Iām prepared for the downvotes knowing where Iām posting.
If you hate it that much, why are you using it? Itās a tool. Itās useful. It also allows you to overindulge, but that says more about you than the tool.
A lot of those are problems caused by phones regardless of whether one uses one themselves.
But for the personal ones, there are self aware addicts of all kinds. Smokers know cigarettes are killing them, complain about them, sometimes even hate them but canāt stop.
Edit: pair o words
Thatās a fair and well measured response. It begs the question of what we can do as individuals, and when it comes to smart phones I donāt think thereās much.
I donāt create posts claiming smart phones ruined every aspect of society dude
As someone who carries around a flip phone on purpose, itās not impossible to live without a smartphone, but itās getting more challenging.
Ticketmaster now requires a smartphone. You canāt print tickets. Which means I can no longer go to baseball games.
So far, thatās the only thing Iāve found thatās a hard block, but many other things are certainly not designed for the phone impaired.
I donāt use it. At all. But nevertheless I still have to deal with people constantly telling me that I need to use their āappā, and or only giving information in the form of a QR code. I still have to navigate around zombie-people staring at their phones while they walk around. I still have to deal with the fall-out of bad online interactions that kids have had. and so on. The attention-span issue that the green-text mentions results in a dumbing-down of news and media and basically all kinds of information sharingā¦
This stuff negatively affects me in obvious and measurable ways, even though I donāt use any of the features of this ātoolā.
I would say that it is also a fault of the device if it encourages this brain-dead overindulgence that is clearly of the interest of many big advertisement companies. You can choose a device and OS tho and install apps that lessen the effect, but an simpler phone might not have all the bells and whistles but can get you quite far without offering such a possibility to lose hours off your brain just turned off.
the guy exclusively lists cultural phenomena. how would not using a phone personaly solve any of these?
āItās just a toolā is such an ignorant statement in general. The tools we use have been shaping or culture for thousands of years. There is no choice not to take part in the current state of humanity. āItās just a toolā is what people who want to sell you their technology tell you to make you forget about the effects it can have on a bigger scale.
I myself feel conditioned to have it over a dumb phone. Companies and people assume that you have one, and the thing I find the most offending is obsessive QR overusage. I hate that.
If itās on a banner or in a document, it rarely ever have plain text address. They are on all of my bills, as mobile banking is popular and you are supposed to trust it and open it in your banking app lol (although itās payment info in a specific format, not a web link). Itās also used in 2FA\registration for apps and you canāt login into popular messengers without scanning a pattern and my workplaces used some of them for all internal communications. And whenever I scan anything or refuse, I see them everywhere, this sharp b\w noise that is not a part of a human world, but rather meant for machines. These technological shenanigans occupying the visual landscape is probably why I can jump from not wanting a smartphone myself to disliking others having them. And with how it locks you from pretty essential things I can see the next step is having government services only availiable in Zuckerbergās Metaverse. Thatās when Iād call quit on that fuckyverse.
/rant
I think QR codes are cool because itās literal computer data in ink. You can draw a QR code with a pencil if you know how to encode the data. Itās like a punch card, a physical manifestation of digital data.
However using a QR code is really freaking annoying, especially if you have a cheaper phone. I always configure my phone to only show the encoded string and not click the links because fuck normalizing blindly clicking links
I find them really fascinating, especially their error-correcting, but I do find them weird occupying every banner without any alternative and trashing our human world with too much of them, outside of the discussion of them being too much needed for functioning in our society.
I used one of those promos to get a bunch of free stickers made and I did a QR code to lemon party with my friendās Instagram at the bottom. I travel a lot for work so I was going to post them up everywhere. Unfortunately I got them printed in yellow which made the QR code not work.
I just got a new phone and someone asked me ādo you like it?ā I hesitated to answer and they assumed āthatās a noā. Well, not really, it works well and does what I need it to. But do I like it? Not really, its a tool of necessity for operating in modern society. I like my steam deck, I like my speakers, I like my bike, but liking my phone is sort of similar to liking my work laptop. Itās just a thing I have to have or be really very inconvenienced.
knowing where Iām posting.
a place where people call each other out for saying stupid shit?
GPS and calendar.
Apparently parents love it as it keeps the kids quiet and relieves them of the stress of parenting.
Also a tracker and a way to contact them at all times. I believe parents who let children take phones to school would feel a bit nervous if their kid would forget it at home one day.
I get why people do this but if I was being tracked when I was a kid, especially after age 16, I would be furious. I would have done something like hide it in a hole beside the movie theatre so I could go smoke some weed and have sex with my girlfriend.
As a parent, it is convenient to have a handy device to zombify my hellspawn for an hour while I need to get some actual important adult shit done, but I also strictly limit mobile device use because my kids will not be iPad kids for as long as I have any say in the matter
Thereās (mostly) nothing wrong with the technology. Itās the enshittification and profit motive behind nearly everything thatās the real problem.
How do you separate the two? To me smartphones seem like the sort of thing that was always headed in a bad direction. Itās inherently a tracking device. Touchscreens are easy to use and intuitive but really slow and inefficient for most things that go beyond browsing/viewing content. It pushes you to get all your software from a centralized walled garden. If it werenāt for smartphones, the people who mostly only use smartphones probably wouldnāt be spending a lot of time on the internet, and that would be for the best.
I think that having the convenience of an easy-to-use, always-online device in your pocket at all times is inherently addicive. The profit motive just compounds this issue on purpose to extract wealth, but it is more of a symptom of a larger issue.
Humans, nor any other animal on this planet have ever existed in an era that they can be always connected to everyone in their species at all times; even having that ability at all is revolutionary and unprecidented.
It used to be that the only people you talk to would be people in your local area, but now a significant portion of the percentage of people that an average person is likely to encounter on a daily basis is via means where their real character is hidden behind a carefully curated mask.
Yes, but you canāt discount the human affects that ease the transition. Smartphones made bite sized pieces of attention way more accessible. And ease of access to distraction/dreams away from the reality we all live in is what I mean, I guess, by accessibility.
Disregarding or summarizing the above: Why canāt there be an objective reality each of us can depend on to relate to eachother with?
privacy