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Comment by primitivesuave | Hacker News Reader

When I was in Tanzania, there were many places where people hadn't even heard of Facebook. Human interaction is entirely face-to-face, and the only way to Snapchat someone would be to literally stick your face through their window. Same goes for pokes.

Why they want to propagate the loneliness and technology-dependence of the modern age onto the truly free societies of the world is beyond me.

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Comments like this, full with a longing for a simpler time, amuse me.

No one's making anyone communicate in a "lonely" way. If you don't like it, you are free to demand your preferred means of communication. What you'll find, however, is that people generally like it. "I tweet in my dreams," someone I know one said.

The truth of the matter is, constant communication is valuable. Not in the market cap type of way but as a type of human interaction. It matters to people. It helps them organize parties, revolutions, their lives around a stream of current data.

Is it distracting and addicting? Yes, it can be. But that's not a problem with the technology. If you lack the self-discipline to live in this deluge of information, guess what - help is one Google search away.

I guess my overall point is that the bandwidth of human communication has only ever been growing. It's not gonna stop now, so there's no point in longing for a long gone idyllic past.

P.S. I understand the hatred for dopamine triggers, wrapped in HTML. Meditation helps.

P.P.S. I'm making an assumption that people willfully choose a medium as a basis for discourse. That's not the case most of the time. I believe everyone should be made aware of how the medium they're using influences their thoughts and actions. I'm all up for having more media, though.

Your comment is not internally consistent.

"I tweet in my dreams," someone I know one said.

If there is any sense remaining in the world, this was uttered in shame.

You make a very good argument, and I have to agree with you. In the end, it comes down to self-discipline and an internal desire to maintain real human contact.

> I understand the hatred for dopamine triggers, wrapped in HTML. Meditation helps.

You are quite the brilliant wordsmith, I can't wait for the next opportunity to use the phrase "dopamine triggers wrapped in HTML".

Says mister "hey check out my blog with a picture of my face on it!".

>Why they want to propagate the loneliness and technology-dependence of the modern age onto the truly free societies of the world is beyond me.

Because technology, and therefore it should be better.

Social modes of interaction must obey technological and business developments.

Also fatalism: you can't stop progress.

So, in general, the current way to view technology is the polar opposite of the optimist modernist way of 19th, early 20th century, were people believed they'd be in control.

Now it's all about "adapting".

Face to face communication is archaic and barbaric. We must spread the Holy Interwebs of Google and Facebook to these uncivilized people and show them the glory of the App. History of the world.

>Face to face communication is archaic and barbaric.

one can imagine how in say 20 years looking somebody in the face and/or speaking directly to somebody instead of "into communicator" would be a major faux pas

I think the webcomic "Toothpaste for Dinner" perfectly captured this sentiment:

http://imgur.com/qhrduxF.jpg

Are there negatives to an alway-available Internet connection? Sure.

Are they massively outweighed by the incredibly power of being able to communicate and share ideas and ideals with the entire world, and access the sum of human knowledge, for free, at a moments notice? Definitively yes.

Calling a society "truly free" simply because they do not have easy access to one of the triumphs of human ingenuity seems naive at best, and wilfully patronising at worst.

Why a company wants to make more money is beyond you?

"The easy possibility to write letters must - seen theoretically - have brought a terrible disruption of the souls into the world. It is communication with ghosts, and not just with the ghost of the receiver, but with one's own ghost as well, which develops under the hand in the letter one is writing, or even in a series of letters, where on letter substantiates the other and can call on it as witness. How did the idea came up that humans can communicate with each other through letters! One can think of a person that is far away, or touch a person that is close by, everything else is above the power of humans. But writing letters means to bare oneself in front of the ghosts, which they are greedily waiting for. Written kisses don't arrive at their place, but get drunk out by the ghosts on the way. Because of this plentiful food they multiply so outrageously. Humanity is feeling that and fighting against it, it has, to disable the ghostly between humans, and to achieve the natural communication, the peace of souls, invented the train, the car, the airplane, but it's too late, apparently they are inventions made while falling, the opponent is so much calmer and stronger, and invented after mail the telegraph, the telephone, wireless telegraphy. The ghosts won't starve, but we will perish."

-- Franz Kafka, letter to Milena Jesenská (March 1922)

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