A French village that voted to ban scrolling in public
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
"Those who might check their phone’s map when lost are instead being encouraged to ask for directions."
Having Interrailed across northern Europe and travelled within a variety of cities without an internet-connected phone, I am now confident in declaring that the average local is terrible at giving directions! Attempt to ask how to get to the nearest metro station or bus stop, for instance, and each of the friendly residents you ask will direct you in an entirely different direction. Of course, you'll also get your fair share of unsolicited travel advice: in Brussels, I believe I have now heard more instructions for effective fare-dodging than I have actual directions!
As a result of the typical denizen's questionable geography knowledge, I've now made sure I have a good offline map before embarking on any journey. If I know approximately which railway or bus lines I'll need to use, I'll download timetables for them as well. Of course, I could print out a dozen maps in advance - there's nothing inherently electronic about a map - but spurning maps entirely and asking for directions just won't cut the mustard!
Went to Porto too recently, same experience. Very cool, especially as a first approach when you don't know the city enough to plan and orient, or if you are like me and spend hours wandering randomly deep in cities...
So it's pretty ridiculous to be offended because someone figured they'd check online before giving you information. Especially if the trains are notorious for not arriving.
Why wouldn't you want to be checking for the latest information in that situation? They can't telepathically obtain information that the train is going to arrive.
This is also my issue with the "put your camera away, live in the moment!" crowd. Well it's have my camera out or have no photo anchors to bring memories out of whatever fog they fall in to.
Rhymes are how epic poems were memorized before the advent of a form of writing capable of recording something of length.
Put your experiences to light verse and musical accompaniment and you’ve got something even more memorable!
Do you remember your photographs when you’re not looking at them? I remember my songs! I remember where I was when I wrote them and who I was around.
I remember writing a song about the man who brought a shotgun to the roof of a hospital in SF and was killed by a SWAT team.
I remember the song I wrote about the Google barge and the security guard I talked to there one night.
I remember the song I wrote on a beach in Hawaii, the song I wrote about my hometown and the lackluster reunion ski trip that reminded me why I left my hometown.
I don’t take many pictures and I don’t have the best memory, but I have vivid memories of the sights and sounds of the places I was when I was looking up and around and writing. Where I was decidedly not looking down at a device and rather living untethered and soaking in the world around me.
I haven’t had a data plan on my phone for about 8 years and the primary reason is so that I can observe and experience!
I'll just stop you there. You've either misunderstood me or really want to get into the philosophy of recording ideas, and I do not. I have a way of recording memories that works for me. Let's leave it at that and move on.
When I got the map the next day, I realized that all the roads are curves and circles, and intersecting at strange angles, and the buildings aren't situated as blocks. It's almost impossible to follow instructions like "walk straight for two blocks and then turn right", especially at night.
As far as navigation goes, I'll take GPS over asking for directions any day.
Outside a large city it might also be that occasions to practice English are vanishingly rare and when you have never really practiced outside school, it doesn't quite work out.
Now, I'm still a bit surprised. Many, many people can speak some English just fine here, especially younger people.
Are your experiences recent and where was it?
I got through France just fine while hiking and hitchhiking on my almost nonexistent french, mainly speaking English and German.
Just starting with "bonjour" or "ca va?" often lead to people offering me to sleep in their homes instead of under my tarp, especially in small towns, where the older population doesn't see many outsiders, and is therefore generally interested in having something to talk about. Of course their English and German is rather limited, so it takes a long time to communicate, but it felt very rewarding whenever it worked.
Decades ago some friends and I were in Nuremberg and we went to the tourist info kiosk to ask for directions (Americans speaking German), having just arrived on the train. We went outside and I wanted to go one direction and my good friend the other. We argued, in got way more heated than we’d ever been before. Finally he said to me - yes, you are right, that is the direction he said we should go, but that’s not what he meant. To this day I still don’t know what Ryan picked up on that I didn’t, and even Ryan would agree my German is better - but I was wrong and Ryan was right, and the guy at the info kiosk was 100% wrong.
I really can't speak about northern Europe, but giving wrong directions to foreigners is practically a national sport in Spain.
The proposed solution that at least 54% of this village have recognized is that the internet has really eroded societal bonds. The optimization of everything, coupled with the easy on-demand connection provided by phones is a big problem for society. It's like eating cake all the time, its easy and feels good in the moment but it will likely have negative societal impacts.
I'll speak for America, but I am sure it isn't unique here. The optimization of everything to short term profit & loss coupled with phones has made society pretty unpleasant.
- Grocery stores have removed handles from bags and most tellers.
- Extremely uniform big box stores are primarily all that are left
- Shopping is fully online
- Workers have been reduced as much as possible to automata in low status jobs.
- Due to the quality and quantity of data, of all goods are priced to the absolute max society can bear and wages are suppressed to the extent possible as well.
- Connection with society is primarily done through a screen and id ephemeral
I could go on. The point is that in concert, this has seriously changed our society even if any single change alone would be positive.
Phones are simply a symptom of a society that is lonely and disconnected and a biological psychology that makes adaptation to this change hard/impossible. It's not neccesarily negative, but we will see how this shapes society when gen-z and gen alpha are in their 40s.
In response the mayor promised new investment into sports, recreation, libraries and book sharing... In other words, there's more going on here than just the "phone ban", but a broader attempt to reconnect and rehumanise the village life.
My concern is that even with the social and financial will to restore a more convivial lifestyle, those young people won't be able to engage. Having been raised by screens they are already so psychologically altered (damaged?) as to be lost.
The assumption that life can "go back" may be misguided, and that makes this an experiment worth watching.
What counts as "a book" here (the seven volume À la recherche du temps perdu seems a bit of challenge to rip through in a day) ?
All the same it's a high number, .. I'm guessing more than a few were light pulps and the best you could find given the library at hand?
I read a lot of books, several thousand, from 12 to 17, and kept a log of them - later I worked in (and led) a team that digested a few thousand technical documents a day (with a heavy dose of computer assistence to find|pick out key parts), there's a lot of material you can fly through quickly and not miss much, there are rare books that can take a year or a lifetime to fully digest and finish with.
p.s. I exaggerated slightly, it took me 3 days before I installed TikTok. I'd watched silly viral videos that appeared on the news for years and so I was intrigued about it. I've loved it ever since. Just gotta get it set up right so your filter bubble is what you're into. I get half my tech news from HN and the other half from TikTok.
That's definitely problematic and not where anyone wants this to go, right?
Ah yes that's quite a different matter.
My thoughts are that sure, when you are living and working alone, as happens to many of us at times, it is possible to successfully apply "force". Like making objects of temptation unavailable, maybe using a time-locked safe or taking a week away at tech-detox bootcamp.
IIRC Johann Hari in "Stolen Focus" seemed to think this only ever created a temporary relief, a bit like dieting and then gaining rebound weight.
What I wrote about in Digital Vegan was based on my interaction with heroin addicts, and is all about the friction that comes from peer pressure and groups that reinforce (mutually enforce) behaviours. Friends are a bigger problem than self-will in the arena of addiction. External force, even in peer relations, tends to have the opposite effects.
Not dissing your idea, which is accurate, but I can't not-find it funny to then remark that most Americans couldn't even take a 2 week vacation without cheating with sick days.
Now what would they have done before the advent of the smartphone? Turn the clock back and have them do that.
Last week I met friends at a board game cafe / bar (I live on the west coast now) and there were tons of college students enjoying coffees and beers and pizza. There was still alcohol, but it wasn’t the point of the evening. When I was their age, we got loaded to forget / escape our boredom.
What I’m saying is that there’s a positive outcome that can be reached through community investment.
So what are High School students supposed to do? They often don't have the money to go spend to hang out someplace, and even if they did, can they actually get there? Maybe with an hour of transit time each way or with a friend's parent who can drive them.
The complaint of "I don't have anything to do without my phone" is probably coming from a younger group than College Students in general.
Now we've traded it in for solipsistic, depressed, pill hooked anti-social teens because of an obsession with health at the cost of everything else. The pandemic of course did its part to accelerate that trend. Hitchens anticipated it a generation ago.
Your body will recover from some stupidities in your teens and young adulthood, having your mind glued to your phone instead of having a real life for your formative years, not so sure.
Or at an arcade? Or a rec center? Or at church?
Or some other thing outside of their house that doesn't exist anymore in any real way?
The death of the third space outside of school/work and home has been awful for society tbh.
I mean, we all know how this is gonna end.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/508614/school-phone-ban-...
No there isn't: "In response the mayor promised". Namely, the mayor and their gang achieved THEIR objective first and blah blah the rest.
Dear fucking God I will go to my grave complaining about how much I hate this trend.
Or it'll actually boost profits from people having the menu on their phone for dine-out ordering, allow the restaurant to update pricing more easily matching their costs, and of course the savings from not having to print physical menus.
Time will tell. I'd bet on the latter.
It's all just a social experiment which hopefully ends up trickling up and making owners aware how stupid it is to expect everyone to bring a phone in their pockets in order to being able to order food.
Some times it's not even a lie: as part of mentally cleaning up from an intense addiction to social media, I've forced myself into offline mode and purposely leave the phone at home from time to time.
Also some times I didn't feel like doing the theatrics, and upon asking for a menu, they'd say "it's there in the QR code, please scan it" and leave me to it, as if they had done a good job. Not on my watch!
It's like how CA taxes you on your unemployment insurance income.
Just under 11% of the village support the measure strongly enough to vote for it. Not 54%. Only 20% of the local electorate voted at all.
On that basis, it's probably a good thing the measure is unenforceable.
After all this is the way the US conducts its elections. Many elections have very low turnout, yet the results are binding.
Abstaining leads to your opinion not being represented, which is to be expected. It doesn't follow that therefore other people's vote hence represent you.
For the vote mentioned in the article, which is non-binding, non-enforceable, and ridiculous in its scope, I'd guess that most abstainers' real opinion on the matter, is that it's a waste of their time to participate.
Democracy is working great here and everybody is really happy about it.
40 years ago if you lived in a small town and had nerdy or niche interests, you were mocked, bullied, and socially isolated from your peers. Now you can find thousands of other people who share your exact passions and interests and connect with them through the internet.
The status quo is always defended by people who are well adapted to it. But the status quo doesn't work for everyone. The internet age is making life a lot better for a lot of people who were previously marginalized.
I'm sure that when Gen Z gets old, they'll be nostalgic for the good old days of TikTok and Instagram. They won't understand whatever new VR metaverse their children live in, just like Boomers and Gen Xers don't understand the current situation. It's a story as old as time, but the world will move on and continue improving.
Hell, the way I got even more into tech (in the very early smartphone days) in the first place was because my friend group - which isn't easily changed when you're not an adult - was not very accepting of my hobbies/interests. I still remember the mocking I got for not being able to match the quality of a AAA game or mocked for tinkering with electronics by people who were 100% confident in their opinion that cheap earbuds would spontaneously explode.
There's also the mention of asking for directions instead of using map apps, have we already forgotten how frustrating an experience it used to be, trying to find a place, getting vague and often wrong directions, circling around the same place until finally getting the right directions?
First, in a physical store, if I wasn't familiar with that location I'd often have to pester a store employee for information of where a product is located. Now I pull up the store's app and it tells me the aisle and often bin location. Saves me time, lets the staff do their regular job (stocking shelves, etc), and it works out good for people who have a difficult time navigating social interactions with strangers.
Now the negative of this -- stores can have less staff (as they aren't getting pestered as much), and the staff they have doesn't really have to know the products that much (so you lose out on a 15 minute talk with a retired plumber working the plumbing aisle at the hardware store, getting sage advice). Flip side of that is sometimes you can get better advice by looking it up on your phone, but quick internet research isn't something that everyone is really good at.
Online ordering -- yes, I can now get access to things that were never available to me before (unless I happened to be in a very high population density area that could support certain specialty stores). Years ago I had always wanted to try something like Vegemite, and finally ran across a very small jar in a World Market store in the city. Now I can order multiple jars of the stuff on Amazon for a reasonable price.
The negative of this is once I needed an air filter for my lawn mower (about 10 years ago or so?). Craftsman mower, so I went to Sears. Couldn't find it on the shelf, grabbed an employee, they looked it up on their computer and basically ordered it for me on sears.com and had it shipped to my house. Had to wait a few days instead of fixing my lawn mower right then (like my Dad would do back in the day, by grabbing a needed part from the local small town Ace Hardware or similar). Heck, I couldn't even get a headlight switch for my (at the time) 10-year old truck from Autozone without ordering it. (But today I'd just model it and 3D print the thing).
I also chuckle at a French government trying to encourage people to spend more time in public. Throughout history French governments have famously tried to keep people from taking to the streets. Most every revolt began with a conversation in a pub or coffee shop.
<sigh>
Okay, fine.
Human contact, even with strangers, has a profound impact on health, mental state and quality of life. This has been researched and proven over and over. We are simply wired to function in social groups. Our current state of individualism is rather exceptional, and a cause for many issues with (mental) health.
So, yes, you scrolling HN has an effect on my health, because the reverse is unfortunately true too: loneliness (and isolation etc) have a negative effect on humans
You haven't talked to me :D
I'm wholly in sympathy with the idea that public life would be better if we spent less of it on our phone, but counting every good deed left undone as a harm done is a very dangerous road to go down.
I wasn't seeing it as a "good deed left undone" but as a normalized state that has been unbalanced by phones and individualism. That the norm is a place where humans talk, collaborate, and have deep connections in small social groups. The way humans have lived for millions of years.
I guess looking at it from a more practical perspective of individualism being the norm from which we should break through good deeds, is a far more effective and realistic way. Thanks.
Citation needed. The cohort that wants to talk to random strangers in my experience 1) significantly overvalue their opinions 2) seem unbothered by any behavior or body language saying "please leave me alone" and 3) are not nearly as interesting as they think.
Just because I'm outdoors doesn't mean I signed up to be bothered by randos.
It might be just my big city upbringing but the random people chatting me up in public almost always want something from me I would rather not give them. Most of them want my literal money. Either by scamming me or by just begging. Those who don’t usually want to tell me about their faith and try to get me converted.
Not saying it is all interactions. Have a few positive ones too, but the wast majority is not.
The reason I am very skeptical about talking with strangers is evidence based and has nothing to do with phones. In fact it predates smartphones by decades.
The idea that baning phone usage is going to make people less lonely is in itself preposterous. If you see me on my phone in public most likely i’m talking with one of my friends. If you are feeling so lonely that you want to force me to interact with you instead of them, then maybe you are the one who has a problem? Like join a club, invite people over for some board games or volunteer.
After living in London a few years and returning back home, I realised how defensive and wary I'd become of stranger interaction.
In London people might be trying to pickpocket you or sell you something, but in smaller towns I've found most of the time people are genuinely being friendly or asking for directions etc
Couples that met on a bus commute was a trope with a basis in reality; nowadays everyone's isolated, headphones on, eyes glued on a phone. The first reaction to human contact in public spaces is one of distrust and defence.
> The idea that baning phone usage is going to make people less lonely is in itself preposterous.
It's not magic; it's a signal, a public statement.
That sounds good. I was in my early twenties when smartphones went from a curiosity you heard about on the TV to a reality in many hands. Scammers and beggars masively outweighted positive random contacts even before. Phones and headphones did not cause this where I have grown up.
Talking to random strangers in public is generally very awkward and unpleasant for me and I don't see how subjecting myself to that would improve my life in the general case.
Yet, I, introvert++ have had the best moments when travelling, talked to random strangers or exchanged beers, music and stories when stuck in transport. This still comes out as net positive for me in all the decades of having awkward conversations, unwanted attention or just social interaction. I won't give up those hundred of situations that made me uncomfortable for the few that truly changed my life.
I spend all day at work talking with people, being in meetings and having said human contact. Outside of work I prefer to control that contact, hence why I walk around in public with big obvious headphones on.
Plus, it's such a culturally dependent thing, Americans are known for always engaging in little bits of random conversation and pleasantries with total strangers, but other cultures can see it as either cheap and shallow or weird and creepy, and of course if someone sees it as either of those, it isn't going to help their loneliness.
> We are simply wired to function in social groups.
A stranger on the bench is not my social groups. I have my friends and circles to whom I talk, and that's good enough for me. Talking with utter strangers on random occasion is stressful to me; I'm quite certain that I'm not wired to do it.
I'd still call it the same way you would, if anyone gave me the chance. Wouldn't even have to think it over.
Radiations man, radiations!
Do you really believe that? Do you actually believe you get a "measurable harm" due to a few minutes of so-called "second hand smoke"? Does ANYONE actually believe that?
I'm not sure how people just buy into small memes and make no use of common sense, whatsoever.
Yes: https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/secondhand-smoke/health.html
> It is not enforceable by police – officers could not stop or fine people scrolling in the street because there is no national law against smartphones – but the mayor describes it as an incitement to stop scrolling and guidance for limiting phone use.
I remember when you couldn't go anywhere without smelling cold tobacco, even in trains and buses, not even talking about might clubs and restaurants... Now even outside many smokers are considerate and will avoid smoking in your direction, especially when you have kids, which was definitely not the case 20 years ago!
ETA: I guess you are objecting to my "worse than ever" characterization, and you are probably right, but it's shocking to drop into France where youth smoking is visibly more common than it was 15-25 years ago, mother-daughter smoking is a thing, young adult smoking might be only 40-50% but that's hard to differentiate from 100% and it's 10x higher than some other western nations so it seems crazy.
Banning thinking and daydreaming while walking?
License for walking, lanes for walking and turn signals on your shoulders?
For your safety.
i'd now like to move to the next item on the agenda and propose banning of smart phones followed by all social media.
Why though? I’m fine with shunning smokers - these directly affect the others in a negative way.
Scrolling seems harmless to others; no reason for me to make it socially unacceptable.
The headmaster of a school who says no to phones probably has more clout.
What amused me in that article was the kid who said he needed GPS to find his way around... in a village of 2000 people.
Antisocial does as antisocial does, and no right wing ban on it will prevent me from scrolling, whether it be on vellum, wood pulp, or oled.
Yikes. Who actually wants the government regulating something like this?
edit: moved the bulk of my comment upthread
"Hello, sir, do you have a license for that scroll?"
"No, I am but a crier here to announce..."
"The rule is no unlicensed scrolling. We're going to have to take that scroll into custody"
but I bet they're coming for the parchments later then the papers and finally the books!
when does it end!!??
Even more amazing: when that happens, no one seems to notice that a huge line has been crossed, because by now, they've been shafted that way so many times, it's just fairly normal.
So sad.
If this seems a bit heavy-handed, it's because damaging and addictive habits require collective action to stop. No one walks down the street in San Francisco and tries to convince heroin addicts to stop for other peoples' good. No one tries to tell drunks and alcoholics to stop overdoing it.
They are definitely early, and possibly the first place to do this, but they will surely not be the last. Our youth have been ruined by cheap, omnipresent, and never ending social media content. This is a step in the right direction to make public spaces social again.
People who are friendless ought to get a job, volunteer, get a hobby, join a group, go to a social space instead of expecting strangers to entertain them.
For practical purposes most folks just aren't apt to have anything useful to contribute in 3 minutes. I'm 43 and I don't think I have EVER got anything useful out of such an interaction. It's just pure social petting like monkey's picking bugs off one another and I don't get anything out of it nor feel obligated to do it when walking around. I don't feel socially impoverished because I have actual social interactions in contexts which I feel are useful or beneficial.
My theory is the people that have more need of such social petting are aggrieved at changing social standards. It's just not my problem.
I remain unconvinced this is other than an impoverished way of looking at the world. If anything, it seems much more to me now also a self-impoverishing one.
I'm just saying to be slow to use monkey habits as a reference when critical pieces are so different. I'm not particularly arguing about what humans should do. Merely pointing out that the human situation is more unique than previously implied.
One of the things I've loved about Baltimore for the quarter century I've lived here has been exactly that it differed in this, but lately that hasn't seemed very much to be the case, and that bothers me, especially to see happen in such a relatively short time.
I'm not inclined to haste in accepting it as normal, especially in the wake of a pandemic that seems to have significantly accelerated a process of cultural disintegration in at least the US. Things were not like this at all five years ago, and it legitimately frightens me that people seem to struggle to remember that, because it means I have to wonder what else may have come to be thought normal five years hence.
There's nothing specific to any context† that would let presuppose that anyone's up for socialisation. The only thing in common is that two people have volunteered to feed cats. It is just as much a commonality as me noticing someone in a bus or park reading a book and saying "hey I've been meaning to read that one, WDYT of it so far?".
The only way to know, is... to address the person, thereby taking a risk at either robbing them of a bit of time, or - $deity forbid - meeting someone nice, if for a fleeting moment. They are of course at liberty to turn the attempt down, a perfectly valid response that should be treated with utmost respect.
† well, except things like parties or blind dates.
Furthermore at least some conversation is apt to be started for functional reasons.
This creates the space, opportunity, and time for meaningful conversation and interaction. Contrast this to standing in line for food together for 2 minutes with someone you aren't apt to ever meet again.
I don't get where this hyperbole comes from. Wasn't every generation "ruined" by this, that or the other thing? We need to maintain some perspective. The youth are the more relevant ones here, not us.
People who don’t understand something that didn’t exist when they grew up assume it must not be possible. People assume that games crush creativity, that social interaction online is not actually social interaction. These same biases based on “the way we did it” show up in the RTO debate and other areas of society that are being changed with a new mode of interactions.
Human beings are remarkably adaptable, and I don’t think for one second that online interactions are necessarily worse. I do think we are going through a transient period where as a society we adjust, and transient periods are rough. But as we learn to exist with these new modes of living we, as a social whole, will simply adapt how we interact and live, create new social rules about how to best exist with these new tools.
As we did with language, written words, books, newspapers, telegraphs, radio, telephones, television, etc. Every one of these was greeted with fear and disdain, and social disruption as we settled through a period of transformation. This one is no different.
Hand wringing and bans and teeth gnashing will happen, won’t help, and won’t alter the course of a single thing. Better, IMO, to lean into learning how to live with these advances in a healthy way and teach your children that. Banning them from learning the complexities of a new social medium until they’re old enough to get into serious trouble will only hurt your kids.
My position doesn't come from resistance to change. It comes from seeing statistics like this: https://nypost.com/2023/06/19/number-of-teens-who-dont-enjoy... and from seeing how social interactions in person have degraded as smartphones became pervasive.
>Banning them from learning the complexities of a new social medium until they’re old enough to get into serious trouble will only hurt your kids.
And yet this is exactly what we do with alcohol. You cannot buy or consume any until the age of 21. Do you think we should simply trust children to self-moderate alcohol consumption?
And yes, we should trust people to learn self moderation for alcohol. It works very well across most of Europe. Puritans should be fucked off at every opportunity.
I don’t think children are, by and large, heavy drinkers regardless. These laws are more rooted in prohibition and Puritanism than science. Society prior to age laws didn’t collapse, and alcohol was available to children for at least ten thousand of years. In fact America generally has significantly worse problems with destructive alcoholism than the rest of the world, where the relationship with alcohol isn’t as obsessively restrictive.
So it's not going to work, because they would not need it if people could gone without phone, and people who can't won't stio just because a bunch of other people will tell them it's better.
Social pressure doesn't work with addicts. Espacially if said addict are to a tool that also makes some tasks 10 times faster.
They could ... read a book?
i wonder if there used to be laws against reading books in public
The moment stuck with me. Of course he was right. But he was fighting a cultural tsunami.
And there's so much of Turkey I wouldn't remember without the photos. Good times good times.
I went to three days of a convention in 2016[0]. By the end, the whole thing was so vivid in my mind I could walk around it in my head and remember every little detail. Eight years later, blurs of shapes and colors and sounds are all I have without the photos I took and the words I wrote. Taking notes helps, but a photo captures all those details I don't think to note in the moment.
[0] https://kyefox.com/2022/07/11/my-first-furry-convention/