> No one feels connected, present, alive, embodied, or sexy when they’re on their phone all day.
I feel like the blame is misplaced. People are on their phones all day because of social media. The phone is just a convenient access point. I suspect without socials, the phone would be considered just a really handy tool [0] rather than the growing consensus that it's some kind of social menace.
[0] that some nerds go too far with, like the computer
> [...] Why walk into a store in Soho and see what’s on offer when you can stay home and scroll the entire inventory from the comfort of your couch? Why go to the library to find books about a topic that interests you when you can look it up on Wikipedia in two minutes and move on with your day?
> Instantaneous access to everything obviously comes at a cost. The cost being that we all behave like demented Roman emperors, at once bored and deranged, summoning whatever we want at any time.
Even without social media, we still would have the instant gratification that the author proposes as a problem.
Correct, but social media takes the problem and turns it up to 11. It's odd how people seem defensive about it. If you use social media, you are being manipulated. Full stop. It's not only if you're uneducated, or not technical, or unaware of it's impact, or whatever. You are being manipulated. Full stop. Not only that, you are being manipulated by some of the best and brightest minds of a generation. To pretend this isn't problem is basically Stockholm syndrome at this point.
Online shopping and Wikipedia were a thing years before smartphones though. In the post-cell but pre-smart era that the author is glamorizing, you could already scroll inventory and look things up on Wikipedia from the comfort of your own home.
The actual problem is that there are still physical stores and libraries. These should have all gone away decades ago to be replaced with something that you can't instantly find online.
Society is still run buy nostalgic boomers who don't know how to use a computer and this is yet another example of the friction it causes.
Despite the existence of phones, apps and websites this decade is, so far, the best for national park visitation. The same is probably true for local parks, Because as of today home VR isn't at that level. That's despite the lockdown dip.
Nobody wants to go the library to look for a book that probably isn't there only to have a chance encounter with their future wife. It's fantastical thinking and designing a society around that expected user behavior is a gross misallocation of resources at best and dangerous at worst.
Social media existed before the iPhone/android. I remember needing to be at home on my computer to check myspace, xanga, and even thefacebook. Not sure how I feel about this article (it's interesting at least) but the existence of phones/apps does coincide with a lot of changes to our relationship with social media and a lot of changes to social media itself.
Perhaps without smartphones in everyone's pocket we would use social media much differently and that industry would have grown differently....
You did have to be more deliberate about it though. Checking socials and posting to socials required physically going to your computer, sitting down, and doing it. It wasn't something you could just to absent-mindedly with the convenience of just putting your hand in your pocket.
And we sat at home and waited for mIRC, ICQ, or MSN Messenger to chirp, of course.
What really changed is that good old Moore's law delivered systems where personalized feeds are not just possible, but they are the norm. And with a bit of tweaking, add infinite scrolling, spice up the recommender system to inject a bit of noise/variance, and ... voila! you are in a nice Skinner box.
My approach is to block the majority of notifications and have no social media apps. Now it is a phone with some handy features like maps, music and a web browser.
You can't separate phones from social media, they have a symbiotic relationship and feed off of each other.
Without smartphones, social media would be much less pervasive and much less toxic, because people would not have an internet connected camera with them at all times. Fewer posts means less engagement, and even more importantly having to bring and then open up a laptop would pose a major barrier to doomscrolling behaviors. Some would do it anyway—there were lots of us who spent a lot of time online before Facebook—but not anything like as many as do now, which means it wouldn't be normalized. And without normalization, social media as it exists today couldn't really exist.
So, yeah, phones without socials would be tools. But phones created social media in the incredibly toxic form it exists in today.
The real social menace is how few "third spaces" are available without some sort of overlarge fee. Instead every location is surrounded by large parking lots so we are further isolated by driving everywhere.
I feel like the blame is misplaced. People are on their phones all day because of social media. The phone is just a convenient access point. I suspect without socials, the phone would be considered just a really handy tool [0] rather than the growing consensus that it's some kind of social menace.
[0] that some nerds go too far with, like the computer