The analogy to pacifiers may be overly condescending (equating adults to children), but in general I have adopted the view that smartphone usage in public is essentially second-hand smoke, and that hopefully within the next 1-2 decades the public will finally begin to recognize this as widespread addiction and begin setting some limits.
I got into computers when I was in early elementary school, and that began my track toward exploration and software development. There's no doubt that my mom's worries of me being addicted to the computer were absolutely true - entire summers were spent on the computer.
What's different about computer addiction and smartphone addiction is that computer usage is more limited in where you can do it. My computer-addicted young self would not have been able to whip out a desktop computer at a restaurant, barbershop, or waiting in line to pick up an order. But with smartphones essentially being "pocket computers", people can use them anywhere - even driving.
I do believe in personal choice, so I don't want to be heavy handed, but I imagine our society will need to grapple with this problem. I see couples on dates with each other in restaurants, both on their phones nearly the entire time scrolling through endless feeds. I watch sports events where any small break in play people need to pull out their phones. There is no presence anymore, and public space (along with suburbanization) has rapidly eroded over the past 10-15 years since smartphones were invented. Now commercials for phones/5G normalize the idea that you should be able to download/stream a movie on your phone walking down a sidewalk.
There's a balance that needs to be struck here, and it's going to be difficult to reach because we're still relatively in the infancy of these fancy electronic gadgets. Particularly in the US where individualism and personal choice is so deeply part of our culture, it will be difficult to restore the public space so that we can come to expect if you go out in public, people are actually... present and there. But somehow we eventually came to the same conclusion with banning smoking in restaurants et. al.
I'd hate to see them regulated, or... how would I ever remember anything? With paper? I'd be hosed if I lost it, and I lose... everything.. including my keys and wallet.... all the time, which I also use my phone to find.
The 1990s solution was just to really amplify the public space. Things like the rainforest cafe were very normal aesthetically. We essentially used clickbait in real life.
Smartphones are one half of it. The other half is we have kind of deprecated public spaces as an idea. We hardly even have them besides restaurants!
Even virtually, we don't have anything like true community forms to the degree we used to. Single player epics are a major game genre. Watching netflix is the new pastime, etc. Most of our big cultural things are fairly private now.
We even talk about privacy probably more than any other technical topic, and that is very new. Nobody but pirates would have known what a VPN was till know, and it was common to not care what the NSA knows about you(Ok, a lot of us like me are still like that).
And at the same time, everything has become about sex more than ever before, and even that seems to be more of a private thing than a public Hollywood drama spectacle.
The concept of a "dream job" is widely mocked. Everything seems to be seen as just some infrastructure to support private life.
What do you... do in public exactly? We are told every day it's just place you go to get ready to be at home.
Banning phones would just lead to everyone staring at a wall instead of a phone, until we actually restablish the public sphere as a real thing.
We've been very unconscious about our acceptance and deployment of technologies, and I don't know that there's really any way around that. It's sort of a Catch-22, technologies empower the individual. Reflecting on it, they tend to create a path of least resistance which is typically isolated (visiting Radio Shack in person as opposed to online). This isolation is inhumane though, we're social animals at heart, but it's way easier to find exactly what you want in the online catalogue of literally everything than it is to move around in the physical world, dealing with x, y, and z. Ultimately, as an arbitrary unit (society?), we've sort of walled ourselves into a really undesirable landscape that I'd argue we're pretty actually fucking averse to.
We hand off these novelties to future generations without any real bearing, all the organizations, traditions, adaptations, and more or less say "You figure it out." And the craziest thing is just the fucking rapidity of it all. Think of life in the 1920's. People have lived that long, 100 years. Imagine the cognitive whiplash watching highways and motor vehicles emerging, radio, television, the nuclear bomb, commercial airliners and transcontinental travel being trivialized, mass warfare, helicopters, wireless communication, calculators, computers, internet and the list goes on - every alteration of the nuanced fiber weave of the social fabric that all those techniques have shorn, altered or displaced.
We have no real reference point in the here and now that can comprehensively assist us in a meaningful convergence, we've sort of been shot into a dark vacuum entirely unconscious of the consequences with the pretense that it's what we desire. But I think we're quickly coming to find, at least those conscious of the implications, is that what we desire isn't necessarily good for us.
But the thing is, I don't think it's probable that we could really retard the unraveling of a technology. If it wasn't Ford it would've been someone else. I don't think it's possible to limit human curiosity, if not culture A, then culture B will ask the questions.
>it's way easier to find exactly what you want in the online catalogue of literally everything than it is to move around in the physical world
Perhaps if cities and communities were pleasant places to walk and bicycle this could change. In that case, the traveling is a positive addition and makes the trip enjoyable rather than a negative cost.
>The other half is we have kind of deprecated public spaces as an idea
We used to use the coffee house/bar in my town as the public house, where news was spread and discussions took place. The demise of such places has been very unfortunate and our interaction is now much poorer in both quantity and quality. Facebook/Twitter/Reddit are poor replacements, although I do like my town's subreddit.
I really don't know how we are going to reestablish public places again but I hope it happens.
I would love to see something like the cafeterias in Mexico City where people go to have coffee, eat, talk, play games, and catch up with each other.
If I want to remember something I write it down, or I train the memory. The phone is so ephemeral, just a vague cloud without landmarks or permanence-- how would I find the information again after I put it in my phone?
Your system (probably) works well for you, and I'm happy you have something which serves your needs.
Memory has a limit. I'm about 90% sure I have dyspraxia which is an ADD/Dyslexia/etc type condition, and have essentially never been able to learn.... anything to a 100% reliable level.
At the moment I'm using a custom app called Drayer Journal which is designed to solve the permanence and search issue with P2P sync, Heirachal organization, and exporting subtrees as shareable documents. Unfortunately it's a KivyMD prototype and I'm not sure I want to rewrite it in something less buggy.
It does seem that for whatever reason, most artistic fields were doing better without present day tech though.
Even if we took this as a valid statement on its face, it's also
- A personal safety tool used by vulnerable people to protect themselves, from joggers to the mentally ill
- A way of checking in on one's family member suffering from illness
- Access to information that is contextually important like specific venue masking guidelines
- A means of spending time with family; as long as work knows they can reach you, you are good.
Etc.
I think it's a good idea to ask not only if we still want to be "blame the tool" people, or "blame the people" people, but also whether we want to open up this general context where we enshroud efforts to project values in a casement that looks like generalized blame of device and person both.
IMO we can do better than methods that turn into "see something, shame something" especially when so many details matter.
I'm not sure I agree that it's second-hand smoke to the public, but it's definitely first-hand smoke to the user.
I mean, yea it's great you can use the smartphone to do those noble things you listed, but that's not what 99% of the people standing in line, head crooked down, eyes glazed, thumb flying back and forth are doing. They're scrolling insta or snap, or tiktok, chasing that continuous dopamine drip. I remember pre-pandemic walking past a huge line outside of a movie theater, and every single person was scrolling content, eerily silent, not even talking to the people they were with. These people were not checking in on local safety information.
I'm not going to shame them. If that's how you want to live your life, it doesn't affect me. I don't care if the guy in front of me in line is high on drugs or high on instagram as long as 1. I don't smell it and 2. he moves forward along with everyone when the line moves.
Sounds pretty serious. Why not take a moment and ask them what they are doing and why their phones help them out, rather than projecting your worst expectations onto them en masse? It'd be much easier to help them out that way, if you are really interested in assisting via your personal values.
Otherwise it appears indistinguishable from shaming them inwardly, which could be even worse than doing it loudly, in person, and giving them a chance to defend themselves.
This is a weird argument to me, since second hand smoke causes cancer. I agree that we're probably more distracted than is good for us, and there are contexts where that's a public health risk (specifically when driving), but until we see evidence that public phone use causes bystanders to get cancer, equating the two seems hyperbolic.
I get your sentiment, but treating it like second hand smoke seems a bit silly. There's no health risk if a stranger on the train wants to be on their phone instead of talking to me.
Before covid, I went to a few speed dating events with a "no phone" policy. And no one had any trouble with that. We also already have "no phone" on occasion, like on quiet cars on trains.
So do we need cell phone free spaces enforced by law instead of social politeness? What spaces should be cell phone free.
As a parent of a three year old, one of the worst things to me is seeing other parents pushing a pram with the baby facing the parent, but the parent facing their smartphone; their mind somewhere else. I know I'm an outsider on this topic; I don't have a smartphone¹, but I just can't fathom how you can let that thing get between you and your child in that crucial bonding phase babies go through. How is this not an addiction?
I fully agree with your smoking analogy. I wonder how long it will be before the majority sees it that way too.
1: Technically speaking I do, but its a smartphone with Ubuntu on it (Meizu sold them years ago). As it is now long out of updates and as society is pushing hard to have certain apps available (banking, authentication, messaging), I will probably have to get an Android soon. I have no intention of changing my behaviour with these devices though.
I got into computers when I was in early elementary school, and that began my track toward exploration and software development. There's no doubt that my mom's worries of me being addicted to the computer were absolutely true - entire summers were spent on the computer.
What's different about computer addiction and smartphone addiction is that computer usage is more limited in where you can do it. My computer-addicted young self would not have been able to whip out a desktop computer at a restaurant, barbershop, or waiting in line to pick up an order. But with smartphones essentially being "pocket computers", people can use them anywhere - even driving.
I do believe in personal choice, so I don't want to be heavy handed, but I imagine our society will need to grapple with this problem. I see couples on dates with each other in restaurants, both on their phones nearly the entire time scrolling through endless feeds. I watch sports events where any small break in play people need to pull out their phones. There is no presence anymore, and public space (along with suburbanization) has rapidly eroded over the past 10-15 years since smartphones were invented. Now commercials for phones/5G normalize the idea that you should be able to download/stream a movie on your phone walking down a sidewalk.
There's a balance that needs to be struck here, and it's going to be difficult to reach because we're still relatively in the infancy of these fancy electronic gadgets. Particularly in the US where individualism and personal choice is so deeply part of our culture, it will be difficult to restore the public space so that we can come to expect if you go out in public, people are actually... present and there. But somehow we eventually came to the same conclusion with banning smoking in restaurants et. al.