I’ve been thinking lately about one impact of technology that may have been overlooked.
Nowadays if someone has a free moment, they have their phone to occupy their mind. I lived in a time before phones. What did we used to do with free moments? Sometimes we had reading material available. Sometimes we would day dream. Sometimes we would just think and introspect about ourselves. Sometimes we would carefully observe the world around us looking for anything interesting.
And sometimes we would attempt to socialize with whatever person happened to be nearby, even a complete stranger.
I don’t have any evidence or studies or anything. But I am beginning to wonder if there is a hidden consequence not from people are doing with the technology, but from what people are no longer doing because they are looking at their phone instead.
Serendipity has been lost. If you aren't at least open to talk to randoms, you are stuck in your own network. People you know from school or work, and people they know, that's it.
You won't be approachable when you are paying attention to a phone.
And it's valuable. There's a lot of people you'll find interesting, but they happen to not be within 2 hops of you. If you want to put a number on it, look at what people pay (opportunity cost) for educational or work opportunities. The social network you'll get is often touted as one of the main benefits of private school, for instance.
Despite being a bit of an introvert, I often reach out to randoms. Just to see what's there. It's been a great strategy thus far.
Theoretically, the serendipity part of it could be replicated online (see Omegle etc.) but I feel that the current regulatory regimes in most countries have a preference for building social media that simply serves up anodyne engagement porn, etc.
The internet is a low-trust environment. Any scammer can reach you from anywhere in the world and try to take advantage of that desire for serendipity. You mention Omegle specifically, which was a hunting ground for sexual predators: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omegle#Child_sexual_abuse
It's the things that don't scale and instead have high barriers to entry that are most likely to produce actual healthy human connection.
I live in a vacation area upstairs from a bar frequented by tourists. I’m friends with the bartender. I’ll go down there when it’s not too busy sit at the bar talk to the bartender and whoever else comes around and is interested in talking. Mostly other guys or couples.
I usually avoid talking to women because I’m obviously married wearing my ring and no matter what, it might come across as creepy and women usually have their guard up and are probably there with spouses somewhere around.
Those are unknown to you, but not completely random. They are at least rich enough to go on vacation, and outgoing enough to go to a bar (and either have friends to go on vacation with or be coupled up), and the bartender is helping you screen them.
Many people typically want to chat with people unknown to them, but not completely random either (especially for women).
There are certain environments where you can randomly talk to people and it’s considered a social norm and certain environments you can’t.
Sitting at the bar is one of those places. I usually go, get one drink and sip on soda the rest of the time and just talk. The bartender doesn’t mind because we are friends and I bring him a lot more business just from other people hanging around and ordering drinks.
On the other hand, the gym is usually not a place where people want to talk and especially where women don’t want to be approached by men. I use to teach group fitness part time in another life and the exception was as one of the few straight men (and at the time single), women naturally came up and spoke to me or I could start conversations with them and thier guard would be down.
Also airports, planes and other public transportation are places I generally don’t strike up random conversations.
> And sometimes we would attempt to socialize with whatever person happened to be nearby, even a complete stranger.
Two days ago I was in Best Buy looking for a DAC for my headphones. They have a section of gaming keyboards and headphones where a kid in his mid to late 20's started to strike up a conversation with me. It went from whether I play video games, to if I live in town, to his story on dropping out of college.
The entire time all I could process was the question of why this kid was talking to me and I kept giving him short bland responses. Not that long ago I would have sat there for an hour talking with this guy and loved every second of it. Then I would have come home and annoyed my wife by telling her all about it.
I know it's cliche to say but something changed in me over the initial COVID lock-downs where I went from socializing being a necessity in my life to just wanting to be home and not dealing with people. A point that bums me out the more I think about it.
> And sometimes we would attempt to socialize with whatever person happened to be nearby, even a complete stranger.
I don’t have any evidence or studies or anything. But I am beginning to wonder if there is a hidden consequence not from people are doing with the technology, but from what people are no longer doing because they are looking at their phone instead.
Turns out that making it too easy to avoid the hell that is other people has some less than great side effects.
I think the “cure” to this is fostering curiosity within ourselves, and learning to balance our curiosity in real world objects, locations, people, activities, etc. in a way that’s balanced with digital information. And understanding that all digital information is really just an approximation of these real-world things.
Put another way… you have to let yourself be curious about, say, the garden in the park, rather than looking at your phone. And when it comes to people - talking to a stranger rather than looking at your phone - you have to not only let yourself be curious, but also be vulnerable enough to make that curiosity known (a secondary skill, that I think can be built on a foundation of curiosity).
This is not necessarily tech driven. People are extroverted or introverted. Pre smartphone, when I was alone on the bus or subway, I always had my nose in a paper or a book. Now it's my phone or a Kobo. I didn't like and wasn't good at making small talk back then, and I don't think that has changed much. I feel like there are a lot of Seinfeld subplots built around avoiding social interaction that I really identified with.
On the other hand, I feel a lot of media is pushing us to ignore, suspect or otherwise be scared of strangers. I don't know that this is uniquely tech driven though.
yes, but only the real introverts carry a book. everyone carries a phone enabling more people to exhibit introverted behavior.
i used to be one of those with a book. now i listen to audio books which incidentally allows me to appear more extroverted because i can make eye contact and i guess people assume i am just listening to music and am therefore approachable.
I often think about this as well. If you have a problem to solve, it’s easiest to use the internet and find threads or videos to solve that problem. But in the “before times” you would need to seek out someone with experience and have a full conversation. While having the information at our fingertips is much more convenient and helps bridge gaps in communities that would lack experienced experts, it does cut the opportunity to socialize but at least 1 conversation per problem.
Not sure about "overlooked"? It's one of the most common refrain of the past ~20y that smartphones have existed: "people don't talk or pay attention to anything anymore now they're all on their smartphone all the time", it's one of the most criticisms of smartphones
> And sometimes we would attempt to socialize with whatever person happened to be nearby, even a complete stranger.
I think this is the core reason for so much video arcade machine related nostalgia. Those that experienced this the first time around will know about stacking coins on the machines, playing against those you didn't know and so on. Now that is back to table football etc. but an entire category came and went in the space of 30 years.
Sounds like a myth to me, I remember life before "devices" and laptops, I had newspapers, books, magazines, board games and card games, walkmans, audiobooks, idk...maybe you're talking like a thousand years ago?
Not to say the phones aren't having an impact of some sort, but yeah, I always knew how to distract myself.
When I was a child, the TV was running at our home a lot. When I left home, I didn't buy a TV on purpose. Visiting my family again was a weird experience: after a few words, someone suggested to go watch a TV. Nothing specific, just the default way of spending time. I was like "ugh, if you don't mind, I would prefer talking to you", but they were like "no problem, we can watch and talk". Except, it didn't work that way. Watching and talking means, you ask a question, the other person opens their mouth... but keeps watching the screen... and then maybe after a minute says something, very slowly, not even a coherent sentence.
If you are not used to that, it's like watching people you know turn into zombies. But of course, if you do it every day, you are just as zombified as others, so it feels okay to you. (Just like drunk people don't mind being in company of other drunk people, or stoned people don't mind being in company of other stoned people.) You spend a few hours in each other's company, saying less than ten sentences during all the time, and somehow it gives you the feeling of spending quality time together, when in fact everyone was only paying attention to the screen.
You could get an equivalent of that by having the whole family sit on a large sofa, everyone watching their own smartphone, sitting together in silence for hours. At the end, everyone would feel like they had a meaningful experience together. It only feels weird when the rest of the people are glued to their screens and you are not.
Nowadays if someone has a free moment, they have their phone to occupy their mind. I lived in a time before phones. What did we used to do with free moments? Sometimes we had reading material available. Sometimes we would day dream. Sometimes we would just think and introspect about ourselves. Sometimes we would carefully observe the world around us looking for anything interesting.
And sometimes we would attempt to socialize with whatever person happened to be nearby, even a complete stranger.
I don’t have any evidence or studies or anything. But I am beginning to wonder if there is a hidden consequence not from people are doing with the technology, but from what people are no longer doing because they are looking at their phone instead.