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Comment by mkr-hn | Hacker News Reader

On the one hand, I completely agree. On the other, we need people like artursapek to make us think about how far we're willing to go into the digital abyss. And we need people like you to offer the counterarguments to the counterarguments. And maybe people like me to remind everyone that our natural social checks and balances are still working perfectly.

For what it's worth, I never see people with their smartphones out for more than a moment. Maybe it'd be different if I were closer to Athens, Atlanta, or even one of the smaller big cities at the east end of Metro Atlanta.

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I don't know you or your background but I'm going to guess you may not be part of that younger generation (late high school, early college years) who was literally born with a computer in their crib and came into their teen years with with a smart phone in their hand.

I'm often reminded of the divide between them and my generation (born in the mid 70's) when I visit friends who have children that age, or even in public places where they hang out in groups. I virtually see each of them holding a smart phone, maybe not always using it but definitely at the ready no matter what the circumstances (middle of a conversation with a human being, shopping for clothes, driving, etc...). Even if they don't look at it for more a moment as you say, it's always present and slowly but surely encroaching on real human interactions.

That generation will be entering the world of grown-ups very soon and your argument will rapidly be invalidated.

It's hard to predict the course of an upcoming generation based on what they experience now. I've never been without a TV in my own room. When I was growing up, I read frantic posts on Usenet about how people my age were glued to the TV and video games, and how that would ruin social interaction.

It wasn't long before people said the same about the web, instant messaging, early social networks, and everything since.

I seem to get along with people without issue despite growing up immersed in these society killers. Why are smartphones a special case?

Its because the new thing is always a special case. Its natural for some people to think that the old way of doing things is the only good way and that anything new that could displace or alter that way of doing things would just ruin it.

I am hovering between the generations in this regard, and I definitely see (or think I see) a strong gradient. I know vanishingly few adults over thirty who spend life buried in tech- even the tech-savvy ones. Then as you work backwards in age down to high school, you see progressively more and more absorption into technology.

Most everyone I know along the "scale" is sharp enough to use whatever the latest tech is. The different is not savvy, it is usage patterns.

/anecdote

When a mobile network terminal (which is really what these phones are) is seen as a logical extension of you brain (google is always at hand, stored notes, etc) and perceptions (a text message can be likened to a friendly wave from across the room, you get to choose your own interaction level from that point), it's natural to have it always at hand, and ready.

If others perceive you to be inattentive because you check your phone, that's old-world thinking. I'm sure many people have attention problems, and may not apply the correct amount of attention to local stimuli, but then again, maybe they just don't find what happening immediately around them all that interesting at the time.

A phone can enhance a conversation. One participant can take a few moments to research something that was just discussed while listening in on further conversation, and then re-enter the active portion of the conversation with new, and useful, information.

Is short, we are in a transition period. There's learning to be done about the best way to deal with all the new capabilities we have (because that's what they are, enhancements to us), as well as social norms that need to adapt.

My personal experience has been similar. When a group conversation peters out, its easy for a lot of people to pull out their phones instead of continuing the conversation - and when one person pulls it out, everyone else does as well.

It definitely seems more noticeable among the ~17-18 age group than ~20-25 (20 here but I had an odd childhood and behavior patterns like this were explicitly discouraged.)

Good news is that not everyone does this.

As a tech guy in his forties, I find these arguments hilarious - especially when my own generation had the same things said about television ("They won't know personal contact or relationships!") , video games...every new thing is the end of human society as we know it.

Until it isn't.

I mean, honestly, stop being so myopic. There were people who decried the STEAM ENGINE. There were people - sometimes, legitimate journalists and "thought leaders" who would write articles and essays about ELECTRICITY. And RADIO. And the PHONE. And the TELEGRAPH.

And when the telegraph began to become obsolete, there was wailing and and gnashing of teeth. When the 'horseless carraige' was introduced, there were op-ed pieces written stating it was a sad state that America might not use horsepower in the future.

Yeah, society is going to change. It's always changing. People adapt. Some things we lose, some things we gain. It's only "the way it should be" to you because it's the world you know.

What about the introduction of the printing press? After that moment, the amount of information available to people grew by a million times. There are abuses with reading books, too - remember the stereotypical novel reader that has no social life, preferring his story characters instead? Yet, even with such exaggerations, books do not destroy our life. Instead, books have been the main means of storing and transmitting culture in the last 500 years.

We'll adapt, we'll find social norms. There will be do's and don'ts. We will have etiquette. But now we are still in the infancy of this age.

It was year 2000 when I got a digital camera, and I've shot 50K+ pictures a year since. This is a sea change in remembering your life. The smart phones came 5 years later. Now I can't imagine life without it. But we'll assimilate this phase too.

None of the things you've mentioned interrupts the social interactions when you're actually out with someone. I do agree that the only constant is change, but also, the always-on internet is truly something new for us.

Television interrupts the social interactions, if there is one nearby. As do newspapers, books, people walking by...

There are some interesting points both here and upthread, but I'll respond here as this provides a perfect jumping off point:

silverbax88 seems to state that the introduction of television was similarly heralded by people bemoaning that it would cut back on social interaction. He then dismisses this, as if the idea were absurd. I also see a lot of Singularatarian types with nearly religious fervor with comments like: "If others perceive you to be inattentive because you check your phone, that's old-world thinking." Now, upthread, joe_the_user makes a rather important point that the changes which we're discussing here impact younger generations the most, it's not the old farts who are used to the next big thing, but the children who have no natural resistance to the addictive stimuli. Back to the television. While Silverbax88, one of the self-admitted "old farts" was not drawn in by the evil TV monster, it strikes me as a child of the nineties as completely disingenuous to assert that a sea-change did not take place in terms of consumption of television, and specifically on how the increased consumption of TV time correlated with a dramatic drop-off in social interaction.

I refer specifically to my generational cohort, and how I observed our outside time diminishing as we got older. I remember many afternoons in 1998-99 playing Duke Nukem 3d for hours and being prompted by parents with phrases like, "Don't you want to go out and play with your friends?" something I thought especially silly the few times I would go out and no one would be outside as they were all... playing video games and watching TV.

This is hacker news, not anecdote TV, so let's see if I can dig up some actual statistics:

According to Vandewater, Bickham, and Lee [1] :

Results indicated that time spent watching television both with and without parents or siblings was negatively related to time spent with parents or siblings, respectively, in other activities. Television viewing also was negatively related to time spent doing homework for 7- to 12-year-olds and negatively related to creative play, especially among very young children (younger than 5 years). There was no relationship between time spent watching television and time spent reading (or being read to) or to time spent in active play.

So we're left in an interesting situation. On one hand we have a lot of people who are concerned over the explosion of potentially isolating technologies, and on the other we have people who seem to blindly assert that everything will be dandy, because, you know it always has been before. Who do we consider conservative here?

To bring this to sort of a close: I feel the same sort of fundamental discomfort as does artursapek with the concept of replacing socialization, something which I've only recently began to really embrace as a nerd, with an electronically mediated digital analogue. While researching my TV statistic, I saw a lot more papers about the PC-accessed Internet, which I think to be a better metaphor for Google Glass than TV ever was. A lot of these papers such as [2] come to conclusions like: Results suggest that frequent users tend to be lonely, to have deviant values, and to some extent to lack the emotional and social skills characteristic of high EI.

[1] http://www.pediatricsdigest.mobi/content/117/2/e181.short [2] http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/109493104322820...

I don't think anyone is making so extreme a claim that technological changes cannot "cut back" on social interaction. The average amount of time spent socializing certainly fluctuates from time to time and place to place. It's certainly not unimaginable that the introduction of TVs, phones, wearable devices, etc might result in less time being spent socially.

What silverbax88 and others are saying, however, is that there is a limit to this. We are not on a trajectory to a world in which social interaction ceases to exist. In fact, we're not even close.

Consequently, most of these gloom and doom complaints seem overly extreme. If we accept as premises that (a) the world is only changing by a small amount, and (b) it has changed by comparable amounts innumerable times in the past, then our conclusion can only be making a big fuss about this change in particular is extreme.

Which is more likely: That Google Glass is finally the thing that will push social interaction off the edge, or that the people of today (like the people of last decade, and the one before that, and the one before that...) are nostalgic and resistant to change?

With respect to our generation, you said, "...I observed our outside time diminishing as we got older..." Okay, so what? Is this change somehow a bad thing, or is it simply change? Is decrying this change a necessary and useful thing to do, or is it simply nostalgia-fueled alarmism? Of course the people of today will behave differently than the people of yesterday. Why is this surprising? Why is this bad? Why should we care?

"Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question."

~ Samuel Butler, 1863

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_among_the_Machines

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