Comment by Noos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Noos | Hacker News Reader

"As its use has proliferated, so has its effects...

...the interviewer, apparently, asks young people (age 18 to 22 years old) the following: whether men with the (device hidden) are human or not; whether they are losing contact with reality; whether the relation between eyes and ears is changing radically, whether they are psychotic or schizophrenic; whether they are worried about the fate of humanity."

Can you guess the device? It's the Sony Walkman, and the time is the 1980s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkman_effect

The arguments aren't new or novel. Hosoda was saying similar in the 1980s, and the Walkman just as easily isolated people in the 1980s as phones do now. yet somehow humanity survived.

Remember pagers? They were the device of choice in the 1990s for kids, and they were pilloried just as bad, and even linked to drugs. There's a pretty decent history of people panicking morally about new technologies and their dehumanizing effects, and generally people have adapted more or less fine.

But maybe we have lost something also. As a truly social species, do we not lose as a society when barriers are erected to sociability? The literature certainly points to increased social isolation among adults and children. It also makes the point that loneliness is a risk factor in things like dementia, being overweight and a litany of other ailments. I reject the notion that anything new is automatically better and has only net positive effects.

I don't think that's the exact argument the parent was making. We've lost just as much from the car, suburbs, and plane travel but you can't do much about them - they're there so we have to adjust.

If anything, most of the addictive internet stimuli are social to some degree. I do think there's an interesting analysis to be made of how social connectedness got redistributed though. Both in terms of absolute connectedness and who we're connected to.

I would argue that these "social" parts of the internet are social in the shallowest sense of the world. E.g., telling people how your life is without actually talking to them. I would agree with above that these devices are adding to (creating?) our social isolation.

I don't know the numbers. But if my intuition isn't completely wrong, and I'm not a total outlier, most seem to spend a lot of time on Messenger (/other IM) talking. Usually talking about content that is social in nature.

And quite frankly, most "real-life" interactions seem to be pretty much the same. Just sitting around with phones talking about things you saw on the [social] Internet.

> And quite frankly, most "real-life" interactions seem to be pretty much the same. Just sitting around with phones talking about things you saw on the [social] Internet

This is a bit of a sad statement. What about conversation in a group, or debate in a meeting at work, or communicating with your children, or any other kind of relationship? Not everything can be showing each other videos, as YouTube can already recommend better than humans can.

I'd imagine pre-Internet conversations were just as "sad". The main difference was you couldn't "show" what you were talking about. Nowadays instead of verbally describing a conversation with a friend, you'll just do a screenshot dump.

Given how much social life basically migrated to the Internet, there aren't that many happenings without a digital trace.

I mean you can't even discuss politics without talking about Trump's twitter...[0]

Just yesterday grandma was showing me pics my aunt sent her. Pics she found on cousin's Facebook profile.

[0] We already have political scandals that involve just email dumps, think how cool things are going to get when we get dumps of facebook/slack/whatever convos!

> people have adapted more or less fine

No, we have just moved on to the next device, which ends up absorbing even more time. It's not more of the same, it's an increase at every step.

That is funny because I distinctly remember my grandmother getting mad at me as a teenager because I wore my walkman when we went to the grocery store. She said it was rude.

>> generally people have adapted more or less fine

I don't think that such adaptation is a "done deal". We're very much a work in progress as far as the latest social media stuff goes, meaning from about Facebook onwards. And without being all scaremongery, I really wonder if we _are_ fine.

There seems a growing number of studies and anecdotes to at least give the suggestion that ever heavier immersion in the virtual world correlates broadly with increased dissatisfaction and distress, especially for younger people. There were never any such indications for Walkmen, or pagers, so I do think already it's different.

Let's not chuck all our tech in the bin - but let's be cautious and observant about what's happening around us.

>yet somehow humanity survived.

A very convincing and cogent argument can be made to the contrary.

moral panic gets the attention the author craves. it amazes how THAT is such a constant. even on this site, the comments are rife with people forgetting their sense of perspective, history, and human nature and tying themselves in anxious knots over the threat of from this frankenstein technology.

Reading the thread, my impression is that no one thinks that tech is a Frankenstein. Most are calling for a more balanced use, especially for children. There is strong research showing how getting "sucked" into the internet can have detrimental effects on social skills and child development.

Yes, a much more predictable response to a reasonable article is laughter at nonexistent moral panic. It's part of a crude, mimicked categorisation system that less analytical people sometimes subscribe to.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com