I agree in theory. In practice, not on the trajectory we as a species are on. We may be clever in some ways, but we couldn’t be more stupid in others. In that much-discussed book, The Dawn of Everything, the authors’ premise was exactly yours; they showed with a plethora of usually-ignored historical and pre-historical examples, that humans have often opted out of culture-ways we consider to be inevitable, including cities, agriculture, and the hegemony of the state.
But not recently. Since we are careering ever-faster toward the end of a human-supporting biosphere, through our blind greeds, I doubt we any longer have the time to opt out of anything.
Most of those “Gen Xers and older millenials” who supposedly want to go back to pre-Internet days would scream like stuck pigs if Internet access was disabled on their cellphones.
There has always been shallow entertainment. Forty years ago people were complaining about how those young people spend all day sitting around watching TV.
I feel the same way regarding expectations with phones and texting. Given the choice I guess i’d set things at approx the year 2000 internet. I had just gotten broadband but the internet still had that quirky and fun 90s feel. (Also the SDMB was much more active.)
I’d gladly dump my smartphone and go back to a landline and answering machine if I could convince everyone else to go along with me.
I like this post very much. I do wonder if the problem is better labelled not as “modernity,” but as “capitalism,” which forces technological change on people to make a profit rather than actually address needs directly.
I’m divided on this one. It’s much easier now to find listings and blast out resumes. But in the old days, in some cases it was acceptable to hand deliver it. That was usually just to a receptionist or occasionally an HR person but it gave you a chance to make an initial impression on someone who may put in a favorable word for you. Nowadays it can feel like you’re just sending them out into the void even if you do get an automated reply.
I hate hate hate what social media has done to society, but I love the ease of access to information that is now available. Just yesterday my wife and I were taking a walk and saw a squirrel-like animal we didn’t recognize. I pulled out my phone and took a photo, did a Google image search, and identified it as a California ground squirrel, and learned all about its distribution, habitat and lifecycle.
On the same walk we saw a mass stranding of Velella on the beach. She had never seen them before, so I told her what I know about them. When we got home she looked them up, read an article about them and watched a couple of videos and learned about their lifecycle. Before the Internet, this would have taken a trip to a large library and a search through multiple books. Basically it would have taken the better part of a day to learn what she learned in 10 minutes on the Internet. No, I wouldn’t go back to those days.
Isn’t this the usual “things used to be better than they are now”? People have always complained about things changing. Something about aging slowly switches the human brain from risk-biased to caution-biased. We want to surround ourselves with the familiar. I see it in myself and others.
Born in '60. So everyone that took that poll and wants to go back in time, filled out the poll how?
I certainly don’t want to go back. Sure, I have more to think about, and am flooded with information. 90% of which is horse shit. But that in itself has made me a much more critical thinker. And I don’t have to look if I don’t want to.
I’m 100 miles away from my home and also my office right now. I don’t actually have an office to go to anymore unless you call the loft above my bedroom my office (which I do). I also have an office 100 miles away from my home office.
My employers are getting more out of me, but I am benefiting in many, many ways. Too many to count really.
I am helping take care of a dying cousin. But, I can be at work in about 20 seconds. This is absolutely fantastic. Something never dreamed of in the 60’s.
I think those that voted they want to go back in time have not put much thought into it.
I’m a bit old for the question, born in 1951, but I was on the ARPANet in 1975, and joined Bell Labs in 1980. The term Internet was adopted in 1983, but there were were tons of networks you could be on before that. I wouldn’t give it up, but I try to limit myself to not drinking from the fire hose. I could live without news feeds, but Google Maps is pretty useful.
The biggest downside when I was working was that you were always available. Not a problem any more.
In 1993 or so I was going to Madrid. I asked a Mike Oldfield mailing list I was on for places where I could buy some of his stuff, which is easier to get in Europe. In no time at all I had the location of a used CD store in Madrid. I found this place in the middle of Madrid, walked in, and bought some bootlegs. On of the guys in my group who went on the trip with me couldn’t believe it. I could probably download it today, but this was pre-Web.
The headline seems to me to invole a common conflation of the technology by itself as a concept vs. the technology as used and applied.
I would not want to go back, and I believe many people if you poll them more in depth really mean that they’d hop on the time machine to try to make sure Twitter-as-we-know-it and the doubleclick tracking cookie never happen. But like Voyager said, we don’t have to drink from the firehose. We can pick and choose. The big problem is that the consumer culture encourages just taking the easy way and letting things happen.
I say it’s a combination – and in our IRL timeline our modernity is intertwined with the rise of capitalism.
Ulfreida starts by making a very critical point: all use of technology does change people and society – regardless of the level of the technology. Wheels and metalwork; writing and large-structure-building; the printing press and gunpowder; the steam engine and the telegraph; public sanitation; automobiles and radio/tv; computers and the internet, now AI. All made you live differently in the “after”. But it’s the increasing differential speed of change that has been turning harder to adapt to in some cases.
Then yes there’s the capitalistic aspect and the Tragedy-of-the-Commons matter of unintended consequences and externalities in pursuit of once profit and nowadays “share value trending growth” for their own sake . “Social Media” relied on the strong “engagement” algorithm and tracking to sell itself as something worth investing in, because all those “engaged” people would be consumer eyeballs for advertising. Buuuut… “engagement” in a vaccuum meant the algorithm rewarded that which prompted reactions no matter what were people engaged with… so critical thinkers who don’t click on everything and don’t retweet every brainfart become devalued by not being as “engaged” as the fools and jerks, and the business that says “We will advertise only morally and ethically!” gets creamed.
Nowadays you blast them out to an algorithm that decides if you have the correct keywords, salary request, etc for a human being to even look at it or if it just gets auto-deleted.
The Gen X part is definitely click bait. The results seem to be:
Age
Unplug
18-34
63%
35-54
77%
>55
60%
Yeah, 77>63, but is it really that much of a difference? That is going to depend on how many people in each group, and is that driven by the 35-40, or across the whole range? Also, what is with the age breaks? If they’d really wanted Boomer/X/Millennial/Z they’d have picked different breaks.
“65% of adults want to unplug” seems like a fine headline to me, but I guess stoking generational divides seemed better to the editor.
There is also the other option, that this was one of the only ways the data could be divided that told any kind of story, so it’s what they used.
I’m a Gen-X’er. I’m mostly fine with the connectivity we have now. One problem that a lot of folks struggle with is undue stress over topics that have no direct impact on their lives. We’re constantly flooded with faces trying to convince us to think this, or buy that, or support this. And if you don’t do this then you’re not [insert inadequacy factor] enough.
And the common tendency to romanticize the past is a big part of this too.
I was born in 1961, and my household was one of the earlier adopters of the internet - not cutting-edge, but Mr. Legend worked for MITS in the late 70s, so we always had computers at home, and we had dial-up access by the early to mid 90s. I would not go back.
When I was a kid, if I wanted to learn more about a subject, my mom would point me to our sets of encyclopedias. I’d start out with the Funk & Wagnall’s children’s version, then move on to the full majesty of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. If the topic I was researching had any developments since 1968, I could look at the yearbooks for more current information. And if that didn’t do it, I could wait until Saturday, when my mom had time to take us to the library. As you might imagine, if I had an idle interest in something, I just didn’t bother.
When I first got a cellphone, it did bug me that people could always call me and expect to reach me. However, I learned to manage that expectation through the magic of voicemail, and once everyone started texting, it got even better. Now it’s just a matter of exercising the self-discipline needed to ignore the phone until I’m ready to use it.
I think this is the core of people’s dissatisfaction with the internet and modern communications in general. Nothing about it dictates that you have to use it in unhealthy ways, but it’s really tempting to do so.
It’s a clickbait piece with a clickbait headline. The poll was “exclusive”, meaning we’ll probably never see the actual questions employed.
Not so WAG, but I figure they had a question phrased in a such a misleading way that most people took it to mean if they would prefer it to be easier, like it was before modern times, to unplug from constant connectivity. And I think most of us would also answer “yes” to something phrased like that. Equating that to a desire to turn back the clock is the clickbait part - and not coincidentally, something like 95% of the content they provide.
