
Stop Googling. Let’s Talk - notNow
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/27/opinion/sunday/stop-googling-lets-talk.html?mwrsm=LinkedIn&_r=0
======
Xcelerate
Everyone's ragging on this article, but it matches my experience exactly. I
feel like I can't talk to anyone nowadays without fearing that little buzz in
their pocket, at which point they pull out their phone and start playing with
it while I'm mid-sentence. And I'm not some grumpy "get off my lawn" old man;
I'm barely 25 years old.

Friends say "but it was [such-and-such nonsense]. I had to check my phone!"
Really, you _had_ to? Your life depended on you checking that text? People get
frustrated with me because my phone is dead all the time (and thus I don't
text back immediately), but I hate feeling tethered to some device.

I notice an overwhelmingly _huge_ difference in the quality of my
conversations with people when their phone is not present in the room with
them.

This isn't to say I'm anti-technology at all — I spend 10 hours a day
programming. I just don't attempt to do it while conversing at the same time
(nor could I; without uninterrupted focus, I make a lot of mistakes in my
code).

~~~
mixmastamyk
Agreed though I don't let it bother me much. I have a front row seat to the
internet all day, so the last thing I want to do at lunch is futz with a
phone.

------
sandworm101
> 89 percent of cellphone owners said they had used their phones during the
> last social gathering they attended.

Right there is where the author looses me. That online collaboration via the
phone IS a social gathering unto itself. One is not fundamentally different
than the other. Physical proximity is great, but it is a serious limitation.
Not everyone has the time/money to physically meet their friends over coffee
every twenty minutes. Not everyone lives in downtown Boston or NY.

> They say it’s a skill they mastered in middle school when they wanted to
> text in class without getting caught.

And why do kids text so much at school? Because they are bored to death by
mind-numbing subjects and teaching that doesn't actually teach. Texting is the
symptom, not the disease.

The ability to 'not get caught' while communicating with others is a valuable
skill for nearly everyone these days. It should be encouraged.

~~~
andrepd
>That online collaboration via the phone IS a social gathering unto itself.

Still the fact is that it is inconsiderate, or plain rude, to be "somewhere
else" when you are sitting with other people who all took the time to
physically be with each other. If a few people get together and spend large
amounts of their time on their phones, then why get together at all?

~~~
imh
Not only is it rude, but it's not a social gathering in the same way. That's
how I read this quote from the article,

>After five days without phones or tablets, these campers were able to read
facial emotions and correctly identify the emotions of actors in videotaped
scenes significantly better than a control group.

~~~
sandworm101
Staying away from most anything makes you worse at that thing. Staying away
from phones/tablets for a week might also make them less able to understand
emogies, slang, and current humor (all vitally important for the youth of
today).

The OP places greater value on face-to-face conversation. I'm saying that the
OP takes this too far, that electronic interactions should not be dismissed so
readily.

~~~
emn13
I think you overestimate human flexibility. We're hardwired for all kinds of
face-to-face interaction. It's almost certain that emogies or no, no matter
the amount of training, you're never going to gain the level of social insight
and empathy while texting that you could have had face-to-face.

You may have huge brain and trillions of times of the computing capacity of a
simple calculator, but it's still going to beat you at arithmetic. Know your
limitations and embrace your strengths. You're not some general purpose
machine; what's the point in pretending otherwise?

------
sjs382
> COLLEGE students tell me they know how to look someone in the eye and type
> on their phones at the same time, their split attention undetected. They say
> it’s a skill they mastered in middle school when they wanted to text in
> class without getting caught.

In my experience, they haven't mastered that nearly as well as they think...

~~~
jeffreyrogers
Yeah, I'm a college student and I rolled my eyes at that one. I can think of
countless interactions where people think they're discreetly checking their
text messages and it is so irritating to be on the other end of that.

The article has a great message, but unfortunately I don't think most people
are conscientious enough to deliberately change how they use technology and it
is just so easy to check your phone when there is a lull in a conversation.
Technology has been beneficial in many ways, but it has a tendency to be
incredibly antisocial as well and I don't think we've learned to compensate
for that yet.

------
patrickaljord
"Stop using new technologies, let's go back to the old ways", said every older
generations ever.

~~~
agumonkey
I feel weird because more and more I start to miss old tech. For many reasons,
I feel there were beautiful ideas forgotten too soon (aka AlanKayism). I've
also seen a few cycles (from osx aqua, flash, html5, java, js, flat, metro,
material, etc, etc) so I'm past being excited for newness. I don't know if
it's the absolute natural way of things now that I'm not part the current
generation or if there's some value in these thoughts.

It's also natural for some to follow new trends for there's a lot of energy in
exploring things 'a la mode'. But also not to be blinded into thinking old is
useless. Progress is not an arrow, it's a wiggling hyperplane.

~~~
veddox
I'm young, I still find newness exciting. Fortunately I also find history
exciting, and one big lesson that has taught me is that it is foolishness to
equate "newer" with "better". Often it is, often it seems to be, and often it
isn't. The trick is knowing which is which.

~~~
agumonkey
Exactly. It's especially hard to compare, when things don't move
straightforwardly, every new thing is 9/10 old and 1/10 new, and all new
things have their own 10th. Things wave back and forth, in spirals. Knowing
history avoids looping too much. I didn't understand that about it as a kid
(it holds in tech but in society, politics, musics etc too). Good for you
you're already sensible to that.

------
amelius
I'm worried more about the way people are using the web while at work.

If somebody would have said a few decades ago that in 2000, every employee
would have a television set on his desk, people would not have believed this
person. However, the situation is actually much worse.

~~~
llamataboot
What are you worried about? In my experience many jobs simply don't have 8
hours worth of work to do in a day, so there's downtime. (And the ones that do
have 8 hours+ worth of actual work to do, without breaks, are the ones that
pay near minimum wage and are a bit terrible). Since you're on hacker news I
presume you're aware that it is nigh-impossible for a programmer to just
program in flow state 8 hours a day every day 5-7 days a week. I usually get 4
hours of good work out of myself on bad days, 6-10 on great days or under
deadline pressure, but can't keep that up many days in a row. Slack-ing off
and the web help me decompress my brain in between uses.

~~~
DougWebb
Don't become a consultant. My company bills in 15-minute blocks, so I track my
time with that precision. I bill for more than just in-the-flow coding, but I
dont bill for downtime. I regularly bill 35+ hours a week, and the rest of my
40hr week is usually spent on company business. It's not hard, if you're
professional.

------
afarrell
This isn't unique to millennials. My dad and I had this problem where he would
be on his blackberry when talking with me until we had a conversation about it
and agreed to be more mindful of being on glowing rectangles rather than
present in the conversation.

------
methodover
It's funny. On my development team we have four younger guys (mid-late
twenties) and three older guys (35+).

By far the most distracted people on the team are the older ones. In meetings
they tend to lose focus, look at their computers, misremembered what's said,
or just seem to tune it out. I've made a habit of specifically managing how
they are perceiving what I'm saying -- looking at their eyes, seeing if
they're distracted, asking lots of confirming questions.

And outside of meetings, they don't pay attention to our online communication
channels _enough_.

If anything, my experience has been that it's the older generation that sucks
at paying attention to the right things in the new super connected world.

------
jccalhoun
Turkle has written some good stuff but her recent work has been too close to
"Kids these days! Why back in my day..." for my tastes.

(I was going to use that Socrates quote about "Our youth now love luxury. They
have bad manners, contempt for authority" but it turns out not be by Socrates
but from someone in 1907 paraphrasing complains from antiquity
[http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehaving-
children...](http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehaving-children-in-
ancient-times/) )

------
somebodyother
We've spent generations filling our every waking moment with more forced
broadcast stimuli, I don't blame 'millennials' for wanting to put up a minimum
filter and default to their own bubble of controlled media. Why should we talk
if you don't have something more interesting to say than my phone?

~~~
plonh
Because relationships matter and your phone won't care for you when you are
sick.

~~~
johnchristopher
Or help you move your couch and belongings to a new place.

~~~
dexterdog
Or help you move a body.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Out of all other examples this is probably the only one that makes sense - and
only because talking about murder over Internet is very poor OPSEC.

------
vinay427
> In one experiment, many student subjects opted to give themselves mild
> electric shocks rather than sit alone with their thoughts.

This screams of a lack of mindfulness that hopefully can be fixed through
working to become more aware of your own thoughts.

~~~
dexterdog
Which unfortunately very few will do.

------
hellofunk
I am sympathetic to this author. I wrote this a while back on here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9883769](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9883769)

I am nostalgic for the land before internet. While there are many
technological divides and revolutions between generations, not sure many in
history compare to the dramatic change to global society and behavior as a
result of the internet, and by its extension, the mobile era.

~~~
xixixao
The invention of the car (and then of the plane)? Imagine the nostalgia for
times when you had to walk for hours to meet someone across a city, or travels
for days/weeks/months to meet far away places. Same with phones (and mobile
phones), when you had to stick to a time you decided to meet somewhere, and
you didn't show up... Good old times. Transportation and communication are
really one thing, and any significant advancement in them will have the
feeling. I will be remembering my youth, before VR, before shuttles/portals to
Mars, whatever the future will bring.

The way we look at the changes is much more tied to us than the change. You
can always flip a coin and think of how marvelous these changes might seem to
people in the past: "While I'm sitting in cafe with someone I can
simultaneously communicate with someone else half-way across the globe?
Wonderful!"

~~~
ksk
You are conflating two different things. If you traveled by car to meet
someone vs walking, you were not losing anything. However typing words to
communicate is not the same as meeting someone in person and using the entire
range of human expression - posture, voice, facial expressions, touch, smell,
etc. There is an objective loss of 'information' when it comes to digital
communication. Whether you value those additional things is up to you. But
lets not pretend that its just the same and old people need to get on with the
new times.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Well, I'm not touching or smelling everyone I talk to. I mean of course, text
is much narrower band, but it's not that most of the communication you do day-
to-day needs, or even benefits, from the full spectrum of bodily expressions.

Please consider, that current technology gives us the ability to have many,
_many_ more conversations every day than our great grandparents could ever
dream of. For instance, this whole discussion between all of us here wouldn't
happen without Internet. I prefer having "subpar" communication with people
all around the world to not having it at all.

Also consider this - we've been having video chat capabilities for a decade or
so already, and yet people don't go for it all that often. Why it's so? Maybe
because for most of our conversations, _not_ having to involve the messy
things like body language and posture and cleaning yourself up from whatever
you ate for breakfast are actually _beneficial_?

~~~
ksk
Implicit in what you're saying is that one of the reasons you're cool with
having a "subpar" conversation with someone half-way around the world, is this
idea that you're unable to find anyone in your immediate vicinity. Otherwise
(if you agree that text is subpar) you would always prefer just calling up
someone who is across the street.

So because we don't know (or feel immediately comfortable) talking to 99.999%
of humans that surround us, the "removal of the human element" makes it more
comfortable to talk to someone halfway around the world. Sure, I'd like the
OPTION of having to talk to someone half-way around the world. But I don't
think that its necessarily the best option or that we should think that the
only people that you can talk to on any given topic are necessarily _not_
people who are sitting right next to you - on the bus/train/plane/park
bench/etc.

>Maybe because for most of our conversations, not having to involve the messy
things like body language and posture and cleaning yourself up from whatever
you ate for breakfast are actually beneficial?

Or to turn it around, it would be so much better to live in a society where
you could just strike up conversations with strangers and not be judged for
superficial BS like crumbs on your face.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Implicit in what you 're saying is that one of the reasons you're cool with
> having a "subpar" conversation with someone half-way around the world, is
> this idea that you're unable to find anyone in your immediate vicinity.
> Otherwise (if you agree that text is subpar) you would always prefer just
> calling up someone who is across the street._

Yes and no. I used "subpar" in scare quotes to refer to what I think was
implicit sentiment in your comment above. Personally, I don't find text
subpar, just different - trading off additional information for more control
and efficiency, as well as range.

As for being unable to find someone in my immediate vicinity, there are two
issues here, both of which involves self-selection. First of all, people in my
vicinity often are preoccupied with something else, whereas whoever signals
his availability for conversation on-line is probably a safe bet to talk to.

Secondly, when you look for people in your vicinity, you sample the general
population. When you interact on a forum like this one, you sample through a
much smaller population of people particularly tuned to that forum's topic and
style of discussion.

I don't mean to say here that people around me are inferior to those I meet
online; on the contrary, there are conversations I prefer having with those
next to me (often, not surprisingly, about topics related to local context). I
find off-line and on-line forms to be different enough not to substitute for
one another.

> _But I don 't think that its necessarily the best option or that we should
> think that the only people that you can talk to on any given topic are
> necessarily not people who are sitting right next to you - on the
> bus/train/plane/park bench/etc._

I agree. Though again, self-selection. I'm equally fine with talking about
things with people on the bus or on the other side of the planet. But I'm
having this conversation here with you, on HN, and not with my friends over
beer, because it's Sunday night over here in my timezone; most of face-to-face
conversations I could have have selected themselves out by going to sleep :).

> _Or to turn it around, it would be so much better to live in a society where
> you could just strike up conversations with strangers and not be judged for
> superficial BS like crumbs on your face._

Oh I would so love to live in such a world! But that will require serious
rewiring of both our societies and our own insecurities, which would be a
change of much more profound (whether good or bad) consequences than mere
smartphones.

~~~
ksk
Well the thing is, if you think about trade-offs, the current way of thinking
is - I'm willing to have a text only conversation, if I could only get in
touch with other like minded individuals. If we reverse it - I don't want to
compromise on a richer interaction, so how can I change my own
life/address/etc so that there is a higher chance of meeting like-minded
individuals. For e.g. what if, it became extremely easy to move. Like, you
could move your entire house in 30 minutes and go live somewhere else. All the
hassles of changing addresses, packing, unpacking, etc didn't exist. In that
scenario you could just spontaneously move around and be among whichever group
of people you choose to. It sounds weird in my head as well, but that's just
because we're conditioned to feel that way.

One other related issue is this notion of wanting to always be with 'like
minded' individuals. That's pretty much a recipe for disaster if you ask me.
It's probably good to have people around who challenge you or disagree with
you or don't like you all the time, etc. Anyway, I think we're probably close
enough in agreement on the main point.

------
slavik81
The stereotypical family morning used to involve the father reading the
newspaper while eating breakfast. Eating and reading with others is a
tradition long predating smartphones.

We're in a golden age of text, with dramatically higher engagement due to an
unprecedented access to more useful, interesting and relevant information than
has ever been available before.

The title uses a new fancy word, but it might as well say "Stop reading. Let's
talk."

------
javajosh
One of the basic human needs is to be loved and feel like you belong. We do
this by both "keeping in touch", "getting together". The usual assumption is
that "getting together" is a higher quality way to meet these needs than
"keeping in touch".

Your smartphone represents almost everyone you know. In a face-to-face
meeting, the ratio is _precisely_ (n-1)/n. So if you both have 100 friends,
realize that you're competing to meet the need of love and belonging against
the 99 other people in their pocket, who can also give that to your friend
with surprising effectiveness.

(The argument generalizes: you are _also_ competing against every stranger
that's ever put anything online - the person who wrote that Wikipedia article
or Yelp review has a call on your attention, too!)

------
methehack
IMO, all of this applies to meetings at work as well, which are, after all,
conversations. It's hard enough for people to listen to each other when
they're actually listening. Throw in a laptop, a phone, and the mistaken
belief that a person can 'multi-task' without a quality hit, and its a
disaster straight out of the gate.

I'm curious: Does anyone have rules at work around no laptops / phones at
meetings?

------
Kiro
I long for the day I can be completely absorbed by technology.

------
archmonk
for linux and mac user type this on commandline traceroute bad.horse

------
fit2rule
Lately I've been feeling despair and dread at the scene of hundreds of people
glued to their phones .. after a particularly hard week at work I stood at the
station and watched the train roll by, full of commuters glued to their little
machines. It was an entirely dystopian scene, and as much as I've been a
promoter of the technological revolution that is the Internet and all its
devices, I'm feeling more and more disaffected with the results of what we've
done.

It could be different, but its not. These phones are brick walls, carefully
channeling the minds of the enslaved back to the master.

So I started thinking about what I would do to make it different, and really,
I think one small tweak to our technology would make a huge difference. Of
course, its not in the interests of the manufacturers or network providers:
make it possible for phones to auto-discover each other locally, without
requiring a server somewhere upstream.

If only we had some way to get people connected to each other - in a local
context - i.e. anyone on the train can search for and find others on the same
train without requiring a client-server relationship with an upstream
connection. Host-AP mode: too restrictive.

We need local peer search and discovery.

About the only way I can think of to get this right now is to man up and put a
device in AP mode with some sort of SSID named "LocalUsersNetwork" or
something .. some sort of recognizable brand that people can use to connect
with their local peers.

It would make the forward march towards further electronic enslavement so much
more palatable if it were possible to have at least a local context in which
to freely operate.

EDIT: events like this make me think there _is_ a market for "local stranger
discovery services", its just nobody has worked out a branding process for it:

[https://www.facebook.com/events/1480766915558797/](https://www.facebook.com/events/1480766915558797/)

~~~
djent
And yet 50 years ago, everyone on trains were staring mindlessly into their
newspapers...

[0]
[https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/800/1*U36hBj8i-C7J...](https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/800/1*U36hBj8i-C7JJJxS4MP2HQ.jpeg)

~~~
skwirl
Did people start reading newspapers in the middle of conversations with
others? I don't think the analogy entirely holds.

~~~
TeMPOraL
No, but newspapers also served as a clear sign of "I don't want to engage in
casual conversation". Really, it's not like before smartphones people were
actually talking with each other on the bus. Hell, in the fine era of 1990s,
when people stopped reading so many newspapers but didn't have smartphones
yet, no one talked with random people either - it's sort of a cultural norm in
the west.

