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Why I Don’t Have a Smart Phone: Five True Stories
1. I was carpooling with some people on a six-hour trip (to Urbana), but before we could start, we had to get on the highway. Our GPS navigator took us right past the highway on-ramp we all knew, down some other road, then on a crazy four- or five-mile detour through other neighborhoods and odd side streets, finally coming full circle, back to the same on-ramp where we had started, which, this time, we took.
2. For the next six hours, an extroverted older guy (maybe in his sixties) sat next to a younger guy (early twenties) and tried to make polite conversation. Even though they didn’t know each other previously, the older guy was friendly and full of energy, and it was clear that he really valued human interaction. The younger guy sometimes engaged, but his talking and even his listening eventually trailed off, as he lost interest in the conversation and paid more and more attention to reading whatever was on his phone. Perhaps unintentionally, the younger guy’s visible boredom sent the message loud and clear that he wasn’t interested in talking to the older guy. I ended up feeling bad for the older guy, and spending a lot of the trip engaging with him, even though we were sitting in different rows and had to crane some to make it work.
3. A friend of mine, a psychologist, notices a trend: She has always had toys available in her waiting room, for any children who come. At the beginning of her career, it was a pretty reliable rule that children loved toys; now, some decades later, children seem less and less interested in the toys, or anything that requires manual dexterity to manipulate or use; the children may pick up a toy briefly, but they become frustrated or lose interest much more quickly, and revert to the one thing that still can hold their interest: a screen.
Children’s social skills may be declining as they have less time for face-to-face interaction due to their increased use of digital media . . .
UCLA scientists found that sixth-graders who went five days without even glancing at a smartphone, television or other digital screen did substantially better at reading human emotions than sixth-graders from the same school who continued to spend hours each day looking at their electronic devices.
If you’re like me, you can immediately think of at least a half dozen people you know (mostly, though not only, male) who have enough trouble with basic human interaction as it is; the last thing they need is additional headwinds making it worse…
5. I go on a date with a girl. She spends the whole time texting her friends.
This one needs no further elaboration because you’ve already heard it or lived it so many times yourself.
Published in Technology
Exactly. As much as it’s peculiar and annoying to see everyone walking around looking at their phone, imagine if everyone was looking at a book. You’d think my, this is quite a literate society.
That happened to me once. Operator error. One of those instances in which a computer is obediently doing what it was ordered to do, but you don’t realize you told it to do that.
Downloading high-resolution topographic maps? So that’s why their so popular! (Just kidding)
I love newspapers. I really do. I love paper and print, and folding and glancing back to know where I was on a page, and flipping through to see how much more before the end of the paper, the story or the report. It takes a millisecond, but it helps me. And I hate a scrolling screen it’s like living in the present and not knowing history. It’s like never really realizing how much you’ve read in an article and then having to scroll back to look for a previous reference, and having to scroll down again and look for where you’ve left off.
And with different font sizes and self-adjusting formatting, you can never know exactly where to look on page number 47 or C12 for that thing you just were reminded of and wanted to check out again.
I use computers almost exclusively, but I really mostly hate them.
What I would like, and have been waiting for for decades, and what people had been working on in times past, was a foldable durable paper embedded with HD appearing-and-disappearing ink that is electrically activated, a paper that can be a single page newspaper that you can put in your breast pocket.
In those years before wi-fi I thought it might be that you could go up to a magazine or newspaper stall on the street on the way to work and for a quarter touch the corner-contact of the paper to a dispenser, which downloaded the whole newspaper to yours. And with thumb pressure to change pages and you could read front and back, over and over again until you’ve read the whole paper.
That was before the cell phone which is notoriously fragile and water-susceptible, and heavy and “butt-dials” and has so many touch buttons that I can’t talk to my sister without the constant beep of her ear touching the touch screen. AND tracks your every move, word, thought and smell. “He’s in the Deli, Mr. Brin!”
That paper, that I would invest in. If only to make the world a better place.
Well at least you don’t have it in a case on your belt…
When people tell me artificial intelligence is going to take over our lives, I just say, “Google Maps”.
I beg to differ. I know for a certain fact that they save their most malicious AI algorithms in secret, staying in a back room, smoking cigars, and drinking rum… dreaming up images of girls that are indistinguishable from the real thing… and making indecipherable puns and cackling while playing 3D Monopoly. Disgusting.