Smartphones: C or D?

Technology is awesome. My phone is great. And I will look at it while talking to you. And at dinner. It's ok if you do too, I don't mind.

Just friend me on Miitomo if you want to discuss further.

if i'm talking to you and i'm in the middle of a sentence and your phone buzzes, will you completely forget i exist and give priority to whatever is on the phone?

because that's the shit that drives me crazy. the hierarchy that places whatever is happening on the phone at the very top

I guess it large depends on the group of friends you hang around. Most people that I'm around frequently function in the same way.

I used to feel that way about landlines too, my parents would always run to answer the ringing phone when I was growing up no matter what they were doing.

i mean, imagine you have a friend that regularly stops listening to you mid-sentence and walks away to talk to someone else whenever anyone else enters the room. unless you have crazy levels of confidence, you would probably think "i guess i'm not very important"

the looking at the phone while talking thing i can handle, as long as they're making some sort of bare minimum effort to keep a conversation going. that's annoying but not the confidence destroying. but with some people, you could be talking to them about how crappy you've felt since someone close to you passed away, and how it's been especially tough to handle given the other things going on that ----**BZZZZ BZZZZ* *xylophone ditty* *BBZZZ BBZZZ* "hello? hiiiiiiiii wassssup!? no I'm not doing anything, what's going on with you?!"

Yeah I agree, that's the worst

it's most egregious when it's a phone call, but sometimes people completely abandon you irl so that they can immediately attend to whatever text they just got, in the same kind of situation. when people do shit like that to me i want puke all over the place

I hate this decade

Don't hate the decade, hate the people. If I ever have a kid I'm gonna pass that on

Handset wringing

tommy texters

**BZZZZ BZZZZ* *xylophone ditty* *BBZZZ BBZZZ* "hello? hiiiiiiiii wassssup!? no I'm not doing anything, what's going on with you?!"

always completely hated+feared phones tbh, even when they had curly wires; whatever the other problems with our "devices" i wish their telephone function would just dry up and flake away like the vestige it is. aside from the crippling dread of having to place a call to anyone about anything (the waiting -- the cold sound of the ring -- the unreadable void from which the voice suddenly issues), there's the trapped, sweating rage i used to feel whenever my best friend would call me in the summer of eighth grade. for no reason! with no plan, and no apparent limit on how long he was willing to continue this faceless, anxious, excruciating conversation. he just wanted to "talk". as if that were possible. now no matter what i change my ringtone to that's still the feeling i get when i hear it -- OH GOD NO NOT NOW PLEASE NO NOT NOW PLEASE GO AWAY. don't call me unless you have a really specific ~90-second discussion in mind or there's a chance i could prevent a death; if the death's already happened, that'd be a text. anyway, line to be my friend starts back there everybody! don't push.

I used to feel that way about landlines too, my parents would always run to answer the ringing phone when I was growing up no matter what they were doing.

― Treeship, Thursday, March 31, 2016 6:12 PM (55 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In the pre-answering machine days this made sense, because you had no idea who was calling or why. Every call could be an emergency!

I get what y'all are saying here but smartphone doesn't necessarily mean other people encroaching on your personal time, or other people assuming you will be available. (You could, y'know, not answer when you didn't feel like it.)

For me it's been quite the opposite. I used to go to an office Monday through Friday 8:30-5. Large chunks of that time aren't used wisely - coffee breaks, water cooler chitchat, etc. And when I had a deadline or other urgent situation, it was expected that I would be able to stay late or come in on the weekend, Office Space-style, in addition to the M-F 9-5 stuff. That time too had a lot of slack in it - waiting for things to come back from an editor, waiting for layout to be done, etc.

You know what that was? A pretty major fucking incursion on my personal time. People would come by my desk and assume I was available to talk to them.

Nowadays I can go about my business: drinking beer, noodling around with a guitar, playing my children. People don't call me until they need something specific from me - I don't have to wait at my desk or be tied at home waiting for a phone call. We have the conversation we need to, and I either go do some work or I go back to doing what I was doing. The combination of a mobile phone and remote work has given me *better* work-life balance, not worse.

The efficiency gains are legion. One time I was out of town, and some poor coworker spent all day recreating a file that would have taken me 10 seconds to tell her how to find.

for me they're classic, not so classic for others

treezy

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/orthodox-judaism-millennials/476118/

'I find meaning within the practice of Shabbat and not touching my phone.'

everyone always having a camera still trips me out

it's cool having a ton of stuff to read at any moment

pretty much everything else i could do without

xp j.,

I know millennial jews who abstain from technology during shabbat. I think it's a good life plan.

It was annoying, last year, when I wanted to meet up with one friend who did that. We would have to arrange everything beforehand.

is life better now that your computer is in your pocket all the time?

I am akin to grandma upthread.

I recently acquired a smartphone to replace a flip phone that was about a decade old or more. I have a no-contract phone and it can do all I want it to for $100/year. The smartphone is more capable and I appreciate the extra ease of use and extra features, so I will vote classic, because it really is a better tool now than before.

Is that smartphone in my pocket all the time? Hell, no. It's in my pocket exactly as often as I feel like I want it in my pocket, which amounts to maybe 3% of my waking life. Fuck being umbilically attached to my phone or to the internet. I never miss them when I don't want them, which is most of the time.

Being without the phone is considered a crime in polite society, you must be with us and plugged in at all times, a deference and desire to be monitored by the machine. Recently i sat on a bench overlooking the Lune, and felt respite from the grinding oppression of capitalism as I enjoyed the view, reverie's warming embrace approaching when suddenly I felt a cold shiver, and i turned around and for a brief second there were hundreds of benches behind me, each one with someone I knew, had known, or had approached me once looking for directions. They were all with me also looking at the view. My old boss, the kid that fired rubber bands at the teacher in primary school, the recruiter on linkedin,, all the airbnb hosts, husbands, wives, neighbours, man-managers and property developers, Thankfully it was just a brief imagining, but what an invasion of privacy, reverie trampled underfoot like a copse by a new housing development. This happened even though my phone was turned off and at the bottom of a bag in a house somewhere. There is no escape, even without the phone they wanted to be there, filling their reach as far as it would go

I got home and there was a Linkedin request from an ex-girlfriends brother and a woman who works in the same coworking space as me, who I didnt know the name of and had never spoken to. She was overlooking the Lune as well.

and some messages. "where are you?" they said. I never ask where they are!

g. The combination of a mobile phone and remote work has given me *better* work-life balance, not worse.

Yes, i agree with this. Remote work is fantastic, I love my work (building web stuff!), and love that ALL of my work is either productive or learning. Im always working on something if im not in reverie. And then some people pay me, its not even work!

although it is a butt dialing/caught cheating ballad, I would like to repurpose the trey songz song chorus to add "Smartphones, dumb shit"

Having a small child means I now have my phone with me even at work meetings. I feel quite self-conscious about that but nursery have called a couple of times because he's bumped his head or something.
Actually I'm not sure i'd have survived the early months without my smartphone. Most of my parenting knowledge I got at 3am from others in the same boat/friendly forums. Or while sitting pushing a pram back and forth.

i have some friends who make their living writing software for phones, it's nice to always be able to check basketball scores if im away, and portable music has kept me from murdering my coworkers but on the flip i can never escape work bc my email is forwarded to me wherever i am, since im not on social media i feel like i really have to work hard to keep up social relationships, and my phone is heavy so i have to hitch my pants up tighter which is suboptimal, oh and cell service is prob my biggest single monthly expense next to health insurance

in measure i guess closer to c than d but i sometimes wish it would just go away

Having work email and docs on my smartphone is actually my favorite thing about it - given the nature of my job it's more freeing than enslaving because it means I can go do a long workout or meet a friend for a leisurely lunch knowing that if something comes up I'll find out. It means I can dash off quick email responses on the subway as they come in instead of showing up at the office like "ugh now I have this pile of email."

Also can take care of little things like ordering more diapers or paying a bill.

What I do miss is that mental quiet time with a book or long form magazine article.

What I do miss is that mental quiet time with a book or long form magazine article.

if you miss it enough.......you can still do it, I give you permission

yeah sure, free will

But the reality is, when you have a block of time such as a Subway ride in which it's not realistic to perform certain tasks, you're freed to do other things. When you are able to do more "pressing" things during that time, however, it's sort of the natural flow of things that you do the more pressing things. I think a lot of people ITT overestimate how deliberately every moment of life can be lived. We have limited amounts of willpower, we develop habits, we have demands placed on us, etc.

I don't see it as all that different from the fact that I don't keep certain foods in the house, because I know I'll eat too much of them. Sure I could "control myself" but that takes a lot more mental energy every time I see the box of whatever thing. So I just don't buy them. Similarly, I think what I'd really like is just an hour or two a day when my smartphone was completely inaccessible.

I generally deplore what seems to me to be the over-use of smartphones by those I see around me. For my own part, I had a Blackberry for about five years and resisted upgrading it to a touchscreen phone because I was convinced I would dislike the lack of a real keyboard. I have been surprised to find that I really quite enjoy the sensation of tapping on the virtual keyboard when typing on my new phone.

I also find having the fast internet connection available at all times to be very handy when I'm out and need to look up train times or find pubs and other places, as well as look up things on Wikipedia if I'm particularly curious about something.

I wouldn't want to switch to using the maps on the phone for general purposes as I prefer, when hiking, or even just walking around town, to use a paper map (Ordnance Survey map, or London A-Z atlas) and work out from it where to go, rather than simply going where the phone map and Google directions tell me to go.

When I'm on a bus or train, I do now find myself 'checking' emails and other notifications from time to time, but not to the extent that I feel it's an addiction. I have much more of a problem with that kind of addiction when using my computer at home.

A few things that do annoy me about my new (Android) phone are the constant updates (virtually every day or so) to installed apps; how heavily Google services and data collection are built into the thing; and the fact that apps are constantly running in the background unless you expressly log out or force stop them.

i went to molasses books last night without my phone. i wrote some things in a journal, i read a short story by flannery o'connor, and i had some conversations with people at the bar area. all in all a success.

you're like a person who decides to start writing real letters to people, like that person on that day i mean

i might do that who knows.

added Jeff on miitomo as requested

Can't wait for the next time you visit and we can go get a beer and interact through Miitomo exclusively.

funny i just sent a letter to my cousin who lives in the next city over

it read

"Dearest cousin,

I hope this letter finds you well. It would seem as though curiosity got the best of me and so I rummaged through the desk drawer, grasped a pen, and am now writing to you in hopes that I may discover what, in Heaven's name, you are up to at time of receiving.

I am, Madame, your most humble and obedient servant,

Infinity"

i let out a chuckle at the end

heck yeah xxp

http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/480240/adventures-in-grayscale/

cool to learn that f sharp has amorous designs upon a blood relative

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

we're all blood relatives in some way right

can i get yr sister's number?

sure