Around 2014 I was invited to a birthday party. The party location was in a cellar bar in a narrow side street in the medieval city center. In the bar was absolutely no cell reception and even if you ascended the stairs and went infront of the door you only had Edge. There was no Wifi.
It felt magical. Like the parties we had in the before smartphone era. Each gust arrived their phone in their hand, noticed that there is absolutely no reception and just put it away. So people talked, joked and debated. With anyone staring at their phone.
Sounds nice, but it shouldn't take -that- for people to interact with each other. It's so incredibly rude to dick with your phone at a gathering of friends, yet so common, especially among but not exclusive to younger people.
I went to a small superbowl gathering once with some folks I didn't know(friends of friend), where the host quite literally spent the entire time on their phone, reading twitter. They'd announce "someone posted 'x'" about a play or commercial. The others would feign laughter, then go back to playing with their phones until they heard cheering or laughing. I left at halftime in disbelief people operated this way.
I guess I'm equally surprised that people on a forum built around an industry that relies on people being glued to these devices are surprised, in 2023, that the industry has succeeded in that effort.
Yet expecting some harsh top-down measure to deal with it is often as useless as expecting the drug addiction epidemic to end if only drugs were illegal. Ultimately we need to not only put effort into hard limits tech-wise for those in exploitative/extreme situations but most importantly developing social awareness and strategies to deal with the issue.
Not having a phone at the dinner table (with family, with friends, etc), for example, could easily become a social norm/taboo, and it already is for most people I know already. The benefit of these rules (vs more aggressive top-down rules like no phones in the venue period) are there can be exceptional exceptions when you really need to be on-call.
While I'm sympathetic to the motivations behind stuff like gov/venue controls for stuff like this, in practice it's usually a much tougher social issue that needs to be nurtured rationally/carefully, with respect towards those tangibly victim to the downsides. We all are inclined to seek cheap boogie men to blame for social issues but we also tend to disregard the downsides of the utility of hard/aggressive rules while simultaneously being fully aware of the natural inclination to bypass such rules when it matters.
Drugs are a poor comparison. I can make many drugs in my basement using cheap and widely available supplies. I cannot make a highly available global network optimized by corporate psychologists to be as addictive as possible.
If we decided to we could have our government snuff them out for good in a single bill.
This is definitely dependent on the group of people, but if you have like 2 or 3 people doing it, everyone ends up doing it. Nobody wants to talk to a person on their phone, even if they can multitask
Rudeness is subjective and based on implied social agreements that a) change, and b) are not as universal as they are assumed to be.
Based on my personal experience I can agree that if someone uses their phone in a gathering of people it can disconnect them from those people, and that some people see “choosing to disconnect” as disrespectful, but I think that to unilaterally call that disconnection rude is to ignore the world we’re currently living in as well as the legitimate chance that those people are addicted beyond their control.
This is a generic argument that could be used anytime a negative word is deployed. "That's just the world we live in, and they might not be able to help it, poor dears!" It's so soft it's difficult to find a hard point to attach an argument to, "nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so," rewritten in warm spit.
> It felt magical. Like the parties we had in the before smartphone era
This comment feels very foreign to me.
Very rarely do I encounter someone so glued to their phone that they can't interact at a social event. Usually that person doesn't engage much with other people and eventually stops getting invited to future events because they're simply not showing any interest in socializing. I don't even understand how someone works their way into a friend group if they're too attached to their phone to be socializing.
It's weird to hear about groups of friends who are all so attached to their phones that they can't interact unless forcibly separated from them (or from reception). And that's coming from someone with a very tech-heavy group of friends.
> Very rarely do I encounter someone so glued to their phone that they can't interact at a social event.
It's not like someone doesn't interact at all. But all those tiny distractions went away. No quick glance at a messenger, or social media, or looking something up.
I'll be honest, in my experience, being tech-heavy ≠ tech-dependant, If anything some tech-heavy people are hyper aware of their usage and actively avoid it in social settings
This would be a really nice restaurant/bar idea, too bad cell phone jammers are illegal in the US. Maybe you could layer your walls with foil to naturally block antennas?
It seems like it’s probably legal. Might want to provide a reception-available area to give people the option of stepping out to check their phone, similar to a smoking area.
I know it's not good in aggregate, but I miss smokey bars, even though I don't smoke myself. The smoke made everything look sort of softer, and the smoke hid some other odours of bars. :-)
There was also a defacto "tradition" on campus, you saw coats and shirts on balconies and then you knew they'd been to a bar last night. :-D
I thought I did too, but now I live somewhere where there are plenty of smoky bars, and the novelty wore off quickly. It's just a pain having to deal with clothes drenched in smoke after an evening out, when you have experienced not ever having to deal with that. Knowing that all bars are smokefree is much easier than having to remember which ones are and which aren't.
Maybe this could be like, neo brutalism. Purposefully use materials in locations that are cel reception dead zones.
If you wanna get all covert & secret agent ish, then have data harvesting agents plant lil doohickeys that extend range lol. Now you got some neo noir sci-fi cyberpunk espionage actions a-brewin.
AFAIK, while active signal jammers are illegal, passive signal jammers are legal. You should be fine just covering your walls in chickenwire (though this works for wifi frequencies, not sure about cellular frequencies).
No, the mesh doesn’t block everything. In the case of using your rule of thumb (1/10th wavelength), it’ll reduce the signal strength by about 33db if my math is right.
Our local ski resort has no cell reception, and it's magic. When you sit on the charlift you always talk to strangers. In the lodge everyone has their eyes up and is talking, and even when waiting for a lift people actually chat and laugh and joke.
I genuinely hope they never build a tower up there.
I seriously doubt phone reception is stopping people talking to strangers on ski lifts. People aren't generally on their phones on ski lifts even where there is reception.
It felt magical. Like the parties we had in the before smartphone era. Each gust arrived their phone in their hand, noticed that there is absolutely no reception and just put it away. So people talked, joked and debated. With anyone staring at their phone.