As someone who grew up before computers and smartphones were commonplace, for the most part you could still life in the same way as you did before computers and smartphones, because all the things you’d need still exist. You’d just be horribly out of the loop of the way modern life functions… But you could do it.
What’s interesting is that pretty much no one wants to live this way any more. It was pretty damn boring a lot of the time.
Yeah but maybe a bit of our problem is people don’t get bored anymore. The feeling of boredom is an important one and we stuff it down with dopamine doping and doom scrolling. When I was a child, if I got bored I went outside, or I saw if my friend could play, or I got a toy out. Once smart phones came along suddenly being bored was just an invitation for Reddit— Lemmy— to fill in the void.
I’m glad that Lemmy is not as addictive as Reddit was. I want to be bored a bit sometimes. Boredom makes me do chores instead of ignore them. Or play with my kid more. Or go hiking.
I don’t imagine 80s kids would have said they had boring childhoods, just because they weren’t completely soaked up with phones demanding their attention 24/7.
My childhood wasn’t boring, but I was bored an awful lot. And I agree, boredom can be a great motivator. But I can’t say that I miss being bored.
Relevant meme…
It’s a media art piece by Mark Vomit.
Yeah, I love my phone and the whole world it opens up, having access to so much information in my pocket. But I also hate how tied we are to them now. I bought tickets for a gig recently and the only way I can access them is by downloading an app (that I’m only going to use for this one gig). What if I didn’t have a smartphone? What if I didn’t want to take a smartphone to a gig? You aren’t allowed to go to this gig without one, and it’s a small thing, but I don’t like how the option is out of your hands.
Pretty much every supermarket in the UK now requires you to download an app so you can access their offers. I hate this so much.
I thought I lost my phone before moving states and nearly burst into tears. It has my insurance, the map, what if something happened to me on the road, etc. It was an awful spiraling feeling. Thankfully I found it, but it was a hard reality check of how much I have tied to this little device.
I run a contracting business and have had straight panic attacks over not being able to find my phone as I’m rushing out the door for the day. I really need to set up an asterisk server and keep my sim cards there but I just don’t have time, nor am I paying a service a ridiculous monthly fee to run it.
Uhm can you explain a little more about the asterisk server and the sims cards. I thought asterisk wasn’t for mobile phones.
I’m trying to remember myself, but I remember reading about a way to feed a sim interface into a digital telephony card for use with asterisk. It was basically like a modem the fed a voip/sip line into the system. This was years ago that I read this and I could be completely misremembering it.
The smartphone is the only science fiction thing we have.
We didn’t get table top fusion reactors, food pills, Rosie the robot, casual commercial space travel, flying cars, hoverboards, etc…
But we did get a little computer we can carry around that has literally everything in it. It’s a camera, it’s camcorder, it’s a microcassette voice recorder, computer, telephone, book, TV, video conference system, remote control for all my lights, remote control for the TV, a McDonald’s ordering device, instant messenger, magazine, radio, GPS for my car, GPS tracker for my family, health monitoring device, flashlight, Sears catalog - It would probably be harder to come up with a list of things that it can’t do.
You can take my smartphone from my cold dead hands.
We did get flying cars. They are called helicopters. Impractical except for niche applications.
Look at the mofos you see only dealing with driving in straight lines on the ground and tell me you want them flying. Like a week ago I made the foolish mistake of honking (one honk) someone who cut me off and they got behind me just so they could rage honk and tailgate me for a solid minute. You want that guy with access to the ability to drop stuff from above?
This kind of “single device that replaced an entire backpack of stuff” is why there are no computers in the Dune universe.
They would make the plots too easy to resolve.
Up until long-covid and being over-worked kicked me out of a job and onto my ass for a few months, I was a caseworker for adults with severe mental illness for years.
Helping people get a government phone was a necessity if we were working on transitioning them out of their residential care facility into more independent living.
It was such a frustrating struggle for the Clients without phones… Reminders, telephonic appointments, me being able to reach them was so much more difficult if they didn’t have a phone. Even being in RCFs, the resident line was always busy or misplaced, and staff at those facilities are not always the most stellar employees…
When covid hit and everything went on lockdown, it was nearly impossible for my team and myself to reach our Clients without cellphones…
Cellphones have become so ingrained in society and are essential for access to not only normal community resources, but also essential for adequate coordination and access to one’s treatment team and resources.
It’s getting harder and harder to function in society without a cellphone. That trend will only continue. I don’t think it’s necessarily/inherently a bad thing; it’s the evolution of our society. But it certainly is a terrible thing if you do not have one…
As a society we place huge importance on reading and writing literacy yet forget that digital literacy is just as important. Having a cell phone is, like it or not, a pretty big part of being literate in this digital world. We don’t see people acting proud of themselves for not being able to read (at least I hope not), and cell phones should be no different.
“I don’t even have a smart phone” is the new “I don’t even own a TV.”
Right? It’s a basic expectation that you have a phone number for everything. Work, doctor, etc. But we still treat it like having a phone is a luxury, for entertainment and convenience. Buy it yourself and figure it out yourself!
Hell, even restaurants are more and more replacing menus with QR codes
Does anyone disagree with this? My city gives out smartphones to people who can’t afford them because it’s cheapest way they can get access to city services. Much more efficient then having staff in an office to enter data and make calls on their behalf.
Do they also have access to public internet and public charging stations? What happens if the phone is lost or damaged??
I’m not 100% but they will replace the phone if damaged. I’m not sure about if it is lost. There is probably a cut off where giving out phones is considered worse than having social workers enter data for certain people. There is housing assistance which would include electricity. I suppose you could charge at city service points? The cell phone plan includes Internet access.
Modern life is difficult without internet access, but yet you can live without internet, the question is, how long?
The one thing that really makes me sad about common cellphone usage is the lack of face-to-face connection. It’s a trip because I went through middle and high-school without smart phones, everyone did. I miss those regular, everyday connections with people.
Those that haven’t gown up a significant amount of time without smartphones don’t think the difference is that severe, or that the connections we’ve replaced them with are the same or superior, but it just… isn’t.
Is it really the phones or is it just that connecting to people after high school gets harder?
Both. It makes it easier to keep in touch technically, but whether or not they are responsive is a whole other story.
