Having a smartphone is the best thing ever

Yeah, you do. Otherwise you'd remember all the math and foreign language you learned in schoool.

Without smartphone my hikes are on average 5 km longer than with. I usually get lost and then it takes longer to find my back into civilization. -> Smartphone makes me dumb and fat but is very practical to have.

FYP imo

@pokeraz

That is definitely part of it.

I hate how high my phone bill is, but the reality is I'd have a tough time saying no if it were tripled.

I agree with HT and pokeraz. I think it has also cut down on meaningful conversation as people are happy just texting instead of ringing and having a proper conversation. In regards to the cost of phone calls, I am very happy. They were absolutely exorbitant when I was younger. Now I happily ring anyone long distance and don't even think about cost.

Do you want to communicate your thoughts or ideas or do you want to spew sound from your mouth?


I don't understand why people think voice communication is so noble.

Just had a funny realization. Not taking into account the time of a phone call, just total instances, if I am on the phone, it is more likely I don't know the person I am talking to.

It's not about hearing my own voice. It's about hearing the other persons voice and laughter etc. I just prefer to have an actual conversation with people I am close to. With others or if I am feeling a bit low or whatever I prefer to text. Each to their own, it's just my personal preference. I do think texting is really convenient if you are really busy or you know the other person is as then obviously both parties can respond when they get a chance. There is definitely a place for each but if I want to catch up with certain people I would always ring not text.

The place it really irritates me is in-person conversations. Good conversation is something of an art, and focus on a smart phone entirely trainwrecks many conversations.

Howard,

I 100% agree with you. It's extremely rude and can totally spoil a social get together.

I generally don't want to interact with the kind of people who would allow their phone use to ruin a social get together

None of my friends do this. It's more younger family members that have a tendency to be glued to their phones. Not all of them, but it's definitely a thing. Definitely think it's a generational difference. I just find it really distracting talking to someone and they are fiddling with their phone while replying. Possibly I need to up my conversational skills so I can keep their attention lol.

Try having children!

I've never really "tried", but somehow I succeeded at doing so.
Twice!

Does this mean you don't want to interact with the people using the phones or with the people it bothers?

I suppose its open to interpretation

I always think about how much smarter I would be if I had the internet when I was a kid. I guess this could be debatable based on the personal resourcefulness argument floated a few posts back or something similar (although I doubt it). However I think it would be near impossible not to have made less "life" errors if you had access to the internet as a kid.

Being at everyone's beck and call via your phone these days is my issue with it. Although I'm so old now this doesn't really apply to me anymore as a kid I know this would have annoyed the crap out of me.

fewer

Young people use their phones to communicate with each other, they're probably talking to each other a lot more than we ever talked to our friends.

There're references going back hundreds of years to children not being as good at holding conversations, or not learning as well as in the good old days. It's the internet's fault, or TV's fault, or radio's fault, or the printing press' fault. I think people just feel threatened by what's new.

Though obviously if someone starts looking at their phone mid-conversation, they should not be spared the rod. It's for their own good.

I also dislike the idea that somehow it's a bad thing, net, that facts are more readily available now.

It certainly devalues the kind of education you get through most of your school life, and that needs to be changed. What matters now are ideas, and knowing what kinds of facts exist. You can't google for ideas you don't know about, so that should be the focus of what we learn.

opinion of an old chiming in...

...one of the things that stands out to me about google or other modern search resources is their target is so damn narrow. you type in a specific phrase and you get specific results that inherently filter out all of the surrounding chatter because they are so extremely good at what they do. honestly, if you aren't able to find what you're looking for in 5 minutes with google you just don't know what the hell you're doing.

but what google and other modern search engines don't often allow is the exposure to incidental knowledge. 'back in the day' when you were researching a topic (at a library or other such resource) you almost always ended up barking up the wrong tree a time or two...but at least you were reading about something else you weren't even aware existed and were able to store that information away to better round out your knowledge base.

often times learning about the things that exist around the fringe of your specific point of interest can be more enlightening than getting right to the answer of your question.

You've never gone down a wikihole