Comment by isoprophlex
5 hours ago
> I’ve seen generations grow up. Some grandparents come in with their grandkids and say, “Anna, remember the jukebox?”
> Today, however, young people no longer come to the bar. They came when we had the dance floor and the music. Today, they like to spend time with the smartphone; they even take it to bed when they go to sleep.
What are we losing, what are we taking away from life, now that we ourselves have become a resource to extract. Probably, a lot.
> Today, [young people] like to spend time with the smartphone; they even take it to bed when they go to sleep.
Recently my parents (in their mid-60ies) were visiting us. At some point I realized that both of them had been quietly sitting at our dinner table for over on hour, eyes glued on their smartphones. They are massively addicted. I have noticed that they get nervous as soon as the smartphone is out of reach, or even in silent mode. They mostly talk to friends via Whatsapp and are in constant fear that they miss out on something or that these friends (which also seem to spend most of their days on Whatsapp) will be offended if they don't reply within 5 minutes to the latest Whatsapp trivia. It is quite a struggle to even get them to turn off their phones when we are having dinner. The Whatsapp messages just keep coming in. My wife recently learned that her mother mostly spends her evenings with posting photos of her life on social media, and broke off contact with her brothers for a few days because they failed to quickly and enthusiastically react to some photos she posted on a family Whatsapp group.
But I guess for Anna Possi, our parents are "young people" and could be her grandchildren...
I agree with you, the infection hit quite a lot of older people very hard as well. I have problem getting some 40somethings to meet in person, even in professional contexts, they are just so soaked in a WhatsApp maelström of utterly irrelevant messages that they are conditioned to answer NOW!
That said, the core of the message should not be judgments between the young and the old, but the problem that we have introduced digital fentanyl into our pockets.
You're right, as is your parent comment, in saying that this isn't something only the young suffer from. In fact it's everywhere; the people with the worst smartphone addictions near me personally are an 11 year old and a 70 year old...
That said the message, when taken as a general progression between how life was then and how it is now, stands.
3 replies →
> maelström
Good use of that word.
English has ae in Maelstrom but the contemporary word in Danish, Swedish and Norwegian is Malstrøm/Malström. I wonder when it lost it's ae, I see Mahlströmn from 1698, reading the etymology it says dutch but I wonder if they just wrote it down first. Everything about the sea is always filled with mythology.
I think social media needs a less poetic word though.
I have recently moved into a new accomodation, and my neighbour is an elderly Italian lady in her mid 80s. Our first conversation was about how estranged she feels nowadays that everyone around her, young people but also middle-aged adults, are unable to connect not only with strangers but also among each other, filling every minute of their lives with a smartphone. Even the doctor's waiting room or Sunday mass doesn't feel the same, and she has to force people to snap out of it and just put the bloody phone down. She asked me how did I cope. I said I didn't, really.
We had a beautiful conversation about that as it is a topic that I think about a lot, yet whenever I breach it with any "adult" (millennial or older) the response I get is either a shrug, or denial. Weirdly enough, it is an easier topic to discuss with the younger generations, those that have grown up in the YouTube era, yet deep inside feel there is something crucial that's gone lost in our society and we haven't even started trying to recapture it.
I have always believed the millennial generation to be the only one to do something about it, as it sits right between the major societal upheaval the internet has brought. The older generations are lost to Facebook and inertia, the younger have never even seen the world of before.
To expand, I wonder whether people will wistfully look back on their days browsing tiktok and shitposting on HN compared to whatever they and their kids / parents will be doing in 20 years.
> What are we losing, what are we taking away from life, now that we ourselves have become a resource to extract. Probably, a lot.
Beautifully said. And sad.
Socrates would have drawn the line at writing and reading texts.
And he would've been right. Any new advancement in technology brings societal change, and it is possible to reach a point of diminishing return, where the bad sides outweigh the positives.
I wish we could, as a society, have a serious conversation about this effect without resorting to name calling ("Luddist nonsense") and straw men ("but what about penicillin?")
Second that. I see that as a failure of society or democracy as a whole - that we are no longer able to have that broad, public conversation and act accordingly. Why should every "innovation" be shoved down our throats, if we don't want to?
When ever in the history of the world were humans not exploited by other humans, in much worse ways than now? I'd rather be google's data source for ads than be someones actual slave for example.
Also I don't really like these luddite sentiments, usually shared between the two extremes, old ladies that never used the internet so they don't understand what they are missing, and IT guys that are too jaded to see the benefits and are at the stage of "wanna become goat farmer". Outside addiction the internet is great.
"Outside addiction the internet is great."
So are painkillers, or alcohol. Still we shouldn't simply shrug our shoulders over their abuse.
We need to find a rational way to treat smartphones. As of now, we are fully in the Gin Craze [0] phase of their use and moderation is badly needed.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gin_Craze
Are we the bad guys?
If you have to ask?