It has been a while for me since I’ve posted. Working from home reduced my ‘working’ time in the office so less reading here. But I do remember this being a very nice place for intelligent discussion. And I’ve been thinking about somethings for a while now on my own but thought maybe you guys have already figured it out for me. Or at least have some angles I haven’t considered. Sorry for the intro.
If you’re like me you have a smart phone and enjoy touching it quite a lot. Seeing cat videos, news events, man telling me things I agree with/man telling me about thing that makes me mad(but in a good way). But sometimes I wonder if I really do enjoy touching it.
Maybe others have similar experiences but for one reason or another I’ve lost all social media. Including things like reddit and twitter. My one exception is youtube with youtube shorts. Which is my one window into this world again and I am as susceptible as anyone else. I generally find myself getting annoyed with it for various reasons and end up not using it much.
But with this lack of ‘real’ social media I still find myself wasting time on my phone with sort of similar things. Like scrolling ‘google news’ or some random thing. Or even just playing some game on my phone. I’m not sure my phone usage has gone down at all with the lack of social media. I used to track my wake up time vs my actual getting out of bed time and it didn’t change with the lack of social media.
I used to be sure the root of modern evil was social media and I’m not saying it isn’t. But I find the lack of it not exactly solving the problem. So finally to my real question. Is the real problem just holding entertainment box on you at all times the real problem? Should humans just not have such an easy access to quick, easy entertainment? Kind of like fast food? It’s just too easy to get. Were our parents prophetic when they said don’t sit so close to the TV?
I’m curious of the experiences of others in this regard. I’ve experimented with no phone/limited phone and I just find myself bored. Maybe I didn’t do it for long enough. But I always just end up with the feeling of ‘what am I gaining?’. Similar to a guy from the 1800’s refusing to use plumbing. Is it really worth it? Is there an actual gain?
What kind of a sik question is this? Of course we should! All of technology can be viewed as the quest for better pornography. From the earliest cave paintings and the Venus Of Willendorf, to today’s advanced web cams and all those wonderful sites offering free downloads of bootleg photographs and movies- it has been a long journey. As I stand in awe of how far we have come, I can only wonder where we will go next.
So you think the amount of time people spend on their phones is ideal? That seems like an uncommon opinion to me. For reference I track my time on my phone and it’s usually about 60-90 minutes a day. But I really focus on not looking at it.
My phone is (for various reasons) a flip phone with a miniature screen, and I have bad eyes. So the phone is no problem.
The computer, however, is a huge problem. And I kind of have to have a computer, because there are too many things that I want to do that, in the modern world, I can’t do without it.
I use social media to partially earn a living and from around 2012-2017 it was my primary business. So, there’s an element of needing to use it stay up on developments to some extent, mixed with the idle entertainment scrolling thing. I try to limit my use to NOT “shorts” but substantive information that has some relevance to my life. I’m more likely to consume 2-3 hour videos, music, etc but in a way where it’s not monopolizing my time.
While I stand by my first post, I’d like to give a more complete answer.
I definitely do not spend too much time on my phone. This is for several reasons. First, I work from home. Why use my phone when I have my personal laptop on the desk right next to my work laptop? I also find it very hard, bordering on physically painful to type on my phone.
I do not think I spend too much time on my laptop either. The only social media I am on are Facebook, the Straight Dope, and the Giraffe Boards. I am on Facebook primarily because it is an excellent way to communicate with people I already know. All my posts are friends list only. If I need to announce anything to all my friends, I just need to make one post instead of sending a bunch of e-mails. I can also stay in contact with friends who have moved far away very easily.
Bakc in college, to meet a requirement I took a class on the evils of alcohol. No question, drunk driving is bad. No question alcoholism is a very bad thing. The teacher and all the materials went much further- all alcohol was bad, wrong and evil. At the time, I thought this was ridiculous. The impatient driver who killed my niece was very likely over the legal limit for alcohol. We cannot say for sure. We do know that the crash caused her severe leg injuries, yet she refused medical treatment. The best explanation is that she was legally drunk. She knew a blood test would show that she was legally drunk. So, she avoided medical treatment to avoid the blood test. I still think that class and that teacher were ridiculous. Alcohol did not kil my niece. A drunk woman who knew she shoud not have been driving did.
It is the same with the viewpoint in your OP. Yes, the internet comes with some problems and some people will over indulge. This does not mean that the internet or social media are wron, bad and evil. It means they are jusr like every other technological advance in the history of humanity. Should we be careful not to over indulge? Certainly. Should we shun the internet on basic princilple? Certainly not.
My lunch break is ending, so I cannot watch the clip right now. However, I know of several companies actually working in the field. The device I have seen advertised involves the user inserting the penis into a cylinder. The cylinder the provides various sensations in synch with a POV video of a porn actress or actor being penetrated. I do not remember company or product names. I would rather not search for them. But, I am not making this up.