Looks like we're officially into the "responding to tone" and "ad hominem" area of Graham's Hierarchy of Disagreement, and it only took 57 responses.
As for alarm clocks, are you kidding me? You need to pay $100+ a month so your phone can be an alarm clock? You know they sell those for $8.99 at Target? And get this, with the Target ones, you don't even have to remember to recharge them! Isn't that amazing?
As for GPS, my goodness, the complainypants level here is high. Can you believe it, I actually use paper maps. Paper maps are the bicycles of mustachianism. They also don't require an investment of $100+ per month.
As the person who brought up these uses, I can't help but feel that some of your disdain is directed at me.
....
And you can get off your high horse for not wanting a smart phone like some of us do. Why don't you go back to the typewriter while you're at it too.
Sure am glad your reasons for owning that slab of technology aren't bringing the worst out of you, Sylly.
Nobody is immune, folks. Nobody. (Not even me!) The first step is admitting you're human, and this is what this sort of technology can do to human behavior. Awareness of the problem is the first step. I'm sorry for singling you out specifically, Sylly, but when one's handed a great object lesson to a talking point...
I guess--since we've talked so much about addiction and alcoholism--it makes sense to compare the IPD response to teetotalism. The heart is in the right place, but I think it makes too strong a claim and doesn't really understand the benefits. If your only interaction with alcohol was walking in to a bar at ten AM, you would think everyone was an alcoholic and you would see booze as only a negative thing. This is what's happening when everyone you see with a phone has their phone out. You're only seeing the people who brought out their phone. Selection bias.
I finally understand where the failure to communicate between us lies. I'm
hardly a technological teetotaler... I'm a systems administrator, for crying out loud! My entire guide is built around helping people
use technology to lower their communications costs! Somewhere along the lines, you've decided that I'm anti-smartphones 100% of the time, when in reality I've always been pro-right tool for the job, even if it is a smartphone. However, I preach from the bottom-up mentality of tool shopping and recognizing the difference between most people's needs and wants. Focus on what you need, and it will do those jobs better than a convergence device. I say this from a place of knowledge and experience, and also from an historical perspective as well as one informed by scientific understanding. I have a very intimate perspective from the inside of the machine, and I see both the blessings and the curses that come with it.
I say this out of love, but the whole "if you don't accept all technology in its most current iteration, then you don't accept any technology at all" argument is tired, flawed, and even a little insulting. We have common ground here in the belief that technology is just a tool... the difference is, I believe in selective and informed choices in usage and don't dismiss older technologies as being worthless just because it's older, and I understand enough about human nature to know that most people don't have enough self-control to moderate if left to their own devices, so I try and make people stop and think about what they
actually need instead of just succumbing to their base wants. Is this not the very heart of MMM's greater philosophy?
Cite selection bias all you want, but I've seen the market saturation numbers in sales and in the real world. This is a noticeable issue because a
significant portion of the population is over-indulging in these activities daily both in public and in their homes, and the frequency of these occurrences are increasing over time, not decreasing. Technology addict logic is even visible within this very community and thread. We're not talking about people hanging out in bars all the time coming to the conclusion that most of the population has a drinking problem, the closest analogy is seeing a significant percentage of the general population publicly intoxicated around the clock and expressing concern. There's cause to treat it as a larger, growing societal addiction first, even if some people are capable of moderation.
Over the past five years, people like ourselves are becoming a minority, and in the under-30 crowd, it's approaching an anomaly as these things get cheaper. I say this because I do make a point to try and look for people in public who aren't using the things all the time, and they're rapidly vanishing. Not even houses of worship are immune anymore. In my own synagogue, I'm frequently in the back working with the AV team, and throughout worship service you'll see nearly half the crowd at one point or another take out their smartphone and look at the world around them through the screen for extended periods of time, and we're not a small congregation. During the teachings, this same half of the congregation has their faces buried in the same smartphones. Are they taking notes or reading scripture? Rarely. They're texting, doodling, playing games, watching videos... phone calls had gotten so bad that we started having to put up signs on the overhead telling people to turn the things off. GSM buzz is an issue with recordings some Sabbaths now, even despite the shielding.
The biggest problem with smartphones being so addictive are their physical size and form factor. They are designed with great psychological insight and marketing informed engineering - they are literally designed to always be physically noticed and to be constantly touched. Worse, the physically larger they get, the greater the mobile data dependence to drive any of their features, making them more expensive to operate. The mobile industry knows these things and exploits that knowledge to increase profits... you should read some of the industry papers on usage and marketing sometime to get a sense of exactly how dehumanizing their attitudes towards their customers truly is.
Outside of work-related tasks, smartphones don't actually add much real-world value to people's lives, outside of the psychological illusion of being important enough to matter. Worse, most of their conveniences erode and replace basic survival skills that most people should know how to do and take very little training to learn, yet abandoning those skills because a little device can conveniently do it for you makes you dependent upon others to do simple and basic things for you. These things erode people's memories and critical thinking skills. Now we get into the human nature argument. At the core of human nature, we all desire to know our place in the world and think that we matter. These devices fill that desire in such a way as to distract us collectively from productivity... and ironically enough, actually creates a greater physical separation between people than it does to actually draw us closer together. Madison Avenue has learned how to manipulate that desire for a greater place in creation to make a profit. This is the underlying thrust of our consumerist culture and how it arose to be such a problem in the first place. If you think for a second that this culture hasn't deeply permeated everyone's technology use, you clearly haven't seen Apple's stock performance for the past few years.
We need to stop and look at this from a larger and longer perspective. For millennia, people lead happy and fulfilled lives without these mobile communication devices. These things haven't even been mainstream for ten years, and look at what it's doing to our collective society as a whole right now. Can you say with a straight face that most people's behavior with these devices are socially strengthening and an intellectually decent change for the better? Ethics in the application of technology use is important, and the development cycle has accelerated to a point where the ethics arguments and laws can't keep up with the advancements themselves.
Today's technology is wholly unique in the span of recorded human history, even if nothing is technically new under the sun. Just because man can do certain things with technology, we should take the time to stop and ask if we should be doing it in the first place. We live in an amazing age, but knowledge is power, and power corrupts. We aren't talking about mechanical looms displacing weavers here. We're talking about centralizing all of humanity's information access within a database that has a deliberately high noise to signal ratio, fostering dependence upon technology and corporations to remember for us and do most of our work, and creating the ability to manipulate human perception through the application of selective data bias utilizing portable access terminals. Does this paradigm shift not warrant a bit deeper examination than all the technological advancements of the past 150 years combined?
In the mean time, let us take a pragmatic approach on an individual basis and treat technology as the tool it is. Let us question its true value and apply it only as needed, just like everything else in life. I've said my piece. If anyone feels compelled to respond, kindly make a point to actually read and take it in collectively instead of surgically extracting passages to argue with me over... I know that's difficult for many people to do on the internet, given how low reading comprehension has sunk with digital text these days, especially with anything that takes a significant amount of time and attention to read... but please try.
On a lighter note...
Suddenly I really want to go over and park myself on IPD's lawn and play Angry Birds (or Minecraft PE, more likely) on my smartphone. :)
Edit: "Hey mister... what's your wifi password? I wanna watch some youtube videos!"
Come on over! My yard is fenced, I xeriscape with russian thistle and poison oak, I've been known to practice bartitsu and carry a cane, and my house is in a jurisdiction that believes castle doctrine starts at the property line. As for the WiFi, I have open access. Just connect to the unencrypted hotspot named "MITM-Honeypot", and watch all the Youtube videos you can stomach! Be sure to also log into your Twitter and Facebook accounts while you're here and tell everyone else how much fun you're having.
See you soon!