Spent a morning out on the town on my day off, and everyone is just fucking buried in their phones 24/7. This realization was so absurd to me
Of course I’m not exempt from this shit, but no wonder people are having so much trouble making friends and creating meaningful relationships in this day and age. So fucking bleak
Newspapers and what became before them weren’t addictive, dynamic skinner boxes with millions of dollars in machine learning behind them trying to map out and manipulate every aspect of your behavior. It was just good old fashioned one way propaganda.
that’s the individual analysis, i’d argue newpapers could occupy a similar function in public spaces of a tentative ‘do not disturb’ sign that phones do. the OP is talking about people in public and it’s a pretty valid observation that people used to have ways to avoid talking to others and making relationships too.
Oh, yeah, fair enough.
Eh at least it wasn’t so easy. The generation of “meet people or practice socializing in lines” is gone due to phones imo, bit harder to do that with a newspaper at every ‘empty’ moment
yeah paper’s a bit less conveinient and vulnerable to people seeing what you’re reading & inquiring about it. phones have definitely improved upon the “don’t talk to me” meta, especially with headphones
Fuckin headphones. Everyone has them on. How do people feel safe biking in the city with headphones on?!
Also with a newspaper, you didn’t have a real time comment section and if you are all sitting around reading a paper you’re probably all reading the same few papers and it could even foster in person social interaction and discussion. I remember a time where I would come to work and eat lunch in the break room while reading the paper and talking about whatever was in the news that day with my coworkers for example.
If this is what it sounds like, why isn’t my phone more entertaining? Do a better job, manipulators!
Something being addictive doesn’t necessarily mean it feels good; often it’s just the cessation of the withdrawal symptoms.
This is part of why it’s called “doomscrolling”, because it doesn’t feel good but you feel compelled to do it (implicitly because not doing it agitates you or something)
The extension of that take is smugly quoting that one ancient Greek guy that said the children of his time were unruly and disrespectful.
kids these days can’t memorize anything, they just write things down and read them back later
In the contemporary attention economy, I doubt most people of any age actually remember phone numbers or the like without electronic assistance. I sure don’t. There’s so much else going on and it takes up headspace.
I remember having like 30 phone numbers in my head. What a fucking waste of space. Some of them are still in there even though I haven’t used them in decades.
lol still remember the landline number from my childhood home.
Actually I still probably remember about 30 numbers now that I think of it.
I think the non-thought-terminating way to interpret these datapoints is that the modern version is an amplification of whatever you want to call this, just like the 24-hour news cycles have been compounded by minute-by-minute updates from news delivered by social media pages and now Telegram groups and such. It’s not the same because there are (real and substantive) parallels with what came before, that’s a crass simplification.
Absolutely everything is literally and exactly the same with no material or sociopolitical differences. The most leftist position is to say this a lot with the implication that nothing can or will ever meaningfully change for better or for worse.
Jesus Christ I genuinely don’t know what your problem is. I try to never respond to you because your posting energy really rubs me the wrong way and your 100% commitment to get the last word in no matter what is exhausting, but…
Is this really how you had to respond? You had so many choices. Did you have to assume so many negative things about what I think despite not having any evidence I think those things? Do you really need to choose such a combative tone with a comrade? Did you need to even respond at all?
W/e I’m going back to work fuck this
Agreed. One of my least favorite aspects of this site being so small is the amount of power posters and the debate energy they have.
I also find it ironic that so many users here are going off on smartphones because algorithms and skinner boxes or whatever while having ridiculously active post histories on this platform, which has no profit motive, skinner box behavior, etc, presumably also from a smartphone or some other device.
EDIT: I misread who posted this, so I’m rewriting this reply.
I stand by my position that dismissing ebbs and flows and ups and downs in how society changes with a picture implying “look things were exactly the same” is an extraordinary claim that glaringly lacks extraordinary evidence.
you just made this up, they didn’t say any of that
They posted a picture that contextually implied “this is the same thing as contemporary phone usage.”
To some extent, yes, newspapers were “do not disturb” gestures of their day, but they also lacked the technologically sophisticated engagement maximization strategies used by contemporary devices, among other differences.
they didn’t say it was good or bad, they didn’t imply nothing has ever changed or can ever change?
“people are buried in phones” was met by “people used to be buried in newspapers” then you just assumed the only way to arrive at that observation is through all those ideological offenses, which is a pretty silly assumption to make on a leftist forum. people here criticize more traditional media all the time.
So what was the intention of the picture since you have privileged access to that knowledge and are apparently also aware how wrong I am?
Considering how often quotes like these below have been posted in the past to dismiss peoples’ concerns about worsening material and personal conditions in ways large and small, from online dating to employment precarity, by way of saying “people were unhappy before about things so being unhappy now is exactly the same:”
It did look like more of the same to me, and without additional text, the further implication was a sort of “case closed” message.
i’m simply reticent to make a sweeping generalizations about someone’s whole ideological outlook from a single datapoint. its justified to call into question the comparison being made, but the distance from there to a fundamental disbelief in societal change is wholly unsupported, which is why you have to bring in all this vaguely related stuff that’s superficially similar. but assyrian old men yelling at the sky don’t have anything to say about newspapers vs. phones in capitalist socialization
It may be at an impasse anyway; the person who posted the picture didn’t clarify the original intent in their one reply so far and to be fair to them I came on pretty hard, as you said.
I appreciate that you acknowledged that posting the picture on its own had dubious intentions, but this particular well may have already been poisoned because I came on too hard and I think I now regret that.
That quotation from “Socrates” is made-up by some 19th or 20th-century moralist.
I didn’t think highly of it to begin with.
I know you don’t - the people posting that quote are lying to make a bad argument even worse.
Destroy that buggo dipshit.
Urging someone to acknowledge that material and sociopolitical conditions can, have, and will continually improve or worsen somewhat is not “destroying” someone, nor is it calling or even implying that that someone is a “buggo.”
I know irony poisoning is your thing, but come on. Save it.
Nah, you destroyed them. No need to be humble.
It’s in bad taste, especially here.
Absolutely everything is literally irony with no contextual or humorous differences. The most good-faith position is to say this a lot with the implication that posts can or will ever not be ironic.
When most of what you post is stuff like this
I’m going to read your posts as even more irony.
And even if it isn’t, no, I don’t see that other poster as a “buggo dipshit” and my goal wasn’t to “destroy” them.
Stop posting smugly as fuck then.