My phone hardly rings at home anymore (yes, I do still have a landline). And I can’t remember the last time a friend called just to chat.
I used to think that this would mean that people who planned to be politicians would have to carefully guard their online presence.
Now I think that it won’t matter at all, and you can already see it happening. You can find plenty of video of candidates saying and doing truly absurd things right now, and it doesn’t seem to be affecting their popularity. Who would give a shit if someone found a 20-year old video of them being an idiot?
The ubiquity of portable music players (now that they’re all built into our phones) has allowed people to create a semi-private space in public. Go to any large city, and the number of people wearing headphones while walking around is astonishing. It’s a way to get some sense of distance in a crowded space. This isn’t that new technologically (we had Walkmen in the 80s), but the cultural norms have changed drastically since then.
Shared cultural experiences are waning. Once upon a time, everyone watched pretty much the same television programs and read the same newspapers. There are still massive cross-cultural hits, but the democratization of publishing on the internet means that the tail on the distribution curve keeps getting longer and we have increasingly distinct subcultures. This is related to the news echo chamber (people tend to hear opinions and news that justify their worldview), but it’s much broader.
I think a new, more distant level of intimacy is forming. There’s people on my Facebook that I honestly never expect to talk to again but I like seeing the big events of their life as they come up. Getting to know someone, making a good friend or a romantic partner, also has this new phase, when you’re texting each other comments or thoughts. It’s much less intrusive than actually calling someone, and for me, at least, I think it really helps me make friends out of people that would otherwise have been forever acquaintances.
Using my nieces as a small sample size, teenagers these days don’t care much about driving. They fight to make the other one drive so they can sit in the passenger seat and text the whole time.
Message boards are declining.
I would imagine that Social media makes the ability to reinvent yourself much more difficult for two reasons:
-
You don’t have to loose touch with your old friends if you don’t want to.
-
Your old self is literally in writing for all to see (unless you take steps to remove it, of course).
I went far away for College and I really missed the tight group of friends I left behind but cutting those links and starting fresh helped me become a better person who was completely different than the person I was in many ways. Some because that is just growing up and some because I took the opportunity of having a clean slate to consciously change myself.
I can imagine that if I had today’s technology I probably would have never let go of my old friends to the extent that I did (some of whom I am still very good friends with for what that’s worth). It would have just been too easy not too. That crutch would have also probably made it harder to make new ones.
I wouldn’t have been able to change myself as easily because I would have still been living in the old dynamic I had in High School. I honestly can’t even comprehend what it would be like growing up today.
When I left high school I quickly lost touch with nearly everyone. My kids are still very connected on Facebook etc., and they tell us the status of people they have not seen for 15 years or so. Community is no longer influenced by geography.
Money is now imaginary to me. This causes all sorts of issues (like bouncing “checks” or spending money I don’t have). To wit:
Of course I get paid via direct deposit, but now my company doesn’t even issue paper paycheck stubs anymore. I have to log in to the payroll company’s website if I want to look at my paycheck. So my paycheck is imaginary; it’s just pixels on a screen. (Unless I choose to print it out, which I never have any reason to do.)
Then all my bills are set up on online banking. I do not own checks. I moved all my imaginary money (I signed a piece of paper and carried it from one institution to another and Boom! I’ve changed banks! Magic!) to a credit union about five years ago and never bothered to order checks. I have encountered exactly one situation where I had to go to the CU and get them to cut me a check and that was to pay off a car (and CarMax wouldn’t have taken a personal check; I’d have had to go to the CU anyway).
My bills are imaginary too. With a couple exceptions, they are all emailed to me electronically. I have no reason to reconcile my account because of online banking. I can watch transactions go through using the CU’s app on my phone.
If the internet were to disapparate or something, or say a big hurricane hit and there was no electricity here for say… a month, I have no idea how I’d get to my money or be able to prove how much I do or don’t have. I couldn’t prove bills were paid or even check to see if payment had been received yet.
It’s so weird to me. Money is just pixels on a screen to me now and when I do have cash in hand, I forget to use it because whipping out my debit card is such an ingrained habit. I’ll carry cash around for weeks before I remember I have it and that it can be used to obtain things. I feel completely disconnected from my finances now. Even my credit card debt seems imaginary. I just do math a couple times a month, electronically of course…
As Homo Sapiens devolved to Homo Interneticus rudeness and vulgarity became the norm.
Is that really that different? Most of the reason that driving was so valued is that it increases your freedom. You can go where you want to go when you want.
But once you can drive, and you’re already going where you want to go, would you really want to be the one behind the wheel? It’s just a chore at that point.
My impression is that the actual act of driving is a rotten experience for most people. If you pay attention to the driver, they spend much more time frustrated, telling other cars (who can’t hear them) to move, etc. People behind the wheel are not in a good mood.
Sure, it’s awesome to go for a peaceful drive in the country or zoom through some curvy hills, but that’s maybe 0.1% of the driving most of us do. Actual driving, with other cars and traffic signals is frustrating drudgery.
It was for me and my friends; we all fought over who got to drive. I always drove when with my parents. Nothing was cooler than driving with your arm out the window and being an ADULT. Now it just gets in the way of texting.
I’d be harder pressed to think of something which isn’t changing because of technology.
I wish I’d chimed in before on this, because it’s really interesting to me, and now I’m going to make a statement which will be a bit of a drive-by, because it’s late and I have a lot of problems with you people and I don’t have the time to air my grievances 
In a nut shell, I think socially, a lot of people have become lazy, socially retarded assholes. I am aware that that doesn’t apply to *everyone *- certainly no one here (:)) - but in my opinion the social mores that technology has wrought are not a step forward.
To be clear, I’m mostly thinking of the way we communicate / interact on a personal level. On the surface, I don’t have many issues with the internet or the ease of obtaining entertainment. But like everything thing else, give humans the ability to do something and they have to misuse / abuse it.
Certainly human nature doesn’t really change and we’ll all find a way to be dickheads using whatever tools are at hand. That said, I would honestly forgo the convenience of instant information if it meant we could wind back the clock to before the days of people walking around staring at some device ,oblivious to the world and the people around them and acting like a douche bag was the norm. It seems to be the default and it’s sad and disgusting.
Please feel free to make many lawn getting off of jokes. Not sure what my apparent major malfunction is; I’m not that old and there was a time I was quite the social butterfly, if you will. The new way of doing things, which I witnessed first hand when they started and which some of you here kindly deciphered for me in another thread, literally are of very little interest to me.
The decrease of telephone conversations
I think it is a big difference. When I turned 16, way back in 1998, getting a driver’s license and your first car was a major milestone on the road to adulthood, and something to strive for and celebrate when you achieved it. Everybody wanted the freedom to move around, get out from under our parents’ roofs, and go to places of our own chose. Driving was definitely cool. It doesn’t seem to have the same vibe for teenagers today, not at all.
Also, nobody learns how to tinker with car engines anymore. If you pop open the hood of a car, all you see is a big plastic covering over the engine. People who are born today will probably never see a cylinder or spark plug, with the exception of the few who become mechanics.
Yeah, when I got my license it was “Mom, do you need anything at the store? No? Are you sure?” My kids are old enough to have gone through the same thing, interesting that today’s kids are different.
Not just cars, but all kinds of stuff. My brother was good at fixing TVs by bringing the tubes in for testing. Setting up Wifi on an early computer of mine required a USB Wifi card and setting some dip switches. Hell, you even had to load drivers back then. Now it is all done for you unless you have issues.
Express Line to Hell in a Handcart.
Perhaps attitudes will change. “This guy didn’t have any youthful indiscretions? Like he’s been planning to run for president since he was a teenager? That’s fuckin’ creepy; if all he’s ever cared about is winning elections, he must be some sort of power-hungry psychopath. I’m not voting for him.”
Eh, Obama was pretty open about his youthful foibles and it doesn’t seem to have hurt him. And while GWB tried to avoid the issue, his youthful (or “youthful”, since he seemed to have issues extending into his late twenties) indiscretions were an open secret.
Even pre-Facebook, the public seems pretty willing to forgive a certain degree of youthful hijinks.
I intended to make a comment similar to this, but you’ve phrased it very well. My kids are as connected as any, but also have interests outside their phones. Going thru high school, both were frustrated at the inability of their peers to plan any sort of journey or event in advance. Planning a weekend journey many days in advance was literally impossible. Their friends could not reliably stick to a plan for more than a few hours. Even after reservations and prep was made, no shows and last minute cancellations were the norm. Apparently it isn’t even considered rude to take a “better offer” at the last minute.
FWIW: These are popular kids, Homecoming court etc. They weren’t being shunned. Their friends’ time horizons simply didn’t extend past the coming evening.