You're preaching it brother. Same age bracket and same disdain for our smartphones. They are great utilities to have but some of the applications on them people can't help but be addicted to, and for many it spills over into physical interaction with others. Sad part is that many don't care. Seeing gaggles of peers out together at a bar, coffee shop, there's usually at least one with their head down, and then there's the not too uncommon moments when ALL have their heads down. It's more than unnerving. Watching the Glass video this morning made me want to herald the future but this awful recurring gut feeling of unchecked technology negatively influencing society in unforeseen ways couldn't help but to flare up.
I want the future to happen but I also don't want a simple human experience that I currently know such as physical interaction to decay and wither and eventually become an anachronism.
But they are "gaggles of peers out together". Not stuck in front of a TV every day after school for hours ... like my generation watching early sitcoms/varieties/crime/kiddy shows that don't even move the nostalgia-meter decades later.
I'm not from phone generation, I won't use a smartphone, I don't have any idea how much more tightly-wound-together their lives are then ours were. But I'm sure they are, because they're in touch. They're busy adapting, for better or worse, to the consumer/tech world WE created.
If WE don't like it, then WE have to start thinking about what it means to have young impressionable minds plugged-into the mothership all day long. These appliances are far from transparent, their comms can't be easily shut off, and there's little OWNER-control over their features or bad habits. Anyone who wants to worry, try focussing on that for a while. Their appliances don't give them the autonomy ours did.
> They are great utilities to have but some of the applications on them people can't help but be addicted to
It's worth remembering that much of the addictiveness of consumer oriented services is informed by the work of BJ Fogg, a professor a Stanford [1]. While it's hard to lay the burden for Instagram/Facebook/Twitter etc. entirely at his door; it is the simple minded application of his ideas to the urgent necessity to grow and hold an audience that has created the recent plague of attention sinks that do little to make people's lives better.
I want the future to happen but I also don't want a simple human experience that I currently know such as physical interaction to decay and wither and eventually become an anachronism.