The truck in the room are cars, not phones. And cities built over the idea that you must have them. Walking even in a more or less urban scenario should be something usual, enjoyable, part of our everyday life. Instead most people must have a car, have everything too far away from where they live (or just drive a few blocks instead of walking). Cities built around walkability, with trees, parks, benches and so on, with most of what you need at 15 minutes away from wherever you are, may make part of that flaneurism an everyday experience.
> Walking even in a more or less urban scenario should be something usual, enjoyable, part of our everyday life.
I've lived in a small city, less than 10k population (USA). Being able to walk anywhere and everywhere at any time is truly amazing. It takes 15 minutes to get most places in town at a brisk pace, if you aren't in a hurry you can take all sorts of neat routes.
One of the times of my life I love and miss the most is a summer I spent walking aimlessly for hours every night, usually following a set path to start and then branching off. It makes me sad that some people have never, and will never, be able to experience that.
I live in a very walkable city (Boston) where flaneurism is easily possible yet I constantly see people walking around talking their phone and/or with their eyes glued to one. It’s phones too. People, seemingly, will do whatever it takes to avoid being alone with their thoughts or simply present in their physical environment. Not everyone is like this of course, there are tourists taking photos with their phones too.
"Instead most people must have a car, have everything too far away from where they live (or just drive a few blocks instead of walking)."
I think this is a very US-centric view! I walk everywhere and take the metro to university/work. I love my neighbourhood and it's really enjoyable getting off your subway station and walking home along bars/restaurants/cultural venues etc
as someone who has never had a car nor really desired one, I find it a bit disheartening that my entire life I have watched cities prioritize machines over it's citizens.
When someone posts a beautifully composed picture standing in front of a waterfall and the sunlight just so with the caption “I love spending time in the woods” I generally assume that she does not love spending time in the woods. The evidence rather suggests that she loves posing for and sharing photographs.
Likewise when someone writes a lot of long essays about how much he loves spending time in the woods and he can’t understand why no one goes hiking in the woods anymore I draw my conclusions from his actions, not words.
> When someone posts a beautifully composed picture standing in front of a waterfall and the sunlight just so with the caption “I love spending time in the woods” I generally assume that she does not love spending time in the woods. The evidence rather suggests that she loves posing for and sharing photographs.
I can see how it may be unlikely for a person posing for Instagram photos to be a person enjoying spending time in the woods. However I don't see why it would be unlikely for a person enjoying spending time in the woods to pose for photos.
And yet, the woods are teeming with hikers and campers, at least in California.
I often wonder whether the opportunity to stage your “life” in a beautiful place for social media is a part of why so many more people head into the woods than did ten or 20 years ago. I mean, the woods were there the whole time, and arguably the weather was better.
Driving to the woods is easier than twenty years ago.
Cars are better.
Roads are better.
And of course, maps are exponentially better. Not only in terms of directions. Discovery is exponentially better. That waterfall that only showed up on the USGS topo map, is now on the map in your pocket...and Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter.
Never mind how much easier it is to not get lost in the woods thanks to GPS navigation on phones (even outside of service area, if you've had the sense to download the map). That said, you do run into people who head out relying on the phone who run into a hell of a time when it stops working, either due to battery or accidental disruption (ie, it fell in a river). It would be nice to see more folks pick up some basic orienteering skills (it's REALLY not all that hard...I learned in middle school), but either way, more folks getting an appreciation for outdoors I'd call a good thing.
Now, if they'd bring some Leave No Trace principles into the woods with them, that'd be great. Seeing how the eternal September played out on Usenet though, that may be a bit overly hopeful on my part.
I think the computer and information centric lifestyle we have now, and maybe efficient but stressful workplaces, they make it necessary (for some of us) to be very intentional about disconnecting. Hence going into the woods.
I encounter many miserable looking poorly equipped people constantly asking me to take selfies of them posing with a fake smile. I was stopped 7 times on a 50km hike recently.
People want to be seen to do it. They don’t appear to be enjoying it though.
Edit: ironically considering the article I tend to wear AirPods now because people don’t ask me to do it.
One of my hobbies is outdoor photography. I don’t mind people taking actual photos of the outside. The objection is having 75% of the frame taken up by someone repetitively taking photos of the same pose (the good side of their face) while doing an impression of a fish and/or wearing something completely in appropriate that is going to land them in hospital one day from hypothermia.
As for the selfie, I’m on the fence on your semantic definition. I consider myself to be a meat flavoured selfie stick when asked. I’m merely a tool that happened to be walking past that is good for pointing their device at a bulbous ass obscuring the scenery.
I think the generally accepted meaning of "selfie" has drifted far enough into including "photos of my(self) taken with my phone at my request" that nitpicking about it has similarly drifted into the "WELL ACHURLY, literally doesn't mean that" school of prescriptivist nonsense.
But I have literally (in its original meaning!) never heard anyone but gw99 describe “pictures of myself taken by a bystander” as a selfie.
I’ve taken a lot of posed photos of tourists with their own cameras, I don’t see why “the camera is now a phone” would make that phenomenon merge with the specific thing people do with the front facing camera.
“Me, posed at destination” seems like a wholly distinct phenomenon to me.
> I often wonder whether the opportunity to stage your “life” in a beautiful place for social media is a part of why so many more people head into the woods
I think so. For me and my friends, we’re not “staging our life”, but a lot of times I’ll see someone post a photo of a trail on Instagram or Strava and I’ll comment asking where it is. We still went out 10 years ago. We still took photos 10 years ago. But now it’s SO much easier to share what the different trails look like and it’s possible to share the exact GPX tracks with each other.
It’s a wonderful time to be wandering around in the woods and if someone just got into the hobby yesterday and wants to post the beauty of their quarter mile “hike” more power to them.
I'm not sure exactly what you're arguing. Do you mean that writing about how you love spending time in the woods is evidence that you do not love spending time in woods? I guess John Muir's Wikipedia article needs a substantial rewrite, then.
My basic point is go do your thing. Enjoy it! I’m happy for you. Why does everyone need to convince me how great his thing is and that I should be out there doing it. The genre rings hollow and I suspect that the real enjoyable thing is trying to control other people.
If you don’t want to look on your phone, don’t look on your phone. Maybe other people will notice how happy you are. Or maybe they won’t.
> When someone posts a beautifully composed picture standing in front of a waterfall and the sunlight just so ... The evidence rather suggests that she loves posing for and sharing photographs
My last girlfriend was a great example of that. It was both confusing and infuriating because there was no way to know when she was being genuine about anything
I have learned that someone who excessively stands between an interesting subject and a camera rather than stands behind the camera should not be a part of my life. This includes my ex wife.
Instagram is also full of that. One of the cesspools of humanity.
However this appears to be roughly the usual “modern clipart” image selection for the headline image for the article.
You’re probably right. Just seems like an unpleasant way to live. There’s assholes out there, but generally speaking I try to not let them live rent-free in my head.
Not only can people like multiple things at once it is apparently incomprehensible to large swaths of Hacker News that people can like things that others do not.
Eh, IDK. Seems to me iPhone, and the 21st century tech it symbolizes in this article, made people's lives more intentional than anything. The option to wander aimlessly is still there, and some take it. Yet being presented with options, I'm not surprised that to many it might sounds as enticing as watching paint dry.
As for the rest of it, it sounds a little.. forced. As if there's some kind of conspiracy. Can't it be that people value control of their time/life over some amount of spontaniety? Tech provides them that, which makes all this a side effect of a choice people make.
Increasingly this isn't the case. I'm Amish and people get hostile when I don't have a phone much less a smartphone. Flights, financial transactions of all types, a lot of travel requires it now for some aspect. Those services do not exist for us anymore. Most recently the nearby airport stopped being able to use printed flight passes because the new scanners were built to interface with the smartphone app for the airline, which uses a navy blue background on the boarding passes. Having a printed pass relegates you to a secondary delay to account for that regardless of boarding class.
Does someone paying for identical service as a person owning a phone still deserve to board with others despite the airline's issue with their hardware?
I've been considering the idea of going back to a "dumbphone" once my current phone kicks it, but this kind of thing gives me pause. More and more everyday activities assume you have a smartphone with an Internet connexion.
During the pandemic I went to a couple restaurants. They used to have printed menus, but they got rid of them as part of a "zero-contact" policy. Instead, they put little stickers with QR codes on the tables, which you had to scan with your phone to see an online version of the menu. Even now that COVID restrictions are basically over in my country, a lot of places seem to have decided that not having printed menus any more is the way to go. No smartphone? No food for you!
I would like to give you words of encouragement, because for these minor conveniences there are ample gains in the quality of relationships and interactions with my peers.
> During the pandemic I went to a couple restaurants.
One more detail about being phone-less, I was almost denied my 2nd vaccine for not having phone or email until I asked why Amish and homeless couldn't receive vaccines. I received it ultimately, but was warned that I would have difficulty traveling as I'm not 'in the system' as a result of this.
There are always various shades of adherence to those types of things, so there are a few who might value smartphones. Not every Christian follows all 10 commandments all the time, and our community is similarly human as well. Though there are many shades of devoutness, all sects generally center around community, simplicity and maintaining a small distance from a varying range of modern conveniences.
I'm simply a person with a very old but working phone (2011?) and I'm increasingly running into the same problems. (It even had internet, with a constantly crashing browser, but it was 2G and that was switched off. (I wasn't using it anyway.))
I'm not sure how to proceed. I don't like how the modern phones feel like you do not have control over anything but they do so much in the background. Any freer option seems to be a lot of compromise and work, and is only ever supported so long. I will have to take some time to look into it at some point, but I have managed to hold on for now.
Do you have any kind of plan or thoughts about the future?
You've probably looked into compromise solutions that let you do these things in the same way you've found a way to use the internet that's compatible with your values. Can you share your thoughts on those for people looking to get away from smartphones without losing access to things? You might have some insights that provide a solution to someone.
That's a good question. One is to be a good note-taker. Another is to deal with community-first and work your way outward when it comes to business, buying things. Your local butcher or farmer knows you better than any Amazons or delivery services and will generally accept cash. A good alternative to modern banking is a credit union, which are owned by the community and run by community members. Time is another consideration; phones have influenced culture in a way that makes this generation crave immediacy, and similarly people's schedules are tight for most of the day. Plan ahead to be punctual and make time for things like finding your way to a new place, or extra time needed to use a printed boarding bass.
It seems like having a physical boarding pass would slow down the processing. It's nice that the offer that service at all no? They could just say "Nope you have to go digital"
While tech is certainly one factor influencing the difficulty wandering aimlessly the article hints at another that to me is really the underlying factor which is the commoditization and “ownership” of land areas.
I was reading a collection of articles written by Scottish-American mountaineer/naturalist John Muir in the 1870s. He was writing about wandering around various parts of California.
The thing that struck me is that he would describe picking a path towards a peak and just following it from the base of a mountain. That would be difficult these days because there is so much private land and fencing that you never know if you’re illegally trespassing or if a path goes through. In a city of course the land is nearly all private so you have to follow whatever paths have been laid out between public spaces.
I still enjoy walking around to the extent it’s possible but I do wonder what it would be like to be truly free to roam the countryside without fear of the law.
> "No longer does one simply roll the dice and go"
Nonsense. Unless I'm actively going somewhere for a specific time (interview, doctor, what not), almost every one of my walks will include a "I've not been down that road before" diversion. Or a "Oh, an SSVI[1] sign down that alley!" diversion. etc.etc.
(And I think 99.9% of those walks since 2011 has been with an iPhone in hand.)
> A device that forces us to look down and ignore changes in light.
Gibberish nonsense. People choose to look at their phones because their friends and family are in there, because they want to catch up on the news, or any one of a thousand other valid reasons that aren't "THE PHONE MAKES THEM LOOK!!!!"
Indeed, I will only use my phone for navigation when I'm truly lost and in a hurry. And when I have multiple options I favor the road not taken before. It helps maintain the sense of direction and awareness. It's like being a passenger in a car not being aware of where they are because they're not involved in the navigation process.
I don't agree with the implication that "the phone makes them look" is not a valid reason. The term "dark pattern" is 12 years old at this point, and we have had plenty of evidence that software companies are explicitly optimizing for engagement and using findings from psychology to do so.
If "the phone makes them look" (via dark patterns or whatever), then everyone with an phone (or specifically iPhone according to the gibberish of the blog post) would surely have them out all the time whilst walking, commuting, etc.
But they don't. Even on my currently limited interactions with the outside world, I see most people not staring down at a phone whilst walking. Even on a bus, where it's much safer to have your phone out (London still suffers from opportunist phone grabbers), it's nowhere near 100%.
[Caveat: I am not on all buses at all times, there may be buses where it hits 100%]
Can't help it but think this is written from a position of a someone who doesn't have a long to do list and chooses the passage of emotions and frankly boredom as entertainment. Nothing wrong with that, however with the times being gloomy and oppressive as they are I would think this type of activity will be chosen less and less.
Where I live in the inner suburbs of New York City, my frustration is that all the neighborhoods are so chopped up by highways and railroads that it's difficult to wander. Most areas only have a couple ways in or out. A lot of the main roads are pedestrian-hostile, with incomplete sidewalks.
Think like a child. They don't stick to sidewalks, and will wander anywhere their fancy takes them. Underpasses, large drainage pipes, seemingly empty patches of woodland...
As an adult, this must be tempered with adult notions of private property, but sometimes the now-faded childhood thrill of exploration can be supplemented with the notion of committing a class 4 misdemeanor.
I like to walk home from work (about 1.5 hours) once or twice a week, no headphones. I like to be able to live comfortably with my own thoughts for an hour and a half without the need for constant stimulation and I have friends who truly seem to have lost that ability.
I don't think it's about being better than anyone. I also have friends who seemingly cannot go 30 seconds without scrolling through some app, and it's concerning.
When I was a little kid I often walked miles (to my dad's business or home) from school and found it excruciatingly boring. My pre-device solution was to read paperbacks, so reading a phone doesn't seem much different to me. If you don't mind elaborating, I'm curious about why you're concerned about it.
Reading and digesting a book is different from endlessly scrolling through a twitter feed.
The reason I'm concerned about this individual is because I've almost never seen them not scrolling through twitter. When we're hanging out, eating food, etc it's always present.
Fantastic article. I love walking, I try and get at least 2-3 miles a day. Usually at night after work, while the street lights put up a feeble fight against the darkness in my relatively small town. A great time for to catch up on podcasts and music and perhaps most pertinent to readers of HN I find my mind is much more nimble on these strolls. Ideas percolate much more readily.
One tool I have found useful since my paths are limited here, WIGLE on my phone. I let it run in the background and gather it's WiFi and BT data as it helps to push me to walk down a different street each night and in the end perhaps the data is actually useful to OpenStreetMap when I upload it.
Temptation is the issue here. In the biblical sense. A demon telling me an attractive story. A story that draws me in and keeps me dreaming. And before I know it I'm dreaming all the time.
The storytelling demon is the phone. Always reminding me of the story. Periodically tapping me on the shoulder. "Hey hey look at this! This is important!"
Having a device capable of communication practically anywhere, at any time, is something I happily carry.
Being required to carry an apple/google tracking device, constantly analysing & pimping you out, simply so you can buy an airline ticket, a train ticket, etc - is something I do begrudgingly.
Just as there ought to be a law accepting cash, there ought to be a law mandating that any online payments for things such as airline or train tickets should be accessible via a standard HTML web browser, firefox/safari/chrome. That way I could carry a linux phone without being worried if I'd get stuck at a border because I couldn't install some android app (and no, it won't run emulated because of some nonsensical 'security' measures).
Visual media is the problem, not phones themselves. Use your phone to listen to an audiobook, podcast, music, etc and leave the phone in your pocket. Problem solved.
> ears attuned to serendipity,
Ears attuned to.. the distant rumble of diesel engines. Maybe a few crows squawking. I don't think I'm missing out on much by tuning out city sounds.
For me, the heavy machinery is the worst. Excavators and the like; they're louder than most trucks but stick around in earshot for hours a day. And worse than their engines are some of the tools they use for breaking up road surfaces. The jackhammers and particularly the road cutting saws both make awful noise. The diesel engine noises are easy enough to tune out, but the road saws are like banshees.
I literally lol'd when I read "a blindfold for the ears which encourages us to disregard the whispers of the planet". I guess this person leaves in the countryside or some really beautiful forest, I really like my blindfold to the car horns, people screaming, construction sounds, etc.
Seems rather to be a complaint about the ruining of people watching, now that everyone is looking at their phones.
My thought is that this is an interesting new human behavior to observe, probably won’t last forever if we consider past technology cycles. So this is particular to this point in history.
Not just people looking at their phones but people walking a dog, with two kids in tow, and still looking at their phone.
I do a 12 mile walk at least once a week and I'll encounter maybe 2 or 3 people on average who'll smile and say hello. It's worth it just for that reasurance that not every other person is an arshole.
There's something inherently contradictory about needing a blog post that itself needs the approval of long-dead Frenchmen to justify wandering. The irony is that they are assigning a purpose to this activity without realizing it: that you have to engage with it because it's "natural" and in contradiction to parts of modern culture.
You don't "need to wander". Wandering is something that you may or may not do, but you don't need specific tech companies and products to stop existing, other people to modify their behavior, or a cultural precedent to inform your behavior for that to happen. "Without surveillance" also includes self-surveillance
> used to like to come into the City to take pictures of people’s faces
Also kind of creepy and even illegal in some parts of the world.
It’s ok to leave your phone at home and wonder around… be it an iPhone, an Android or a “dump phone” they are just tools that facilitate certain activities.
> My father-in-law used to like to come into the City to take pictures of people’s faces. He doesn’t come in much any more. Everyone is looking down at their phones.
>This raises a critical point: the loss of random encounters that are the basis of being what the French call a flâneur.
Maybe this is just the Seattle resident in me, but if a bunch of random people are trying to talk to me on my walk I would become annoyed very fast. I am trying to walk here, I am thinking!
I love walking aimlessly to no specific destination, I do it often. But don't "randomly encounter" me if I appear to be thinking.
It is not a Seattle thing. It is a living in a highly populated dense urban environment thing because the probability of a stranger talking to you out of nowhere being a scammer or salesperson is very high.
Even in SEA or other big cities, people are more than happy to strike up conversation while waiting in line for food or tickets or any activity with mutual interest, but accepting random conversations while transiting from one place to another is a recipe for wasting one’s time or worse.
100% Disagree with the opinions of OP. I live in NYC and walk 6 miles a day (the joys of having a Jack Russell terrier).
Every walk we take is random; the phone allows me to stay connect if I need to but doesn't control my path. My Apple Watch keeps track of my distance/time walking (I get an alert at 35 mins if I'm on an hour long walk => 25 mins to walk home). The AirPods are always in Transparency mode where I can fully hear what's going on in the city with some music I like playing as well.
My partner asks me where I am going when I head out on my motorcycle; I never have an answer for them beyond north, south, east or west. That might be for one hour or six, or longer.
I don't know, somehow even though I cannot resist using my smartphone in the boredom of my house once I go outside I completely drop the need to look at it. I might wait on a bus bench for half an hour and only occasionally take it out to check the time. I simply can't relate to this post, the phone is irrelevant to me in those situations
I have an apple watch but its not the LTE variety so I cannot stream (i've gone all-in on Spotify for like the last decade). I haven't even considered until now that it might have enough onboard storage to store podcast episodes.
Perhaps the wandering happens for these people not on their walks but in their internet / phone browsing? I doubt it really disappeared and it didn’t just change its shape
Whether it's worth to look around, instead of looking at an iPhone, may depend on the city. In my experience, Gdańsk, London, Tallinn and Edinburgh are examples of places where it's nice to walk and look around. Warsaw on the other hand gets depressing quickly. There is something dehumanising about its look and the way it's spacially structured.
> But capitalism cannot tolerate “free” time and space. And, so, at last, we have the iPhone.
To be clear, capitalism has nothing to do with the problem the author brings up in this article. The existence of the iPhone does not imply the overuse of the iPhone, or the misuse of the iPhone. People choose to look at their phones while walking, and I find it as frustrating and ridiculous as the author, but it's got nothing to do with economics.
I don't find these anti-capitalist arguments very compelling, because the downsides of capitalism aren't nearly as bad as the downsides of other economic systems. However, mobile apps are generally trying to occupy as much of your time as possible in order to increase ad revenue, so it's no surprise that people are so glued to their phones. You can imagine, in capitalism's stead, some hypothetical authoritarian economic system where technology and mobile apps are optimized for "living a spiritually rich and diverse human life".
But those are apps, which use the hardware as a distribution mechanism, not the hardware itself. And it's still a matter of choice whether you use, misuse, or abuse those apps. I'll be frank: I think the author is saying that capitalism invented the iPhone to addict otherwise well-adjusted people, whereas I think the truth is probably closer to opposite: users shaped the platform into the most convenient delivery device for the dopamine hits they actually wanted.
It’s unfair to single out iPhone but of course I know what he means. I used to ask for directions and that sometimes lead to interesting conversations when I was lost but google maps has eliminated those opportunities.
Easy to listen to Baudelaire talk about being a flâneur, but also he was living in an apartment on the Île Saint-Louis, in the 4th arrondissement. It doesn't get much more central Paris then that.
I would prefer your father-in-law not take a picture of my face. There are things to take pictures of in cities other than non-consenting people. The "value of candid photography vs consent" debate is ancient at this point, so I won't retread it, but you can guess which side I fall on.
I never see phones out, but I still have to walk around people taking up entire sidewalks and aisles gazing absent-minded at something I can't see. People manage to wander despite the phone in their pocket, and it's annoying.
What we have here is a writer trying desperately to sound deep and failing completely without substance to fill the space. Is "we need to wander" the new "we need to stop writing" (Plato)? I see more and more of these trend pieces, and each is more vapid than the last.
This is why I finally ordered an Apple Watch with cellular, so that I can leave my iphone at home when going for a walk or hike, but still be reachable.
I would have a hard time agreeing with the author, even metaphorically. The author even seems to suggest the iPhone is more of a symptom of broader cultural issues:
> But capitalism cannot tolerate “free” time and space. And, so, at last, we have the iPhone. A device that forces us to look down and ignore changes in light.
Perhaps things are different in different cities, but having one's gaze fixated upon a screen while walking is more of an exception than a rule. Even going about life with earbuds firmly implanted within one's ears is far from universal. Yet that does not make people watching any more interesting. You can attribute that capitalism not tolerating free time and space if you like. Personally, I think it has more to do with our streets being conduits for transportation rather than being appreciated as public spaces. It is not as though capitalism forbids free time. Indeed, much of it depends upon free time. Yet we still live in a world where many people won't go out unless they have a purpose, may that be going from point A to B or going for a jog to get/stay fit. Appreciating one's surroundings appears to be reserved for tourists.
I live in Dublin, and I walk (currently unemployed waiting for masters results and applying) a lot. It's not uncommon for me to spend the better part of the day out just wandering the city. There's definitely a lot of people with their heads in their phones (myself included at times, though I try not to!). I've been pushed off the sidewalk multiple times, or bumped into, by people not looking up where they're walking and just kinda zig-zagging down the sidewalk. Often, they've got their airpods in and their head still in the phone.
I certainly agree that people walk around with their noses in their phone. I see it every day. I also see many more people with earbuds, but I live in a neighbourhood that has an abundance of joggers. The thing that I disagree with is the phone a cause of the social disengagement that we see on the street. There are people who are disengaged because of this technology, yet it is a far cry from the majority of them. Are phones a symptom of social disengagement, sure. But how do you explain all of those people who aren't engaged with their surroundings yet aren't hiding behind technology?
Incidentally, the flickr user koen_jacobs from the title photo is/was a huge spammer.
They had a script running that added new flickr users as contacts (who would then usually add them back), then he would remove them after a month or so.
This is why they have "138.2K Followers•385 Following"
That sort of behaviour really diminished the community on flickr. But at least Koen made it work for them.
I don’t understand the phenomenon of reciprocative following. Is it just an unspoken scheme to artificially inflate each other’s internet points? Like a kind of very low-level corruption?
ahahah, https://www.flickr.com/photos/marikoen/ this one? he seems to be sneaky, but also quite miserable. I have no idea why people do this for imaginary internet points. His photos are also quite boring.
Overall, flickr compared to instagram is so pleasant these days, no spam, just photos and some really good curated group.
Do photographers posting such photos ask people in the photos for permission? I sometimes take such photos, but I don't post them, unless there are many people in them (as opposed to just 1-3), but that means I don't post a lot of really good photos, which is a shame. I'm a bit on the verge about it.
Depending on where you are, asking for permission may be either just good practice (to not be an asshole) or a legal requirement. I believe it's the latter in Belgium, where this photographer is located.
It’s a legal requirement, where I am. I just know of several cases where that wasn’t done. And in the case of that Flickr account I do wonder whether the author stopped the cyclists to ask, where I’d guess he would often maybe not be able to.
I have no idea why people do this for imaginary internet points.
An increasing number of people have trouble telling the difference between the real world and the internet. It has all the hallmarks of mental illness, including compulsion and addiction.
As far as I'm concerned "internet famous" === not famous.
In college, when cell phones were just becoming a thing (the old dumb ones - yes, I’m old), I resisted on similar grounds. I disparagingly referred to a phone as a “leash,” arguing that the mere presence of something that can interrupt you at any moment takes you out of the here and now.
Fast forward 20 years and I always have my phone in my pocket, and it feels like I’m on a leash.
Being able to communicate with anyone at any time is an amazing superpower. But not being able to be reached when you were out in the world was also really valuable. Especially as a young person exploring the world.
I know we can’t go back to that era, but it makes me sad that my kids won’t have the sensation of freedom that comes from bouncing around town with their friends, only searching for a pay phone when it was time to get a ride home.
Tl;dr: The lived experience of childhood seems to have gotten a lot shittier, and I think phones deserve some of the blame.
I don’t get this at all. If you don’t want to be reached just leave your phone at home. Or turn it off. Or switch it to airplane mode. It’s not like owning a phone forces you to actually use it 24/7.
There is a social expectation of reachability. I get texts from friends trying to make plans for <2 hours in the future. My wife asks me to pick up things at the store, or do something for her in the house.
You can turn your phone off or leave it behind, but you are opting out of modern society. My father in law still doesn’t have a phone, and it drives his wife crazy.
For kids? Parents of older children use “taking the phone away” as the ultimate punishment. As I understand it, being a teen without a phone is basically being a pariah.
I can turn my phone off, but I can’t make the rest of the world do it too. Which leads to the scenario described in the article. You can’t amble around and meet people; they’re already busy.
The social expectation of your reachability is learned by the people you interact with (and those they interacted with prior). If you frequently immediately respond, people will assume you will immediately respond in future events. If you do not, they will not have the expectation that you will always be immediately reachable. I am not an immediately reachable person a lot of the time. Not necessarily intentionally, but I can and will go many hours without checking my phone. Everyone in my social circle knows this about me, and yet I still have a social circle.
Will you probably not end up being friends with those who demand plans to always be done last second? If you are always unreachable, maybe. But it's not like you're always going to be unreachable. You might miss out on some spontaneous events once in a while if you're intermittently unreachable... so what?
If you are always slow to reach, you just end up around people who don't only do last second planning. Oh no, isn't that what you wanted?
Your point is valid, but assumes I have a deep enough social pool that I can drop friends and replace them with more compatible communicators. That might or might not be true, but I’m hesitant to test it. I like my friends, other than their stubborn refusal to embrace my anachronistic tendencies.
I think by talking about myself I distracted from my intended point though, which is the experience of being a child in the age of smart phones.
The sense of freedom and adventure of being a teen away from home seems incompatible with having an internet connected device on one’s person.
An anecodte: My neighbors are totally reasonable people. Their teenage daughter was an hour late home from school one day, and not answering her phone. They started canvassing the neighborhood, driving her usual route home, checking to see if any neighbors had seen her. She was fine, she went to get a burger with some friends and her phone was out of batteries.
Nothing about that story strikes me as unreasonable today, but when I was a teenager it would have seemed a ridiculous overreaction. Kids had impromptu hangouts regularly. Rarely would they phone home. Most parents were gone until after 5:00 anyway.
Our culture has changed in a direction that feels sad to me. I feel like something has been lost. It’s clear that this is a minority view on HN. Hopefully that means the average person experiences phone culture as a positive change.
> They started canvassing the neighborhood, driving her usual route home, checking to see if any neighbors had seen her.
That's exactly what would have happened to me, before the age of phones. Unreasonableness of parents has nothing do to with phones.
If anything, having a phone would have helped me stave off my parents and afforded me more freedom (not that it makes their behavior fine, but practically I would have probably been better off).
Yes. That's the whole point. You have a choice. Not only do you have a choice, but you can switch back and forth whenever you like. How can that be a bad thing?
> You can’t amble around and meet people
First, that's not really true. There are plenty of places you can still meet people.
Second, why would you want to "amble around and meet people"? The odds that you will have anything in common with some rando you meet on the street is pretty small. You're much better off using Meetup if you want to meet people.
(And the difficulty of meeting people nowadays has a lot more to do with covid than it does with cell phones.)
I understand your frustration. On the other hand, this reachability seems to be a form of spontaneity. Isn't a text from a friend with an imminent plan pretty spontaneous?
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Instead one chooses a destination and walks toward it. Along the way the route is commodified. Restaurants suggested instead of found. Parks digitally delineated instead of outlined by the contours of our promenades.
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In the UK increasingly one needs a credit/debit card, or a phone capable of NFC payments, to actually pay for things. The big-brand shops have most their self-checkouts as card-only & many shops are increasingly refusing cash. (There really ought to be a law mandating that all physical stores must accept legal tender as a condition of trade - else what is the point in cash?)
The parks and pavements here are increasingly blighted by bright digital advertising. Railway tickets are becoming harder to get in a non-digital form, for one example of the increasing dependence on phones.
Point is, the need for a phone, and a debit/credit card to go to a cafe, to take a train, etc, does remove the spontaneity and an element of joy from the experience. Being forced to carry a google or apple tracking device, or even 'just' a VISA/Mastercard makes me feel tethered to the 'capitalist' system - as this article puts it; but whatever you call it, capitalism or technocracy, the author is right.
Not sure you may understand what legal tender is........
No-one is forced to accept cash in the UK, not even government services, all it means if you owe someone money and you offer to pay them with “legal tender”, whilst they can refuse, they cannot sue you for not paying.
I hate cash. There are places in Belgium where you gotta pay to pee/ooo (no joke). I don’t carry cash nor ID. Only my Apple Watch & maybe my phone.
Now that I’m in the USA it’s so much easier. Contactless everywhere. No need to carry cash or coins.
Plus it makes sure that people pay their dues. I pay my taxes, but the local taco guy around the corner who only accepts cash surely doesn’t. With electronic payments there is transparency.
