text so much at school? Because they are bored to death by mind-numbing subjects and teaching that doesn't actually teach. Texting is the symptom, not the disease.
The ability to 'not get caught' while communicating with others is a valuable skill for nearly everyone these days. It should be encouraged.
[+] [-] andrepd|10 years ago|reply
Still the fact is that it is inconsiderate, or plain rude, to be "somewhere else" when you are sitting with other people who all took the time to physically be with each other. If a few people get together and spend large amounts of their time on their phones, then why get together at all?
[+] [-] shas3|10 years ago|reply
Actually there is plenty of evidence that texting and social media offer a similar kick as several other addictions like smoking, etc. it's akin to blaming teenage smoking on boring classes. Further, the teenage mind is susceptible to getting easily bored and to addiction.
[+] [-] alienasa|10 years ago|reply
By all means, communicate with your friends over the internet using all the means availed to you by technology. On the other hand, when you're sitting at a coffeeshop with your friend right next to you, that isn't the time to be chatting with someone half way across the country.
[+] [-] hsitz|10 years ago|reply
You seem to have missed a main theme of the article, which was in first paragraph: "Now they use it when they want to be both with their friends and, as some put it, 'elsewhere.'"
[+] [-] kamaal|10 years ago|reply
I would say an illusion of financial security does that too. If your life depended on getting a decent education, petty indulgences like this wouldn't even occur.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jfoutz|10 years ago|reply
Personally, i've been following the maxim "Prefer a warm body over a cold screen." I turn off (most) notifications. Sure, sometimes i'll pull out my phone to look something up. I'll check from time to time if i'm coordinating with someone, but i try to let my interlocutor know what's going on.
[+] [-] sjs382|10 years ago|reply
In my experience, they haven't mastered that nearly as well as they think...
[+] [-] jeffreyrogers|10 years ago|reply
The article has a great message, but unfortunately I don't think most people are conscientious enough to deliberately change how they use technology and it is just so easy to check your phone when there is a lull in a conversation. Technology has been beneficial in many ways, but it has a tendency to be incredibly antisocial as well and I don't think we've learned to compensate for that yet.
[+] [-] patrickaljord|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|10 years ago|reply
It's also natural for some to follow new trends for there's a lot of energy in exploring things 'a la mode'. But also not to be blinded into thinking old is useless. Progress is not an arrow, it's a wiggling hyperplane.
[+] [-] TillE|10 years ago|reply
I don't particularly care about other people's behavior (and I don't have this problem with friends/family), but I can certainly see how it would annoy people, and probably even detract from the experience of the person who is doing it.
[+] [-] smacktoward|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crucifiction|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gastelum|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffreyrogers|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|10 years ago|reply
If somebody would have said a few decades ago that in 2000, every employee would have a television set on his desk, people would not have believed this person. However, the situation is actually much worse.
[+] [-] llamataboot|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kiro|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] afarrell|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] methodover|10 years ago|reply
By far the most distracted people on the team are the older ones. In meetings they tend to lose focus, look at their computers, misremembered what's said, or just seem to tune it out. I've made a habit of specifically managing how they are perceiving what I'm saying -- looking at their eyes, seeing if they're distracted, asking lots of confirming questions.
And outside of meetings, they don't pay attention to our online communication channels enough.
If anything, my experience has been that it's the older generation that sucks at paying attention to the right things in the new super connected world.
[+] [-] jccalhoun|10 years ago|reply
(I was going to use that Socrates quote about "Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority" but it turns out not be by Socrates but from someone in 1907 paraphrasing complains from antiquity http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehaving-children... )
[+] [-] somebodyother|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imgabe|10 years ago|reply
If you always optimize your attention towards whatever is most immediately compelling, you'll wake up one day and find out you don't really know anything.
[+] [-] alienasa|10 years ago|reply
As the article says, it takes more than 30 second to divine whether or not a conversation is going to go somewhere interesting, and if you stop paying attention at the drop of a hat, it never has a chance.
[+] [-] mathgeek|10 years ago|reply
I don't think that valuing relationships by how useful they are to you "right at this moment" is a very good way to go about life.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|10 years ago|reply
One of the rudest behavior I encounter is people suddenly coming to you and interrupting in the middle of your IM conversation, demanding undivided attention and refusing to accept that you're in the middle of a conversation. IM is not e-mail, it's often as time-sensitive as voice, and quite often that IM conversation is much more important than whatever the interrupter came with.
[+] [-] plonh|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vinay427|10 years ago|reply
This screams of a lack of mindfulness that hopefully can be fixed through working to become more aware of your own thoughts.
[+] [-] dexterdog|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hellofunk|10 years ago|reply
I am nostalgic for the land before internet. While there are many technological divides and revolutions between generations, not sure many in history compare to the dramatic change to global society and behavior as a result of the internet, and by its extension, the mobile era.
[+] [-] xixixao|10 years ago|reply
The way we look at the changes is much more tied to us than the change. You can always flip a coin and think of how marvelous these changes might seem to people in the past: "While I'm sitting in cafe with someone I can simultaneously communicate with someone else half-way across the globe? Wonderful!"
[+] [-] ZenoArrow|10 years ago|reply
People seem to have forgotten that before the rise of the Internet there was another form of media that dominated our lives, and that was TV. Some of the complaints that apply to the Internet also apply to TV, in that it directed our attention away from life in our immediate vicinity, dominated how we spent our free time, etc...
Even though I basically only watch YouTube now, I remember watching a ton of TV in the 80s and 90s. I have some fond memories of moments spent watching TV, but for the most part I watched a lot of utter dross. The same is true for the Internet now, some fond memories of time spent online but something keeps me looking even when the content is dull.
If I could go back, I'd go back to an alternative reality where pirate radio was the dominant form of mass media. I like radio, and I'd like it even better with a greater variety of output, including easy to find output from those in the local area.
[+] [-] slavik81|10 years ago|reply
We're in a golden age of text, with dramatically higher engagement due to an unprecedented access to more useful, interesting and relevant information than has ever been available before.
The title uses a new fancy word, but it might as well say "Stop reading. Let's talk."
[+] [-] javajosh|10 years ago|reply
Your smartphone represents almost everyone you know. In a face-to-face meeting, the ratio is precisely (n-1)/n. So if you both have 100 friends, realize that you're competing to meet the need of love and belonging against the 99 other people in their pocket, who can also give that to your friend with surprising effectiveness.
(The argument generalizes: you are also competing against every stranger that's ever put anything online - the person who wrote that Wikipedia article or Yelp review has a call on your attention, too!)
[+] [-] methehack|10 years ago|reply
I'm curious: Does anyone have rules at work around no laptops / phones at meetings?
[+] [-] Kiro|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] archmonk|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fit2rule|10 years ago|reply
It could be different, but its not. These phones are brick walls, carefully channeling the minds of the enslaved back to the master.
So I started thinking about what I would do to make it different, and really, I think one small tweak to our technology would make a huge difference. Of course, its not in the interests of the manufacturers or network providers: make it possible for phones to auto-discover each other locally, without requiring a server somewhere upstream.
If only we had some way to get people connected to each other - in a local context - i.e. anyone on the train can search for and find others on the same train without requiring a client-server relationship with an upstream connection. Host-AP mode: too restrictive.
We need local peer search and discovery.
About the only way I can think of to get this right now is to man up and put a device in AP mode with some sort of SSID named "LocalUsersNetwork" or something .. some sort of recognizable brand that people can use to connect with their local peers.
It would make the forward march towards further electronic enslavement so much more palatable if it were possible to have at least a local context in which to freely operate.
EDIT: events like this make me think there is a market for "local stranger discovery services", its just nobody has worked out a branding process for it:
https://www.facebook.com/events/1480766915558797/
[+] [-] djent|10 years ago|reply
[0] https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/800/1*U36hBj8i-C7J...
[+] [-] veddox|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnchristopher|10 years ago|reply