The addiction of reaching for the smartphone every 18-30 seconds to check and see if I’ve got email. If someone sent me a note. If some news flash is worth reading.
I’ve been trying to force myself to stop hovering over the screen and look at people on the subway or bus. Actual eye contact. Being engaged in the line at the market. Reading a newspaper or book.
Taking time to formulate a thought.
The hypocrisy of reaching for the smartphone at simultaneously resenting it when my S.O. does the same thing because it means that she’s stopped listening in mid-conversation. ( I am 100% equally guilty of this )
I’m tired of the negative undercurrents of it. Of the snarky slamming and catty to and fro pandemic on every single example of social media.
The SDMB has become a slamfest. Back in the day, someone expert in an area who provided first-person expertise was regarded as an expert in the field. Now, no cite is enough. Worst part is, I can’t stop.
I’d love to walk down a street in NYC and see someone- SOMEONE- not completely detached from their physical environment.
I’m beyond bemusement or even contempt for those people walking out into traffic and getting hit. They’re sick. They cannot detach long enough to save their lives.
I pushed a hand truck full of equipment cases up 5th avenue today from 38th street to 48th street. Had no choice. Yes, it’s the Holiday season and I saw a handful of utterly delightful moments. I also had to quickly avoid having knuckleheads who had disengaged so fully that they were as likely to walk into my hand truck as they were to walk into a truck barreling through an intersection on a green light.
It is a symptom and the disease has so few upsides.
I still refuse to use a cell phone. My husband has an iPhone, and I won’t even answer it. I read, I talk to people I look at stuff. I live a real life.
I’ve found I’m not so interested in surfing the 'net either. I cancelled my FB page a week ago, it’s way too contentious for my taste.
In fact, I think I’ll go for a walk.
I don’t have any kind of portable electronic device at all, not even an MP3 player. All my computing is desk-bound. But having said that, it’s where I sit 90% of any waking day, from the moment I stagger into the living room, to the moment I head off to bed, with only occasional forced interruption for shopping, travel, or the rare event of socialising.
Not having a mobile phone or tablet means I have breaks away, because I know that I would be just like most other people, even as I silently resent this constant connectivity we’re slaves to.
People are shocked and amazed that I don’t have a cellphone. Some are horrified, others express admiration. All over something that seems normal to me. I freely acknowledge that I’m addicted to the internet, but I’m not so needy that I can’t wait until I sit down at my computer to get a hit.
As to the upsides? Well, the perpetual connection may not have much to offer there, but the internet itself is making some amazing things possible. Things like Child’s Play or Kickstarter wouldn’t have come about without it. It’s helping regular folks organize to fight big moneyed interests in politics. It’s made a wealth of information available (along with a plague of misinformation, I’ll grant) to just about everyone. It’s transforming the way we construct our culture, sieving treasures from the murky waters of the past for us to build on.
So, the best answer I can give–short of completely giving up the extraordinary benefits the internet provides–is that you should learn how to tell it to bugger off when you need to. Turn your phone off. Take the battery out, if necessary. Make it a little more inconvenient to indulge the impulse to “just check” stuff. Hell, leave it at home sometimes. It won’t kill you–or, at least, it hasn’t killed me yet.
Personally, I love my gadgets. I also enjoy the ability to communicate with friends and family who live several hours away. Anyway, it sounds more like you’re tired of the effect the internet has on you than of the internet itself. Take steps to decrease the power the internet has on you. Blame the player (yourself), not the game.
What is this non-virtual world of which you speak? Does it really exist, or is it just a whistful fantasy? We all like to daydream about a place where people really exist and aren’t just avatars, but to succumb to these imaginations is evidence of losing your grip on virtual reality. You just need to play more video games.
You don’t have to stop playing with your cellphone* but if you are actually tired of it, you can let it go. I mean, I don’t have a smartphone. I do have a Kindle, and if I anticipate long waits, I usually take it with me - but by no means all the time. I still read, and talk to people, and make eye contact.
*I do deeply resent this whole habit people have of while in a conversation, picking up that fucking cell phone and reading their e-mails. They are totally disengaged from the conversation. I just had this happen yesterday - we were out at our holiday luncheon for work, and one of the participants, while directly engaged in a conversation, started reading her cellphone. This has become so ubiquitous people don’t even think twice. It’s unbelievably rude.
As Samuel Johnson famously said, “Sir, when a man is tired of the Internet, he is tired of life.”
However, I do all my internetting on my computer at home or at work, mostly when I’m alone.
I have this theory. That another 30 years from now give or take your average person will be amazed that some people do shit like scuba dive or rock climb or snow ski. Not because they seem a little risky. But because they can’t imagine going for even more than even a few moments without constant electronic exposure and interaction.
Even now I am noticing that some people are starting to get a bit uneasy at campgrounds without an internet connection and/or poor cell coverage.
Well, I look at real stuff, not just pictures of stuff. I talk to real people, not pictures of people.
I’m not saying your way has no place in the world, but should it really be your whole world? Won’t we end up like the people in the floaty chairs in the movie Wall-e?
Just my opinion.
I lived without any phone at all for 4 years, with almost no internet access for longer (I didn’t own a computer between 2004-2010, though I was using my ex’s computer regularly starting in 2009, the year I joined the Dope). I did not make eye contact with strangers, much less talk to them if I could help it, the horror! You live in NYC, you should understand that no one wants this!
These days I have a $12 cellphone with which I send texts and, much more rarely, make calls. I own a laptop and spend a fair amount of my free time on the internet, when I am at home, which is not all that much most days. My life is the richer for both; I can stay in touch with, and share with, people I value this way, and there’s a huge wealth of information at my fingertips.
If you don’t like being shackled to technology, cut off your shackles (ie trade in your iPhone for something basic and read a book at the bus stop) and stop being so dramatic.
I recently started working fulltime at a job where there is no internet access and use of cellphones is regulated strictly, and I do confess I’m rather enjoying the ‘old school’ feeling of it, but it’s not like my co-workers and I sit around and gaze into each others eyes while we sing Kumbaya and wonder at the bliss of freedom from the incessant beeping of our cell phones. Right now most of them choose to pass the idle time at our job they might waste on their smartphones somewhere else, on reading not only 50 Shades of Gray, but also all the other series of dirty novels which are riding the coattails of 50 Shades success… not a lot of lofty ideals about the meaning of human connection and experiencing life fully to be found, there
More than once, my husband and I have been at a restaurant, and near us will be a table of 4 people, all staring at their little screens. Even sadder, to me, is when it’s obviously a family out together, but apart.
My last job before retiring was in a secure facility - cell phones were not permitted, and it was glorious! After sharing a cubicle with an idiot who was running his side business while he was supposed to be doing the job that was paying him, I loved that the only phones were the ones on our desks! Sadly, my new temp position is with a company that as no issues with cells phones. And the worst of those have moronic musical ringtones that go on and on when the owners step away from their desks and leave the phones behind. :mad:
I have a cell phone. It sits in my car. I don’t think half a dozen people have the number, and it’s rare for me to answer it since I’m rarely in my car these days. I couldn’t use it to surf anyway - it’s a $20 basic phone - remember the olden days when you had to write using the number pad? That’s why I won’t text, either.
I’m not tired of the internet, but I find I have reduced my time on line in recent years, and I really don’t miss it.
I like to read newspapers on my smartphone when I’m on a train or in a waitingroom.
I used to read while walking down the street. I used to write letters to my SO while attending lectures. Sometimes I read the paper behind the wheel when traffic was really bad.
People’s behaviors haven’t changed as much as some Luddites think.
A smartphone is just a convenient tool. There is nothing you can do with it that we couldn’t do a 100 years ago. Back then nobody was interested in the person sitting next to them in the train, only now we have internet acces while daydreaming in the restroom.
