Smartphone addiction

constant escape

winter withered, warm
When I was doing a lot of driving, I just had to use my laptop to see where I was going, then perhaps make a few notes. But it did keep me more aware as I was driving, better able to form mental maps and whatnot.

edit: use my laptop beforehand, that is
 
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yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
i'll just look up where i have to be before i leave and memorize it. when you're close you can always ask around. the idea anyway is that in time you'll brain evolve into superbrain and you won't need gps any more.
 

boxedjoy

Well-known member
Do you think its because such practices are being adopted by neoliberalism, in general? Like its proven to be a robust means of communication, and thus ought to be used for work and not just play? And that is when it becomes compulsory?

edit: communication, in the interest of optimized practice, most generally.

a bit late replying to this but 100%. We have an internal social media forum which was described upon launch as "like Facebook, but work!" It is abysmal. Managers are expected to post statuses celebrating employees minor successes and achievements so other managers can go on and hit Like and leave comments and gifs. As a manager I don't have time to load up a screen and type out a seemingly heartfelt message thanking Stacy for her contribution for people who don't know Stacy to see. As an employee I'd rather just have a quick and sincere "thanks for that I appreciate it" when the task is done. It's a digital solution for a problem nobody ever had. It's getting phased out, after four years, thankfully, they realised that our predominantly young, part-time workforce wouldn't even spend time on Actual Facebook these days.
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
so i'm on this dumbphone for two days now and one of my friends honestly thought i had died in a traffic accident cos i didn't show up as "online" any more.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
so i'm on this dumbphone for two days now and one of my friends honestly thought i had died in a traffic accident cos i didn't show up as "online" any more.
Yeah it seems like this is the kind of hypersensitive response one will increasingly receive if they decide to opt out of the highway.
 
so i'm on this dumbphone for two days now and one of my friends honestly thought i had died in a traffic accident cos i didn't show up as "online" any more.

any other insights are you smarter have you been having more sex been headhunted for your dream job etc
 

woops

is not like other people
have you been in a traffic accident? no i've been busy having nonstop sex since i ditched the iphone
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
any other insights are you smarter have you been having more sex been headhunted for your dream job etc

it's been ten days now and what i sensed in the first few days and still now is a sense of loneliness. what the smartphone does is give you the feeling that you are connected with everybody in the whole wide world. and that at any given moment you MIGHT get a message from someone, might get an e-mail from someone, might get tagged, might get retweeted, etc. and i think giving up on that feels very liberating in the long run but feels cold and lonely in the beginning. the point is, you don't actually lose any meaningful connections, you just lose the fake feeling of ever having been connected.
 

catalog

Well-known member
hang in there yal! i'm gonna get a brick soon i think. i had one day last week when i left my phone at home and it was a good day.
 

catalog

Well-known member
i may have mentioned this elsewhere, but with smartphones, i keep thinking of the virilio quote related to tech innovation:

The integral accident
Virilio believed that technology cannot exist without the potential for accidents. For example, Virilio argued that the invention of the locomotive also contained the invention of derailment. He saw the Accident as a rather negative growth of social positivism and scientific progress.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_...ent,social positivism and scientific progress)

so with the smartphone, the upside is that you get the all world's information at your fingertips and the ability to communicate it to anyone, but the shadow side is information overload/obesity and no one answers your calls.

it's similar to what another sociologist, zygmunt bauman, said about phones - you think they're connecting you, but really the ability to disconnect is as much what they afford
 

catalog

Well-known member
we know we'll have reached a high level of technological achievement when we start going round with our shit in our hands
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
i may have mentioned this elsewhere, but with smartphones, i keep thinking of the virilio quote related to tech innovation:

The integral accident
Virilio believed that technology cannot exist without the potential for accidents. For example, Virilio argued that the invention of the locomotive also contained the invention of derailment. He saw the Accident as a rather negative growth of social positivism and scientific progress.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Virilio#:~:text=war in miniature'.-,The integral accident,social positivism and scientific progress)

so with the smartphone, the upside is that you get the all world's information at your fingertips and the ability to communicate it to anyone, but the shadow side is information overload/obesity and no one answers your calls.

it's similar to what another sociologist, zygmunt bauman, said about phones - you think they're connecting you, but really the ability to disconnect is as much what they afford
I was just thinking about this, but in terms of dialectics, namely how a proper synthesis amounts to more than just a mere sidestepping of unfavorable elements and foregrounding of favorable elements. Instead of the synthesis marking the eating and having of one's cake, it marks a compounding of the strengths of the two theses while introducing a higher order problematic/unfavorable element.

That is, instead of merely sifting out the bad, you just incur higher order bads, generally more abstract ones. Seems to have to with a conservation of preferentiality, as if it is a zero-sum matter. In other words, you cannot secure an orientation within your reality that is free from unfavorable elements. You can sift out the unfavorable elements in absolute terms, but in relative terms there will always arise new unfavorable elements to supplant the old.

So if we impose this kind of dialectical process onto technology ("technology" being a sort of dyad of technical-objects/advancement-of-them) we can see how eventual accidents, or unfavorable elements, are nascent within whatever technical contingency is actualized.
 

nilprenia

Well-known member
I was late on the train, got a smartphone this year for the first time. The situation is different in other parts of the world but in America there are no new brick phones being manufactured which have 4G coverage on all the bands that service expansion is happening on. As nice it would be to never make a phone call or use the internet again, upgrading was the only sensible thing to do
 
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