Smart phones in the hands of dumb people..

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This is something a few of us have known for a long time. To me facebook is a way to organize events. Nothing more. To me my phone is useful for emergencies, navigating with GPS, and, in my case, displaying lecture notes whilst studying.
The only people I really consider my friends are those who would go out of my way to say hi to. Probably only 15, but they are people who understand me, and whom I understand.

The thing is that technology is a supplement to face-to-face communication. Skype allowed me to maintain contact with a friend whilst he was away for three years. It allows us to communicate with our grandparents on the other side of the planet. But none of these replace actually seeing the other person where you get real interaction.

What’s interesting is the relationships between people who contribute to the same forums. For instance, the relationship between Blueprintrandom and Myself. We know each other, and we interact, we help each other. Is that friendship? I wouldn’t have a clue. I think English needs another word to describe relationships on the internet.

Good to know, that I’m not the only one thinking about www and smartphones this way :slight_smile:
I don’t have a smartphone, people always kidding about me because of this, but I never saw a reason to buy one.
It has no benefits to my life.
It’s just an expensive, timeconsuming toy.

Kind regards
Alain

I would consider you my friend sdfgeoff,

Friends don’t always see eye to eye, and they say what the think, or feel, friends are brutaly honest, because they know you like that. And side note, everyone I grew up with as friends are dead… I have a few surviving friends, but they are scattered across the globe…

Drugs, diabities, car accidents, drinking, suicide…

I wish more of my friends had thought they had a future.

That is one of the issues or possible issues that sparked my interest in technology back in the late 80s. There was a prediction in Naisbitts’ Megatrends that a “high tech” society would result in a “low touch” society. It seems to be panning out to some degree. We used to connect primarily with a handshake and now it may be leaning more toward a challenge [B]handshake.

It seems to be an ancient pattern though. I would assume that there was almost ubiquitous transparency and very little privacy in pre-historic times. There is a long history of technology increasing privacy and diminishing interaction with things as seemingly benign as single family dwellings.

This pattern doesn’t seem to be set in stone though. We may in the foreseeable future be connecting in what is probably the most intimate manor… mind to mind.

The contexts mire the notion from the start. New liberties have emerged that allow us to share our thoughts, dreams and aspirations. Political discussion is much more open and tolerated than when I was young. We have, by in large become more worldly with the advent of the internet. A lot of social maturity has come from it.

There has been a steady loss of an aspect of our humanity that we have historically associated with our altruism. This of course is disturbing however it seems almost absurd to focus on the physical when there seems to be no evidence that it even exists. [/B]

Recently, the Oculus Rift guy posited the idea of why you would actually want to go out and meet people when you can just strap on your VR device and meet them virtually. He also said recently that he wants to connect a billion people into a virtual world that will be the ‘largest MMO ever’ (no word on whether he would want to jack us in permanently).

To me that seems to scream of a person who’s not very outgoing and wants the entire world to be that way, we’ll all grow into bubbles inside our own technological cocoon like in Wall-E. Go outside, accumulate some fresh ideas, meet other people in real-life settings, your body and mind will be healthier in the long run.

You will OBEY you will OBEY

It’s informative for me to see how few people are self-aware enough to just sense how their brains and attention spans are being harmed by gadget addiction. When I see many young people, they’ll have a TV on, a laptop to the side of them tracking sports scores, and they’ll be texting on their smartphones. Simultaneously, I’ll try talking to them, and they’ll speak in a frantic dialect, full of sentence fragments and fits-and-starts of barely-formed ideas.

It’s also worth noting that “milennials” are having less and less sex, yet routinely describe themselves as sexually “open” and “liberated”. To them, “sex” means fapping to internet porn, and many women are openly repulsed at the idea of, ya know, actual fucking. (Although it’s worth noting that the “sexual liberation paradox” has been observed for decades: that people who describe themselves as sexually adventurous and tolerant always have both less sex and less satisfying sex than self-described conservative people. This has been true when controlling for age, race, and income.)

I don’t think the young generation of whites here in the U.S. will ever have sex or procreate at anything close to healthy levels. I’ve personally observed that, of the very few people in my generation with a child - and it’s always just one - the child seems to be more of a trophy baby for Facebook posts than, ya know, an actual human being who you protect and love. There’s even a freakish phenomemon of mothers assaulting - and in this case, murdering - their own children so that they can post pictures of the sick child and get Facebook “Likes”.

David; is every possible subject an issue of sex and race to you?

Our local paper has a Monday column where the commentator tries to cite race as being the root cause of a lot of issues, but even he does not go this far.

The way you write, it seems like every post you put down is a hijack attempt, can we please discuss the less charged issue of tech. addiction?

The wide scene, it is about everyone. If your name is David. Say Hi David. If your name is Jack. Say Hi. But never to understand the grand nature of the world. Where there is water. Sky. Trees.

Attachments


Why is everything about race to you? I didn’t even write about race (other than noting that I’m speaking for my demographic, of whites). Just don’t respond.

And yes, when I keep reading stories “celebrating” that young (white) people don’t even like fucking and they theorize that smartphones could be a cause, I mark that down. Impotent men freak me out.

So it freaks you out that people aren’t prowling around looking for every opportunity to satisfy their sexual fantasies? Perhaps it’s a good thing then that technology is replacing it, I’d rather they play games, chat on the social networks, and do productive content making tasks rather than see how many STD’s they can get at once. Best leave the whole procreation thing until after they get married and are ready to start a family.

Yeah, asexual people are gross.

They’re not procreating, and they’re not even fucking…and they don’t even want to fuck. lol. sexual “liberation” is a lie.

Your constant use of the F-bomb tells volumes about that, that and how you seem to want to change a thread’s subject to sex just because the subject of tech. addiction does not seem interesting or naturalistic.

If you come back a few months later saying you’re HIV positive, well I can’t say that you’ll have someone else to point the finger at if it ends up being your undoing.

Can we get back to the subject please, I’m pretty sure that ‘off topic’ doesn’t mean change the subject of and hijack any thread you want. Unlike how Youtube used to be this place actually regulates discussion.

And thus we have regressed to hairless primates,

The fact that you associate sex with deadly diseases rather than enjoyment, connectivity, and the creation of life speaks volumes. (Although I think that the “STD” hype is mostly cover for asexual people to have an excuse.)

I said several things in my initial reply, including that gadget addiction has been cited as one of the reasons that young people don’t have sex (and sure as hell aren’t procreating and are evolutionary failures; whites and East Asians, only). This was the lone statement that you responded to, and are now expressing anger that it’s being discussed, when you were the very person who singled it out for discussion. If you don’t want to talk about something…don’t talk about it.

I don’t think that it’s generally addiction. This is becoming a part of our society. We are getting beyond our limitations with technology. If this is freaking us out, then the future is going to be traumatic.

David Chalmers has some interesting thoughts on the subject

Benjamin Goertzel suggested that it is just the natural emergence of greater complexity occurring through us.

I think there’s just a lot of concern about becoming cyborgs and loosing parts of our humanity that we enjoy. This is a real existential crisis that is occurring and I don’t think playing it off as something else or pretending that it’s something that we can just stop doing is realistic or useful.

For years now I’ve thought there might result a new wave of diversity as people choose different levels of participation in outsourcing our functions to machines. The AI researchers however kept pointing out that even one level - say progressive end user to cyborg - is a night and day difference. Once the brain is given the direct interface the person is - for the most part - no longer human by the common standard. The funny part is the main difference between us and the theoretical cyborg now is the breaking of the skin.

By putting down your devices you’re not necessarily preventing addiction. More likely you are rejecting transformation into a cyborg.

I’ve heard a lot of arguments against constant usage of tech and most of them have been rooted in sympathies toward the direct interaction that has been associated with our altruism. I use tech in an altruistic way every day. The notion that someone cannot express platonic love through a machine is a farce.

We shouldn’t be comforting ourselves with temporary pseudo-solutions. We should be grieving.

The late, great Michael Crichton used to give great speeches around the time each of his wonderful novels were published, tangentially discussing some of the real-world activities associated with the theme of a given novel. (For instance, talking about global warming when ‘State of Fear’ was produced.) When he wrote ‘Next’, he gave this great speech, which has a quote that I wrote down, and I have taken to heart ever since I heard it.

Conflicts [of too much information and information overload] are not inevitable. They’re the symptoms of a problem. Namely, that we have failed as a society to institute procedures to manage information.

When I heard that, I promptly came up with my own “hierarchy of information”. I have always had it posted on my wall, and it goes from “Class A Information”, which is information that I have actively sought and which serves a clear and obvious need, all the way down to “Class D Information”, which I call “outright spam” and includes things like USA politics and celebrity gossip.

It’s up to each individual to take responsibility for themselves, and not to short-circuit their brains and murder their human spirit with tech addictions. This definitely includes gadget addiction, but also porn addiction and getting fixated in absurd cultural silliness (i.e., pop politics debates and so forth).

People need to take responsibility for themselves. It always makes me laugh when I read, “We need to solve this problem with XYZ” and “We need to protect our children…”. First off, human beings aren’t ants, and secondly, most people don’t even consider such-and-such a thing a problem, and so therefore they’re not going to waste energy on other people’s problems. It’s sad and pathetic to see these aging men whining that they can’t take responsibility for themselves (their diet, gadget addiction, whatever) and are waiting for the USA government and media to somehow miraculously cure them.

Don’t know what the fuss is about, its just natural selection at work. All the tech addicted smartphone users who are walking around with their eyes on their phone and ear buds in their ears are getting hit by cars crossing the road, walking off piers, walking into poles/windows/walls/holes in the ground and killing themselves because they’re texting whilst driving. Its just natures way of removing the morons from the gene pool.