
How not to be alone - gjenkin
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/opinion/sunday/how-not-to-be-alone.html
======
oinksoft
As somebody who seldom carries a mobile phone, figures out local directions
with an address and paper map, etc., this editorial resonates strongly with
me, and the author illustrates his point beautifully. His expression,
"diminished substitutes," captures a feeling I've had for a while about the 4G
lifestyle, or even one that just takes place too much on the internet.

In the past 3-4 years, when smartphones completely hit the mainstream, I have
noticed a very significant change in those around me, even in some people I am
close with. They seem more ... robotic! I am certain if I moved in different
circles, I would've noticed a similar pattern years before among BlackBerry
users, who were the butt of the "CrackBerry" joke ca. 2004.

I'm not sure how else to describe somebody completely fixated on a small
device, resorting to it almost like some security blanket when an everyday
problem needs solving. Portable video games like Game Boy, and traditional
mobile phones, which no doubt have been similarly derided in the past, offer a
poor comparison for their limited scope. The small screen provides some
strange tunnel vision I don't care to encounter.

~~~
mikeash
I don't quite get that "security blanket" comment. If the phone is a useful
tool for solving a problem, why not use it? Are we supposed to use old
techniques just because the new ones aren't strictly necessary?

My experience in that regard has been pretty much the opposite. People are
still stuck in a pre-smartphone mindset where you have to give people
directions instead of an address, where you have to remember the locations of
businesses you haven't visited in a long time instead of looking them up,
where you have to guess about traffic conditions instead of just checking,
etc.

It amuses me to no end when a crowd of techies get into a discussion about
driving directions these days. No longer necessary!

~~~
oinksoft
Sure, there's no problem with you and I agreeing to disagree. I'm of the
opinion that the mind operates like a sort of muscle, and that you can be in
or out of shape for a particular thing, mentally. As the mapping example goes,
any convenience I might gain from turn-by-turn directions, delivered on
demand, does not outweigh the tremendous benefit I receive by _thinking_ about
where I am going, figuring out cardinal directions by the sun, and other
things like that. The latter will seriously save you when you lose reception,
phone is out of battery, you're in a place where online maps are out of date,
etc. It's a real, applied skill.

So, what you see as a simple task I see as more of a practice, a way of
living. This is just how I am about most things, being something of a
perfectionist. And that's fine!

~~~
mikeash
OK, I can buy that. However, I have to ask, why use a map? Wouldn't it be
better practice to ditch that as well?

~~~
oinksoft
Yea, definitely! That's why, like I said in another comment, for local routes
I don't really use a map unless it's some place I haven't been before. If I
know how to get to the road the place is on, and can figure out where it is
reasonably based on the address, there's no point in using a map.

But I'd find a traveler foolhardy to not at least consult a map ahead of time
when visiting some very new, distant place. The good thing is that it's normal
in the US for gas stations to all carry local maps. So I'm usually not more
than a few minutes from being able to stop off and get my bearings if needed
-- last I had to do that was in a tricky part of NC (damned business/non-
business routes) in 2007.

~~~
hnriot
Or, rather than stop at a gas station to buy an out of date paper map, you
could get with the program and pull out your smartphone and have the worlds
most advanced cartographic system at your finger tips.

------
_delirium
I think this is fairly complex rather than a simple uniform transition, and
interacts with culture in a way that varies a lot by region.

What the author seems to describe with dismay as being caused by smartphones
has been pretty much normal in Scandinavia since long before smartphones. It's
considered polite to pretend not to notice things like someone crying on a
park bench, if they aren't someone you know. It's also (with some exceptions)
considered weird and intrusive to strike up conversations with strangers, and
instead you're supposed to be absorbed in your own thoughts, or book, or
newspaper—or yes, nowadays, smartphone—unless you're out with friends or
family you already know [1]. An exception is if you are at a bar and drunk. Of
course, the norms are different in, say, Greece, and different again in Japan.

[1] One blogger refers to this as the Privacy In Public Act
[http://matadornetwork.com/abroad/how-to-piss-off-a-
dane](http://matadornetwork.com/abroad/how-to-piss-off-a-dane)

~~~
rdouble
Even Scandinavian Americans act like this.

It's not politeness it's a culturally ingrained pathological aversion to
interacting with strangers.

~~~
abrowne
Even non-Scandinavian Minnesotans act like this ;-)

~~~
rdouble
Good point. Although my friends from St. Paul with Irish backgrounds are
significantly more outgoing and have much larger social circles.

------
anigbrowl
_I was faced with a choice: I could interject myself into her life, or I could
respect the boundaries between us. Intervening might make her feel worse, or
be inappropriate. But then, it might ease her pain, or be helpful in some
straightforward logistical way._

Ease the author's discomfort, more like. If you need to think about whether to
approach a distressed person, chances are that your subconscious is telling
you to leave them the hell alone.

~~~
stfu
I disagree. It depends a lot on your type of personality. But if you are an
introvert you think a lot about weather to approach a (distressed) person or
not. And ultimately are almost are never going to do that.

If you just listen to your "subconscious" and not making an intentional effort
of being more open to people this will negatively impact social interactions.

~~~
anigbrowl
I am an introvert, which is one reason I'm acutely conscious of when people
would rather be left alone.

~~~
corin_
But are your assumptions correct? Just because you recognise situations where
you would want to be left alone, is it not possible that extroverts wouldn't
want to be left alone in those same situations?

------
apunic
Maybe the OP is right and today's smartphones make it vastly harder to choose
to approach nearby people than to retreat into the scrolling names of one’s
contact list. But how was it five or ten years ago? There was always something
which made it harder to choose to approach nearby people: dumbphones, MP3
players, newspapers, etc.

Maybe the OP just uses his smartphone and today's tech as an excuse for his
timidity to approach people.

------
stfu
Completely unrelated to the message of the story but: Did he end up talking to
the girl after all or not?

~~~
panic
He didn't.

 _The phone didn’t make me avoid the human connection, but it did make
ignoring her easier in that moment, and more likely, by comfortably
encouraging me to forget my choice to do so._

~~~
stfu
He hid the answer quite well. Thanks for pointing it out!

------
grownseed
More generally speaking, I think the problem has to do with how we tend to
view "things", how we get attached to them and how we forget why we have those
things in the first place. Assuming that nearly everything man-made is a tool
(be it a hammer, religion, politics, the economy or even art), most of the
things we make have a purpose. I think the problem is that not everybody gets
the purpose of those tools as clearly as others, sometimes to the point where
the purpose no longer matters and the tool becomes an end in itself.

What I'm trying to say is that we tend to glorify the tools themselves,
despite their potential flaws or inadequacies. We forget that we made those
tools to make certain tasks simpler, or more enjoyable, with (hopefully) the
ultimate goal of being generally happier. In my opinion, a good example of
this is the monetary system, where some people hellbent on making as much
money as possible end up living miserable lives.

By shifting the emotional attachment from being happy (by yourself and
socially) to the thing that helps bring happiness ("diminished substitutes"),
we start valuing the tool for its apparent value rather than its intrinsic
one. It becomes the "chasing the dragon" philosophy of life ; we create a
dependency, or even an addiction, where there doesn't need to be one in the
first place. We focus so narrowly on the means that we forget the end.

------
jopt
"Most of the time, most people are not crying in public, but everyone is
always in need of something that another person can give, be it undivided
attention, a kind word or deep empathy. There is no better use of a life than
to be attentive to such needs."

I must be a misanthrope, but I disagree wholeheartedly with the latter.
Limiting the annoying exposure to other people's problems is a feature, not a
bug. People cry every day over ridiculous small-minded problems.

------
vinceguidry
Technology neither brings us together nor drives us apart. It rather gives us
tools for specifying social activity in greater detail. It used to be that I
had to wait until I saw one of my friends at the coffee shop in order to share
something with her, now I can just do so via Facebook.

We tend to think of "before Facebook" as some pre-2000 state that's never
returning, but that's not really the case. I have friends where we might know
each other for a month before we take the step to friend each other on
Facebook. Some people I won't interact with on Facebook. Lots of my relatives
I block. If they want to talk to me, I'm readily available via chat or message
on FB, it's just the daily flow of stuff they're publically sharing I'm opting
out of.

I think a lot of older people who lived significant parts of their lives
without social tools tend to make the effects of having them out to be more
than what they are to those of us who grew up with them. Most people I know
use them perfectly naturally, they don't waste hours and hours on Facebook or
bury themselves in their phones to escape social interaction.

They just move flexibly from social arena to social arena. When I'm at the
bar, I'll pick up my phone if there's nothing interesting going on and play a
game or text or whatever, then just put it down when I get bored of it or
someone interesting comes around. We use technology as a way of filling in
parts of your life that would otherwise go wasted with something that could be
more meaningful.

To worry about software replacing the real is just missing the point.

------
MaybiusStrip
I found this article angsty, obnoxious and full of belabored, melodramatic
prose, just like the rest of Foer's writing.

The instinct not to interfere in complete stranger's emotional turmoil --
especially when she is a 15 year old girl and you are a man in his 30s -- has
little to do with technology. There are other ways to distract oneself in
uncomfortable situations.

I also can't relate to his "diminished subsitute" hypothesis. When I look at
my text/call/email/skype logs I'm hard pressed to find any instances where I
used a "diminished" medium -- sending a text when I should have called,
calling when I should have visited, etc... Some people may do that, but that's
not a symptom of technology, that's just a way of being rude that technology
has enabled.

That's really the crux of the problem with modern communication technology. It
gives people more outlets to be impolite by using it an innapropriate times or
innapropriately. But in many ways, it allows us to connect and stay in touch
with people that were never possible before.

------
danielrakh
Sometimes I wonder if we're in a transitionary phase of mobile technology
where we are still at the point of directing our attention at the actual
technology rather than using it as a compliment to our "real-world"
experience. Glass seems like a step forward in theory, but in practicality I
believe it's just moving the screen from your pocket to the side of your head.

~~~
l33tbro
You're right, we are definitely in a transitory phase. But it goes beyond just
"mobile technology", in my opinion.

I see this as going all the way back to the first stone tablet. Humans reading
/ watching a framed format. With the advent of cinema in the 20th Century,
this form evolves into a screen. Presently, we are witnessing the interface
change from a screen to a lens. This will be a crucial pivot in the human
trajectory, as the technology becomes more sophisticated and comes to color
the seeing aparatus. The politics and dialogue around how this technology
"compliments our real world experience" will be a very interesting space to
watch.

------
jcam
If you have 25mins to spare I would suggest watching the whole Middlebury
Commencement speech from which this was adapted.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgGzz3fKINA&feature=share](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgGzz3fKINA&feature=share)

------
mark_l_watson
I am not disagreeing with the author of the article, but I will say something
positive about the "smartphone life style": my wife and I live in a small town
in the mountains. Although we have a lot of local friends, our family is
distributed in San Diego, San Francisco, and Rhode Island. I really enjoy
keeping in touch with my family by emailing pictures while I am hiking, etc.
in real time as I am experiencing life. I probably send at least two pictures
a day. Later, on the phone, the previously sent pictures are something to talk
about. Using video Skype or iChat video also helps keep in touch.

If I lived in a small town with almost all of my family and friends nearby,
then I might agree more with a limited technology lifestyle, but that is not
the way it is.

------
maresca
On the topic of technology ruining human interaction: I recently read an idea
worth trying. When you go out with friends for drinks, take everyones phone
and stack them face down with yours on top. The rule is the first person to
grab their phone pays the tab. I used to make fun of friends that were
engrossed with their phones by acting like I was texting on an invisible
phone. But, this works much better.

~~~
glassx
Sorry if it sounds rude, but I have a much better idea: find a way to bring
them into the conversation you're having, try being more interesting, change
the subject to something they might want to participate or just leave them
alone for a bit. Some people need to "recharge" by being alone.

As vinceguidry put it on another post, "We use technology as a way of filling
in parts of your life that would otherwise go wasted with something that could
be more meaningful."

