More Connected, Yet More Alone | Hacker News Reader

More Connected, Yet More Alone

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

110 pointsdanso83 comments

I don't think we're going to see a cultural shift away from smartphones anytime soon because we use them to fulfill almost all of the core human drives, within a matter of seconds and with little to no effort. We use our phones to acquire status, respect, praise, attention, to connect, message, brag, to read, read, read about everything happening around us.

What's easier: keeping afloat a conversation with a few acquaintances or tweeting a witty joke and reading up on the 20 @replies you receive? What about taking the time to appreciate a meal, how it's plated, its flavor combinations, or bragging about how cultured you are by posting a picture of it to Instagram then waiting for those sweet likes to roll in?

Smartphones and the social apps they run are brain hacks. We're wired to seek out instant gratification. They literally put us in our own mobile Skinner box.

Anyone else glad they don't suffer from an inability to have dinner or appreciate food just because they have a smartphone?

I guess it's unsurprising that smartphones get in the way of living life, but it's not that hard to use them in moderation, and I'm really not so sure about a cultural shift away from them. Maybe a cultural shift towards more responsible usage -- and I see that cultural shift occurring already.

I totally agree. I think it's easier to put a dystopian view on smartphones, but there are utopian perspectives as well. We can use technology to stay in touch with the important people in our lives, and share beautiful moments. I'd like to see the same video done where the boyfriend is facetiming with his wife while at work, or they're both older and reliving awesome memories for the past.

Robert Wong is the CCO at Google, and I think he has some excellent more utopian views on how we can use technology to enhance human relationships. Granted, it may be his job to do so in order to help Google sell their products, but I don't think that should discredit his views.

Here are some video interviews with him: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V7f0ufstJs (4:51) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vIPk6vIwv0 (1:09:03)

'and I see that cultural shift occurring already'

Maybe someone should write an app that says: 'the cultural shift is coming', to make it happen quicker.

I also think a huge part is that we're not comfortable with being idle and bored.

Sometimes it's difficult being comfortable with that when you're aware of your limited time on this planet. Of course, using up that time staring at a screen is hardly a quality alternative!

I've noticed this as a "dumb-phone" user who often forgets it at home. Walking around with your head up, you feel like you're amongst a bunch of half-asleep people. You can look right at somebody and they won't notice you. Lots of bumping into each other, not making way for somebody who needs to get by, things like that. Many people who are engrossed in their phones don't react to loud noises or other things happening that are out of the ordinary. It can be unsettling.

I used to have a dumbphone from '06 until it crapped out and I went to an Android one. Everyone always made fun of me for having the older phone but then again everyone was always trying to be quick-draw on fact-checking some random bit of pop culture that came up in conversation, checking in, updating statuses, or taking pictures of events instead of being a part of them.

In terms of the phone zombies, it really bothers me when I see someone walking across a street engrossed in their phone. I always imagine them getting nailed by a car or cyclist b/c they aren't paying attention (and I'm sure, tragically, this has been happening). Same things with runners and their iPods prior to iPhones. Your ears and eyes are there for a reason.

Sidenote: Maybe the most interesting part of the NYT article is the first line "Last weekend, I was watching television with a few friends, browsing the week’s most popular YouTube videos, when a piece in the comedy section called “I Forgot My Phone” caught my eye." This goes beyond the meat of the piece but it's so interesting to see that that's a current browsing behavior that's possibly common enough to mentioned.

In a way, I think it's a modern way of filtering things that we don't care about day to day. Do we really wanna sit on a subway in silence twiddling our thumbs, and daydream? Do we really wanna wait on line for a few mins, staring at other annoying strangers ahead of us?

Using our smartphones when we're in the presence of friends/family is one thing. But using it during times of inactivity, to me is harmless.

> " But using it during times of inactivity, to me is harmless."

Until the definition of "inactivity" starts to creep, wider and wider. I've noticed that with myself and people I know, that's for sure.

Stealing a bit from the video itself - you're bowling and everyone disappears into smartphone-land while waiting their turn. I've seen this actually happen IRL, so it's far from a farfetched hypothetical. In the old days you used to use this time to, god forbid, talk to someone and make a friend.

Or you're at a party where you don't know enough people. Pre-smartphone you'd get sick of being a wallflower and some point, go "fuck it", and introduce yourself to somebody. Now you can just slink into smartphone-land. I've done it, I'm sure others here have too.

"Inactivity" is a weird concept. Short of being in a sensory deprivation chamber, there are very few moments in life where you're actually involuntarily inactive.

A few months ago I tossed my earbuds in the trash. I no longer listen to music (or podcasts, or whatever) on the move. I'm more present, less tuned out, and I've learned some things and had some spontaneous interactions that are worth more to me than listening to music I've already heard many times before. I like it. People complained about the reduction in engagement when the iPod rolled around and everyone suddenly had earplugs on full-time. At the time a lot of people thought society would grow out of it and the fad of being disconnected full-time would go away.

It did. We discovered smartphones instead.

The last time I went to a bar I went up to order a drink and all 6 20-somethings at the bar were on their iphones (that's 6 individuals, at a place of social gathering).

The destruction of presence is more than just lack of eye contact. Not so long ago certain people could enter a room and demand attention - they were social beings whose mere presence affected brain waves and nervous systems. Their presence was sharp.

I don't see that anymore. People are dulling. They recede to the safety of a screen because it offers a way of saying - 'I don't need you, cooler things and people are in my phone'. We're in a perpetual standoff.

The problem with a free market is that consumers do not always know what is best for them. Local maxima rule the day. We need narrative, insight, and leadership to provide the activation energy to get ourselves out of the social wasteland we have created.

Ha.. I hear ya. I've seen guys in a party with at least 3 attractive single, bored females sitting near them, and they all just sink their heads into a smartphone instead. As if to signify they have much cooler things to attend to.

But using it during times of inactivity, to me is harmless.

Maybe. Another theory might be that our brains need more downtime than we are giving them. Or maybe we are filling our brains with so much useless knowledge that it is stopping us from remembering important things. Or maybe that time of staring out the window would've made me think of the next great thing.

That's what I worry about anyway when I whip my smartphone out all day.

I remember feeling that before smartphones; I think it might just be the nature of people, especially outside of a university context. I also notice a lot when running and trying to get by people using up all of the lanes on the sidwalk (and the people aren't using smartphones then.)

I spent a single detached year at college, so I can't speak to that difference, but I did notice a big change when the iPhone surpassed "early adopter" stage. There were always people perpetually focused on their Blackberries/two-ways, but they tended to be a select few: Hardcore careerist types and the young-&-gossipy crowd. This seems to have expanded to include everybody from soccer moms to computer geeks, to ten year-olds!

Well aren't you a unique snowflake.

(http://xkcd.com/610/)

Not really. Since I'm a person, it is in my nature as well. I try to be extra conscious about it, but I'm not perfect. It always bugs me when I'm walking on the sidewalk and some runner rightfully asks me to move into my lane to allow him or her to pass. Similarly, I'm a tango dancer and every once in awhile I'll end up hitting another couple.

Eckhart Tolle would say the conscious are the ones that don't think, they just are present :P.

I don't think anybody is having that comic's thought bubble while using their smartphone, because it demands focus.

"You can see a lot by just looking" -- Yogi Berra

I draw a lot, so I spend a lot of time just looking around -- and I've noticed the same thing: many people are too wrapped up in their smart phones to notice what's going on around them.

I've been thinking a lot about it lately, and this is one of those "things I think are true but can not prove" kind-of-things, but I think the larger lesson is that most people, most of the time, are largely driven by their thoughts. Not what's going on around them, or what their body is telling them, but what they think about.

Maybe this is a regional thing. I almost never see people with their phones out.

Another dumb-phone user checking in- it could be a big city or suburbs thing. I've seen the phenomenon like crazy in the Bay, but in my town it's really actually not too bad.

> you feel like you're amongst a bunch of half-asleep people

A few months ago I was sitting in a crowded urban park. I was people watching for a bit; no book, no phone. I saw some sort of surveillance/tracking operation unfold in plain site. A fit, ex-military looking guy in his mid 40s dressed to look like a tourist in a t-shirt and shorts took a seat. He would steal glances off to the side at a certain individual. He talked into his blue tooth ear piece, casually glanced around, and then he took off his blue baseball cap, put it in his backpack, and quickly replaced it with a red baseball cap. He later shot me a little grin, having seen me noticing him, even though I was discrete and over 30 meters away.

Over 100 people could have seen this unfold but I am sure none did because literally most of them were looking at phones.

There are all sorts of interesting vignettes going on in crowded places that almost nobody sees. I have other memorable observations.

My advice to security firms and the FBI tailing targets: fit people over 35 stand out in America at this point.

I was mugged this past year and for months had nothing but my "Wire"-like-burner-flip-phone. It couldn't do squat except take calls and simple texts...if a friend tried to send a photo text to me, my phone would basically reject it. Quite honestly, I found the lack of functionality to be a pretty pleasant period in my life. The main inconvenience was not being able to look up things, like directions, after I left home or work...but that just forced me to be better prepared...(It's kind of astonishing that in a decade, we'll have adults who grew up never having to write things down or pre-plan where to rendezvous). In a worst case scenario, I used Google's SMS search (which closed down recently, alas: http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/12/google-kills-sms-search/).

Now that I finally got a new Android phone, I have to force myself to check it, which is a nice change of mindset. Previously, I had been pretty glued to my phone, to the point where I had to hide my Facebook password from myself (i.e. pasting it into a desktop text file, for login via desktop only) so that I wouldn't reflexively check for new updates.

Why is this so bad? This is a natural evolution of the human race as we integrate technology into our lives. The next 10-15 years will probably be looked back on as a time when we were adjusting to this "virtual" world. It will seem barbaric that we were interacting with this world through our tiny little mobile devices. In the future, our online experiences will not be distinguishable from the "real" world. No use fighting it, it's just a natural evolution.

So flawed, pretending to know what direction of evolution looks like.

damn right, I'm god. And you only exist in my imagination anyway.

There's a tremendous Louis CK bit about this trend:

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zd2sRC3K9Hs&desktop_uri=%2Fwatc...

I wonder what results you'd get if you separately polled, say, under-25s and over-25s on whether the increasing use of smartphones in public is a bad thing.

I also wonder if complaints about "people have their heads in books all the time, they don't talk to each other!" were a common thing when novels began to be broadly popular in the 18th century.

The cause of concern is what appears to be lack of moderation combined with disregard for others. Using smartphones in public? Fine. Using smartphones in public such that you bump into other people/things and disrupt others? Not cool. You can replace 'using smartphones' with 'reading' and it works the same way.

The bowling example reminded me of how all the problems about bowling as a group activity. It's rather easy to imagine why these people are on their phones instead of chatting together or cheering for the other players.

1) You are often playing against the other players. When your friend gets a strike, it generally means that these points are scored against you. That makes it a little hard to be enthusiastic about your friend getting a lucky strike. Two-player coop in games is great because you get to win together.

2) The ball is pulled from your hands the moment you start getting into the motion. Then it's back to more downtime. Bowling with friends is almost 80% downtime, but it's just short enough that you might consider just sitting it through and not necessarily engaging in conversation with someone that you don't really know.

3) When you do have a good conversation going, the last thing you want to do is to have to leave it there to go throw the ball at the pins for a minute and have a hard time resuming the conversation afterwards.

I've only played bowling once or twice, and while I agree it's not the most entertaining sport ever I thought one of its most compelling use-cases was to bring people together.

Yes, you might be "less enthusiastic" when your friend gets a lucky strike, but that's the whole point, you don't go there as a professional player keen to win no matter what, what you did describe would be the perfect moment to make fun of said friend, a third friend might reply that "you're jealous cause he's better than you" etc etc, I mean things that people usually talk with friends and that do make life less stressful.

I agree that playing to win isn't the right approach to have fun at bowling with new friends. I still find that's it's hard to care about the game (to enjoy your own good moves), and then at the same time not care about who's winning.

I guess what I'm saying is that it seems like we're playing bowling because of tradition. Someone could come up with a better-designed game, maybe involving pins and balls, played in a bowling alley. People would still enjoy feeling like they're going out and having fun, but they'd be playing a more compelling version of bowling.

"This isn’t about the problems of digital connection, it’s about propping oneself up as more human and alive. By identifying with and sharing the video, we can put ourselves in the protagonist’s shoes. 'I too recognize this! I am human and deep and carpe diem.' But let’s consider the implication of showing others as robots who don’t live in the moment: you are basically saying they are less human in order to assert how above the unthinking-cellphone-zombie masses you are. Human connection, togetherness, and in-the-moment experience isn’t going away, indeed, we cherish it more than ever. Rad. But, then, more than that, we’ve become obsessed with it, treating the real as a fetish object, all in the name of appealing to the deeply conservative impulse to rank who is more or less human."

http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2013/08/26/the-proble...

I used to think Nathan Jurgenson was just a clever guy who found a kind of cultural-intellectual niche to fill, but "IRL fetishization" is a really great thing to be aware of.

Also, this, from the original article, the Stanford professor says:

"People make dinner reservations on OpenTable; check in on Foursquare when they arrive at the restaurant; take a picture of their food to share on Instagram; post on Twitter a joke they hear during the meal; review the restaurant on Yelp; then, finally, coordinate a ride home using Uber."

Ha-ha, really? Who does this? Jeez!

Oh wow, thank you for posting this. Spot on, great stuff.

But how bad is it really? I don't know the answer, whether empirical or subjective, but I have a (subjective) suspicion that there's a fair bit of confirmation bias going on. What percentage of diners share pictures of their food on instagram? How many people take selfies? I don't suppose anyone has actually collected that data, we can't quite say how much is too much, and since some of these behaviors may well be annoying, people quickly enter confirmation bias mode. Besides, the problem is not phones, it's people. Phones just give us an avenue to run away from ourselves. I'm not on my phone at the birthday party because I have a smartphone, I'm on the smartphone because it helps avoid the awkward silence and contrived conversations that would otherwise prevail. If you were sharing a bed with someone you find hot, say some star or someone you've been crazy about but couldn't get around to telling them how you feel, I doubt you'd be staring at your phone with that person in bed next to you. So the problem is not the phones, it's the quality of our relationships and interaction, and those won't change or improve just because we've put the phone away. Were the relationships and interactions robust enough, a smartphone wouldn't stand a chance of getting in the way.

Smartphones - making even non-geeks aware of how boring people you meet really are.

I think this is an fascinating phase in our adjustment to truly ubiquitous mobile computing. A big part of the problem, in my opinion is how "social networking" (which happens to be massive part of being "connected") is heavily based on reputation, at least for we the users.

We want to get validation from others in form of likes, upvotes, positive comments, and shares, specifically because Social networks encourage this. They have designed their interaction models around this system, because its like crack ... literally, the dopamine shots you get from these activities keep you coming back for more. We're so focused on chasing the next social network "high" that we forget to actually pause and just "be".

I'm not sure how it will pan out, I imagine that eventually just like with everything else, there will be a backlash against this kind of behavior so that social networking in the future might actually focus on fostering deeper interactions with others instead of trying to double "page views" and "engagement"

I for one do not do much social networking, texting or whatever when I'm interacting with an experience or a person, thats just how I am. I do however try to get some memories of those experiences down because human memory is so terrible. This is why I'm not sure how I feel about recording concerts. On one hand those are once-in-a-lifetime experiences that I've found I can't relive without getting them down in video or photo (I rewatch my favorite concerts all the time and am immensely thankful I took the time to record them). On the other hand, I realize that people who want to get their social network high, will abuse the privilege to get a few more likes on instagram or facebook.

Its a toughie, and I realize I'm an outlier because I have begun to see the zombie-like behavior in younger people (I'm on the high end of the Millenial generation) ... I dated a girl who was constantly on her phone, and it was really really weird because that had never happened to me before. I also see young kids these days standing around at a starbucks huddled around their iphone screens, giggling over snapchat and instagram. Again, that was very wierd to see.

So I'm not sure what the resolution is, but I do realize that it really is a developing problem, where I might have completely dismissed it as hogwash just a year or two ago.

Sorry for the meandering comment :\

In essence, wearable computing (remember when that was a fantasy?) has been displacing television as the societal drug of choice. In both cases, the technology's effect on brain chemistry is literally overwhelming for many (or most).

Obviously the genie's not going back in the bottle; we'll have to learn to live with the costs of our marvellous creations, and create personal and social habits to mititage their side effects. So it goes.

Your contrast with television is astute.

People who complain that digital technology leaves us isolated have it completely backward. Digital technology is slowly giving us back some of the interconnectedness that we lost to television, cars, and suburbs.

> People who complain that digital technology leaves us isolated have it completely backward. Digital technology is slowly giving us back some of the interconnectedness that we lost

I am not entirely certain whether the two are mutually exclusive.

Sure, we're regaining the ability to interact with other people on a nearly universal (or maybe just "global") scale. But at the same time we're not really giving them the attention they might deserve. Or need.

The same advances that allow us to constantly communicate with one another? They have also made it easier to ignore people without suffering from social discomfort. It's easier to just get distracted by yet-another-shiny-thing if we lose our interest, even momentarily, for any reason at all.

It wasen't meandering. I think I'd rather be alone than with someone who's always on the phone, or screen.

I hang out a lot more with people now when you have constant access to a computer. If a situation is boring you can always pick up your phone until something interesting happens.

I realise this is not always an option, but remember you can also make something interesting happen :)

Like that one time when a guy sitting upstairs in a bar was bored and threw a mug downstairs and hit some poor girl on the head. Lot's of things happened.

I'd rather have him checked his smartphone.

To quote Harvey Danger: If you're bored then you're boring.

The agony and the irony are killing me...

To me Facebook is the biggest problem. I'm a little embarrassed to say that I check the app on my phone many times per day - almost compulsively - to see if I have any notifications. I get a small burst of enjoyment catching up with friends, but, all in all, it's mostly an unpleasant distraction.

Taking breaks from that distraction - as the subject of this video did, by leaving her phone at hone - feels very refreshing. To help myself take structured breaks from Facebook, I actually made a simple Web app called Facebook Detox: http://www.codyromano.com/fbdetox/

I used to feel exactly like you about Facebook. I would check it constantly, so much so that when I cmd+t'ing to open a new tab I would often instinctively type "f+return" to have Chrome open the site.

45 days or so ago, I deactivated my Facebook account. If you're not familiar, this allows you to "pause" your account -- nobody can access your profile or interact with you on the site while deactivated, but once you log back in, your account instantly resumes where you left off.

It took a week or so to overcome the Pavlovian urges I had developed from years of habitual Facebook additction (albeit often for intellectually stimulating and/or social causes).

The bottom line was this: I've been loving every minute of it since. I feel more free and less tethered to my phone and computer. I have more down time and I find myself less stressed out and, frankly, feeling better about myself.

Oh, and one more thing, lest you assume (perhaps reasonably) I didn't have much doing on my Facebook account anyway: I'm a high school senior. Facebook is huge at my school, and a lot of fun grade/school-wide gossip/interaction/planning happens there. And you know what? I'm president of the student body and if it's important, people can tell me in person.

For me and my fiancee it was Reddit. We'd spend hours each day on there just meandering away the day, and not even realizing it. I blocked Reddit on our network at home about 6 months ago and we haven't logged in since. We're both much happier people now. I think Facebook and texting need to come next.

We've talked about this several times and came to a pretty surprising conclusion: in today's world television is actually pretty "healthy". It involves truly turning off the brain and actually relaxing and escaping, and requires an attention span of 22 minutes or more. With Reddit, Facebook, texts, etc, you constantly shift attention every 20 seconds, and never really allow your brain to turn off and disengage. You're neither relaxing nor being productive; at least tv has a level of relaxation to it. Kind of frightening.

I'm in the same boat as you. I deactivated my FB account roughly 2 months ago and deleted the app from my phone.

I feel a lot happier. I'm not constantly and pointlessly checking FB. I still hang out with friends, I communicate with them via SMS, phone, email, IRC, Twitter, and so on. If someone really wants to contact you, they'll find a way.

I've started to use Twitter more, it satisfies my needs. To improve the experience, I put most organization accounts in a private list and unfollowed them. I also unfollowed a bunch of people I didn't personally know. I don't want my Twitter feed to be a constant stream of advertisements and junk posts (like how my FB feed was). I'm slowly trying to reduce the number of people I'm following to 150 or less.

I did log into FB once since I deactivated my account, and that was to remove a lot of information such as likes, groups, "friends", etc.

Facebook is least important for people in your situation (still in school). You can't help but physically interact with most of your social circle, as you sit in the same building as all/most of them on a daily basis.

For those of us who are older and out of school - I don't live in a city with any of my family, many of my best friends are (literally) all over the world. In the past, we'd just (most likely) drift apart / lose contact. Now? We can stay completely up to date on each other's lives, talk/communicate daily, as if we were at the bar carousing late into the night, as we did 10-15 years ago. These people are important to me, but there is literally no way to talk to them in person, without spending $$$$ on plane tickets/etc.

Actually, your use case was the #1 reason for my problematic proclivity toward Facebook. I too have friends from all around the world (people I worked with on open source projects, people from programs and schools I used to attend, etc). It was because of these connections that I felt attached to Facebook -- I couldn't exactly bump into someone living, as you suggested, vastly out of my proximal social circle.

How have I delt with this? Well, I'm not completely sure. For some who I am particularly close to, I text or IM them on occasion. To keep in contact with a few people, I actually created a new Facebook account with only those people as friends, and then only used the account as an IM client via Facebook messenger.

Honestly, the latter idea makes me wonder: maybe the reason my Facebook experience was so problematic and low S/N was because I (due to typical social pressue) was friends with way more friends than I genuinely want to stay in active touch with?

I don't know. You make a good point, and clearly I don't have a good answer; I've addressed those needs on a case-by-case basis.

If I can dream for a bit, I think my ideal technology solution to this would either be teleportation or immersive 3D video conferencing. It'd be pretty damn cool to "grab lunch" and catch up with someone on the ohter side of the world.

Funny; mine are r/starcraft and hackernews... I honestly need to regulate my time on them both

Haha. Same here when it comes to hackernews. Maybe I'll create an HN Detox one of these days!

Atleast your brain is absorbing knowledge through HN vs facebook, instagram, snapchat, etc. where it adds little to no value

The video is a little bit over the top but really makes the point that what those people need is unobtrusive always-on video capture.

I noticed a family in an airport a while ago --- the parents and the two children were all engrossed into their own mobile phones. I felt very sad and have since then trying to reduce my mobile phone consumption.

I do take a lot of photos with a DSLR in the name of photography, but sometimes I wonder whether I am missing the bigger picture (though I do think I am a better observer and appreciate nature/beauty/patterns etc. better since starting photography).

You would have seen my family doing this a couple of weeks ago (well, except we have one kid). We were stuck there for 12hrs, and we were playing a game together, on our respective phones.

I get the sentiment, though, and I feel the same way about photography, which is why I don't often take pictures when we're doing family activities--I don't want to stop having fun with my family long enough to take them.

Exactly, I've been lately trying to connect with new people. But almost everyone everywhere seems to be really preoccupied. Usually with whatsapp, kikchat or facebook. So even if they're there, they are not approachable or mentally present at all.

Disclaimer. I'm just the person who's doing exactly the same (except with different apps) when ever I have even shortest moment of waiting time. Usually reading HN or other tech stuff or books.

I'm read this while out with wife on dinner. Rethinking my habits right now.

This is my partner in a nutshell. Some of the scenes are a little over the top (bowling example) but it makes the point.

I had the same impression with digital cameras, seeing visitors to my local botanic gardens wonder through and look at everything through a small lcd screen on the back of their camera, they weren't really seeing what's there or experiencing it, they were just trying to frame a picture so they couldn't see the subtleness and feel the peace that's at this place.

You see it all the time at concerts too. I'm guilty of it myself.

Because it's new in the scheme of things, we will continue to fumble around, some abstaining completely, others totally absorbed and addicted until we find a way to balance and new social norms are set, when it's not the 'done thing' to just stare at your phone endlessly while with friends etc

Funny thing about memory. You walk around you look at things. You experience them. And two or three months later it's nearly all gone. Two years later you remember only things you took picture of plus maybe one or two things that was strong experience (like spilling coffee over some guy).

People record to actually have any persistent memories of the event. Worn cameras will make this easy on you. People don't hold cameras to hold cameras. They do it just because so far it's the only way.

From my experience there is a correlation between how likely you are to use your phone during a meal with others, and how boring of a person you are. Have dinner with intelligent people that know how to hold a conversation and you'll forget that you even have a phone.

What if you're using your phone to carry on a conversation with someone who isn't present?

I think that would be rude, the same way as talking on the phone while others are present at the table is rude.

Generally, you'd leave the table to do that.

The first episode of the 2nd season of Black Mirror explores some of these ideas. I highly recommend it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Black_Mirror_episodes#S...

Seconded - that series illustrates a number of dystopian fantasies based on rapid technological change.

Forgive the tangent but I felt the "The Entire History of You" episode is particularly poignant at illustrating one of the most damage side-effects of always being connected and that is the losing the ability to forget. The ability to recall (via images, videos) at a whim can lead to being obsessed with matters that occurred in the past while living in the present. It's a problem unique to our generation since previous generations weren't able to capture, as ably as we can capture now, all the unnecessary specifics of daily life.

Yes that one was great!

Robert Downey Jr actually bought the rights to this episode to make a full movie out of it, can't wait to see how it'll turn out :-)

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/feb/12/robert-downey-jr...

I found I was really, as another poster said, "disappearing into smartphone-land" at every available opportunity. My procrastination levels went through the roof, as I previously had only a dumb-phone. I have an iPhone (4) now but have found out to keep the distraction stuff to a minimum. Apple make it quite easy, can't speak to Android.

Just go to settings->restrictions and turn off app installation, safari, itunes, and whatever. When it asks for a passcode, ask a good friend / family member / SO to type one in and remember it if you need it back at any point.

So now I just have "core functions" of a phone that are useful in a non-distractful way, and a few other relevant apps.

Core functions: - Camera - iPod - Camera - Notepad - Calendar - Reminders - Clock, alarm clock - Calculator - Maps (well, apple maps) - Weather - Email - Phone and text

These functions are actually really good, as they bring together what were formerly separate devices into your pocket, but they don't really change your behavior. You're still a person, not a zombie.

Then, I have some additional functional apps:

- Sleep cycle (upgraded alarm clock) - Torch - Google translate (for travelling) - TripAdvisor, AirBnB (ditto) - Duolingo (for learning French) - Online banking app - Facebook Messenger (I see it as an extension of SMS) - WhatsApp (as above) - Soundcloud (basically an online iPod) - Skype (phone) - SkyScanner and - Couple of online shopping apps (eBay, Amazon, RedLaser)

So all of those extra apps are things which actively improve my life and/or are "lifehacks" bridging me to the real world - instead of going to the bank, I go to my online app, and so on. Saves time.

That's pretty much it. The standard apps replace a whole bunch of devices and books. The extra apps come in really handy. But with Safari disabled, and having not installed all the trendy "social" media apps, I'm still connected with the real world. I don't feel I'm missing much.

The only bum note is that certain useful apps - like Google Maps - have inbuilt web browsers which are easily accessible. So I can't use them. It would be nice if developers respected the "Restrictions->Safari" setting instead of ignoring it.

I purposely don't carry a mobile phone around with me and am noticing the problem getting worse. We don't need all these apps that suck our time and attention for little reward... most of us don't even need a standard phone. It's like being surrounded by socially acceptable junkies, and it's only socially acceptable because nearly everyone's a junkie.

Sometimes, I wish the cell phone was never invented.

The sooner we refine unobtrusive mobile computing (Google Glass?) to the point of the smart phone, the sooner this can go away :)

Illustrating why Google Glass is such a bad idea. In recording their lives people are forgetting to live it. Viva life!

It's a step toward the right solution to this problem. At least people won't be bumping into each other all the time... I'm pretty sure this phenomenon will get worse before it gets better, but eventually our online presences will be fully (and invisibly) woven into our real lives and we will adopt some new form of socialization that takes constant connection into account.

Your Google Glass will alert you when you're about to bump into someone.

The whole point of Google Glass is that it lets you be "present" and keeps you looking up, instead of making you look down at your own hands every time you want to use it.

The past decade has witnessed the narcissism level dialed up to 11.

Indeed. Some say the internet will free us; some say it will cage us with ourselves. Mere perspectives - either way, we're turning into little blinking light bulbs, every one of us.

Interesting topic, yet a very boring article from nytimes...

good thing i dont have a phone ;)

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