Email: It’s not just smartphones

Several years ago, before smartphones were so existent/affordable (free, even) that nearly every college kid had one, I worked as something of a “freshman babysitter” before I graduated. My job was to help them get involved and make friends with each other during the beginning of their first semesters and then do general RA stuff after that. That such a job should even exist should be sending some warning signals, but as I worked it I found that such a job -really needed to exist- since if left alone the majority of the kids would just be on their cellphones awaiting and replying to texts from “friends” far away from wherever they currently were. A few of them would already have smartphones and they’d be even worse, since they had more to stare at and await I guess, but it was as if you’d have entire groups of kids all in a contest to “out cool” each other by having more “interesting things” to do and “people” to talk to. Making fun of them always seemed to do the trick in terms of getting them to not be so weird, but it was as if until somebody made fun of them and made them realize they weren’t being “cool” at all they would have just carried on being pathetic turtles or digital zombies. Headphones are another problem, especially the rapper endorsed canned ones that literally cancel out outside noises (pathetic turtles), but usually those are combined with the smartphone use anyway since few people carry around mp3 players that aren’t also their phones nowadays. To me, it’s all less about any -real- disinterest with the actual world and more about fear. Make them more afraid of their current behavior and it stops. Part of it is because the fear originates from peer pressure of “everybody is on their phone, so if I’m not on my phone I’ll get made fun of or people will think I have nobody to talk to”, so once you squash that it all goes out the window.  It probably started somewhat with my generation. We didn’t have cellphones until into high school, but since middle school we were all used to using AIM and other IM services on our parent’s computers (some would put them in the kitchen just to make sure we weren’t talking to some kidnapper or something!). Some of the guys were familiar with IRC, but that was mostly for getting things or information whereas IM was for talking, usually to girls. If you weren’t using it and you didn’t have an IM name to give out at mixers you weren’t “cool”. The trend just flowed naturally into text messaging and then into facebooking or whatever most people do on their smartphones now. Difference is that for my generation it progressed slowly from IM as a kid -> text messaging as a teen -> smartphone as young adults whereas for this generation they’ll have been using smartphones since high school or even grade school.

As for your observation that girls seem more entranced, it’s more that girls tend to get into it first, but then actually it’s the guys who are -more- entranced/remain entranced over time. Like with text messaging or IM, girls were the reason you’d start using them but then after that way too many guys would become worse than the girls or continue obsessively messaging long after most girls had already stopped. They’d start expecting responses within x minutes and send more replies if you didn’t respond and just generally be annoying. Again, making fun is always the best remedy to behavior like that, when guys start acting like clingy girlfriends to even their guy friends. Or act like creepy stalkers toward girls (“where r u” “what r u doing” “why won’t u respond” and all that crap when she’s either not interested, busy or rightly thinks the guy is creepy). Still, making fun isn’t always enough to do the trick if the person in question is just naturally weird anyway or their values/expectations are deeply out of whack.

Un-entrancing girls is probably easier than un-etrancing guys because of that, since you just have to point to their favourite chick-flicks, stories or other such things; appeal to romanticism and you’ll find that phones of any sort are rarely involved. Online dating and such exists, but even this generation hardly finds it to be romantic (I despair the day when this changes). “What’s your favourite romantic comedy? Was the lead girl on her phone all the time, not talking to anybody actually in front of her? If you were in a romantic comedy right now, your ‘perfect guy’ would ask to share a table with you and you’d just ignore him to stare at your phone some more” and things like that do the spot, with some tweaking depending on the girl, but it’s generally easier to ‘make fun’ in a way that gets them to reflect. With guys, the trouble is you’d have to get most girls to stop being zombies first and turn the thing into a sausage fest (then only the ‘hardcore’ would remain). Traditional making fun can work, but the pull of “there are tons of girls to ‘talk’ to” tends to outweigh any of it for a lot of them. To me, that can be the only reason you also have guys who are more annoying feminists than actual feminists too: they think that being as annoying as the most annoying girls will allow them to get some, when in reality not even the annoying girls they are mimicking can truly stand them.

On a related note, with modern smartphones the “r” and “u” abbreviations also become something to laugh at. We have full keyboards now, after all, virtual or real, so it’s always great when politicians try to use twitter or whatever and use such “hip” abbreviations. Annoying guys tend to have not gotten the memo either, since annoying girls still use them as well. Originally, all the abbreviations had one of two purposes: 1) Make it easier to type out messages on the old cellphones 2) make it harder for parents to read over your shoulder. None of those exist for anybody these days since the “parents” now are quite adept at reading the old IM/text lingo and keyboards make typing anything trivial.

So what you are saying is that it is somewhat of a Jones effect.  Bob and Sue are text message with the phone, I must do so too. Well, that’s not it. More like the ‘patchwork’ of friends must be maintained from IM or Facebook to transition to smartphones.

Do people have solitude anymore? Critical thinking requires it. You can’t really do much thinking if you are checking twitter each moment.

One thing I’ve noticed about Human beings is that they enjoy talking more than anything. More than even TV or video games. This is why gamers spend most of their time on the Gaming Message Forums because they prefer talking or hearing others talk than playing the actual video games.

And it doesn’t have to do with quality. If I heard top scientists or CEOs talking, I’d certainly choose to listen to them than do anything else. But most people are in the peasant class. What is the value of listening or engaging in peasant talk to a large extent? You read Aristotle because Aristotle is smarter than you, and you might learn something. You don’t learn much by chatting with the fool down the street all day, everyday.

The reason why I liked computers and the Internet was because it gave me a tactical advantage over other people. I liked being fluent in computers and even being on the Internet in the 1980s. Today, obviously, everyone does it. But I keep asking myself what advantage does smartphones bring in relation to other people? If anything, it appears I would have a tactical advantage by NOT going the ‘digital zombie’ path. All the ‘texting’ would just break my concentration. And why on earth would anyone need to be in constant contact.

When cell phones got popular, I marveled how women, immediately after a class, would have to call someone. Anyone. What is so damn important that she always be on the phone while walking in between classes? I still associate connectivity as a negative trait such as doctors who used to have ‘beepers’.