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Comment by kernoble | Hacker News Reader

The unmentioned thing here is why? Why does the world with a smartphone and today's hyper-connectivity seem so different now compared to what it used to?

Did people feel the same way when the railroad and other forms of rapid transport showed up?

What makes things feel so different? Is it more competition, and for what? Is it that things are just faster, and the certainties have changed? Has it fundamentally changed how we experience relationships with people?

Are our standards now higher, and is that a good thing?

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I still occasionally marvel that I can wake up at 4:30am in Denver and be in Very Rural Virginia by 5pm...and that's with stopping over in Atlanta first.

It's not the travel, or the time, it's the 'it's more efficient to go thousands of miles out of the way due to logistics.'

This has not been particularly new, but I can still marvel at it.

Having fixed plumbing, I'm reminded that the current iteration is as a result of 2000 years of refinement.

I have a lathe, manufactured in 1966, it still holds tolerances, and I refer to a book (how to run a lathe) that's first printing was at the turn of the 20th century (1912 or thereabouts)

Old stuff is remarkable, too.

Yeah, clearly old things were fine, or in many case quite good.

I think comparing the advances in mechanical precision to changes in society shaping technological advances is not a fair comparison. I would argue that it's exactly that mechanical precision that started with gauge blocks that has facilitated all our advancements.

I think it's just a different "system of measures" when talking about societal/social impact on our human interactions. People's minds and feelings don't fit into technical descriptions.

But, to agree with you, just like basic technology changes slowly, human nature barely seems to change at all.

Something I've been wondering about lately:

In the pre-Internet era, rumors, incidents, conspiracies, book and movie opinions were passed on verbally. I saw an article nobody else in my circle ever read; a friend watched a movie nobody else is going to see any time soon, etc. There were endless opportunities to get together and talk.

We were each other's Internets.

Do people talk less these days? I certainly do but that might be due to my age. But I'm genuinely curious if the topics of conversations are as intellectually fulfilling as they used to be.

People talk online. Whether that's equivalent is up for debate.

There might be an argument that our new online/text based discussions have changed the dynamics (some could argue hindered, but I don't) of face to face communication.

Because we went from living in a world where information about the world around us was hidden, to suddenly having access to all of it. It's surprising, jarring and overwhelming and it's probably going to take multiple generations for people to figure out how to use it effectively, ignore the noise, and deal with the social issues created by it.

Yes, but also, as the author points out in several places, we lived in a world of serendipity, patience, boredom (in a good way ... something that might lead to a kind of forced contemplation?).

One wonders the degree to which our mental health actually thrived better with that extra time, accidental rather than deliberate discovery.

> Did people feel the same way when the railroad and other forms of rapid transport showed up?

To some extend yes. When I was a kid, we'd rarely go to the only major city in our part of the country. Maybe two times a year. Now I live in that area, but I can easily go visit my parents for dinner, just because someone decided that a motorway was a great idea. It cut somewhere like 40 minutes to an hour of the drive.

It still boggles my mind that 30 years ago we considered it a day trip, but with a shorter distance, faster speeds, in a better car, it's just a quick drive, allowing my daughter to see her grandparents way more often than I saw mine.

Point being: increased speed, and therefore frequency, of communication/interaction changes the nature of our relationships.

So the change in the "underlying" doesn't have to be 10x to have a 10x effect on the relationships.

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