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Stop Googling. Let’s Talk
- sjs382 11y ago> COLLEGE students tell me they know how to look someone in the eye and type on their phones at the same time, their split attention undetected. They say it’s a skill they mastered in middle school when they wanted to text in class without getting caught. In my experience, they haven't mastered that nearly as well as they think...
- jeffreyrogers 11y agoYeah, I'm a college student and I rolled my eyes at that one. I can think of countless interactions where people think they're discreetly checking their text messages and it is so irritating to be on the other end of that. The article has a great message, but unfortunately I don't think most people are conscientious enough to deliberately change how they use technology and it is just so easy to check your phone when there is a lull in a conversation. Technology has been beneficial in many ways, but it has a tendency to be incredibly antisocial as well and I don't think we've learned to compensate for that yet.
- somebodyother 11y agoWe've spent generations filling our every waking moment with more forced broadcast stimuli, I don't blame 'millennials' for wanting to put up a minimum filter and default to their own bubble of controlled media. Why should we talk if you don't have something more interesting to say than my phone?
- alienasa 11y agoYou don't know whether or not I have something more interesting to say if you're dividing your attention between me and your phone. As the article says, it takes more than 30 second to divine whether or not a conversation is going to go somewhere interesting, and if you stop paying attention at the drop of a hat, it never has a chance.
- lmm 11y ago> it takes more than 30 second to divine whether or not a conversation is going to go somewhere interesting I think that's an older-generation thing. If you go 30 seconds without getting to the point, of course people will think that you don't have one.
- abalashov 11y agoAnd must all conversation have a point that is deliberated at the origin? A lot of the most useful and salient conversations I've had with friends, colleagues, and mentors in my life have been ideation, thinking out loud, stepping through an experience or an impression... there wasn't a clear point, until two hours later, when there suddenly was. Or, there was a point, one thought, and it changed course during the conversation. I don't know where I'd be without those conversations.
- plonh 11y agoBecause relationships matter and your phone won't care for you when you are sick.
- johnchristopher 11y agoOr help you move your couch and belongings to a new place.
- icebraining 11y agoThe person I'm messaging will.
- imgabe 11y agoThere are things of value to be learned even in media that doesn't immediately grab and hold your attention. Sometimes learning things requires focus. In fact, probably most things worth learning don't jump out and grab you, but require some effort to keep your attention on them. If you always optimize your attention towards whatever is most immediately compelling, you'll wake up one day and find out you don't really know anything.
- jsprogrammer 11y agoWhy can't the immediately compelling be something that you have been focusing on for years?
- mathgeek 11y ago> Why should we talk if you don't have something more interesting to say than my phone? I don't think that valuing relationships by how useful they are to you "right at this moment" is a very good way to go about life.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoWell, but maybe on the other side of the phone there is another person, relationship with whom I value more? It's not like smartphones are all (or even mostly) about status updates.
- eropple 11y agoThen excuse yourself and handle your business in private.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoThat's what I'd do if you weren't interrupting and pressing me for face-to-face conversation. Also, it's you who invaded my space, so why don't you go somewhere else? The point is - in my opinion, it's equally rude to pull out a smartphone in the middle of a face-to-face conversation, as is to approach someone "fiddling with their phone" and expect undivided attention.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoExactly this. Some people seem to think that using smartphone means doing something irrelevant, less important than talking to a person. But you know what? On the other side of that phone there usually is a person. One of the rudest behavior I encounter is people suddenly coming to you and interrupting in the middle of your IM conversation, demanding undivided attention and refusing to accept that you're in the middle of a conversation. IM is not e-mail, it's often as time-sensitive as voice, and quite often that IM conversation is much more important than whatever the interrupter came with.
- vinay427 11y ago> In one experiment, many student subjects opted to give themselves mild electric shocks rather than sit alone with their thoughts. This screams of a lack of mindfulness that hopefully can be fixed through working to become more aware of your own thoughts.
- dexterdog 11y agoWhich unfortunately very few will do.
- sandworm101 11y ago> 89 percent of cellphone owners said they had used their phones during the last social gathering they attended. Right there is where the author looses me. That online collaboration via the phone IS a social gathering unto itself. One is not fundamentally different than the other. Physical proximity is great, but it is a serious limitation. Not everyone has the time/money to physically meet their friends over coffee every twenty minutes. Not everyone lives in downtown Boston or NY. > They say it’s a skill they mastered in middle school when they wanted to text in class without getting caught. And why do kids text so much at school? Because they are bored to death by mind-numbing subjects and teaching that doesn't actually teach. Texting is the symptom, not the disease. The ability to 'not get caught' while communicating with others is a valuable skill for nearly everyone these days. It should be encouraged.
- andrepd 11y ago>That online collaboration via the phone IS a social gathering unto itself. Still the fact is that it is inconsiderate, or plain rude, to be "somewhere else" when you are sitting with other people who all took the time to physically be with each other. If a few people get together and spend large amounts of their time on their phones, then why get together at all?
- joesmo 11y agoAnd doing it in a one-on-one conversation is not just rude, but puts you into the asshole category.
- jccalhoun 11y agoTurkle has written some good stuff but her recent work has been too close to "Kids these days! Why back in my day..." for my tastes. (I was going to use that Socrates quote about "Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority" but it turns out not be by Socrates but from someone in 1907 paraphrasing complains from antiquity http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehaving-children-in-ancient-times/ http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehaving-children... )
- afarrell 11y agoThis isn't unique to millennials. My dad and I had this problem where he would be on his blackberry when talking with me until we had a conversation about it and agreed to be more mindful of being on glowing rectangles rather than present in the conversation.
- fit2rule 11y agoLately I've been feeling despair and dread at the scene of hundreds of people glued to their phones .. after a particularly hard week at work I stood at the station and watched the train roll by, full of commuters glued to their little machines. It was an entirely dystopian scene, and as much as I've been a promoter of the technological revolution that is the Internet and all its devices, I'm feeling more and more disaffected with the results of what we've done. It could be different, but its not. These phones are brick walls, carefully channeling the minds of the enslaved back to the master. So I started thinking about what I would do to make it different, and really, I think one small tweak to our technology would make a huge difference. Of course, its not in the interests of the manufacturers or network providers: make it possible for phones to auto-discover each other locally, without requiring a server somewhere upstream. If only we had some way to get people connected to each other - in a local context - i.e. anyone on the train can search for and find others on the same train without requiring a client-server relationship with an upstream connection. Host-AP mode: too restrictive. We need local peer search and discovery. About the only way I can think of to get this right now is to man up and put a device in AP mode with some sort of SSID named "LocalUsersNetwork" or something .. some sort of recognizable brand that people can use to connect with their local peers. It would make the forward march towards further electronic enslavement so much more palatable if it were possible to have at least a local context in which to freely operate. EDIT: events like this make me think there is a market for "local stranger discovery services", its just nobody has worked out a branding process for it: https://www.facebook.com/events/1480766915558797/ https://www.facebook.com/events/1480766915558797/
- djent 11y agoAnd yet 50 years ago, everyone on trains were staring mindlessly into their newspapers... [0] https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/800/1*U36hBj8i-C7JJJxS4MP2HQ.jpeg https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/800/1*U36hBj8i-C7J...
- fit2rule 11y agoSurely there's an opportunity to break this barrier down .. local peer discovery, open lines of communication - if these features were 'normal' somehow, they'd be used. But people are just used to having a strict social wall imposed upon them on the trains .. it seems like an opportunity to me.
- archmonk 11y agofor linux and mac user type this on commandline traceroute bad.horse
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- patrickaljord 11y ago"Stop using new technologies, let's go back to the old ways", said every older generations ever.
- agumonkey 11y agoI feel weird because more and more I start to miss old tech. For many reasons, I feel there were beautiful ideas forgotten too soon (aka AlanKayism). I've also seen a few cycles (from osx aqua, flash, html5, java, js, flat, metro, material, etc, etc) so I'm past being excited for newness. I don't know if it's the absolute natural way of things now that I'm not part the current generation or if there's some value in these thoughts. It's also natural for some to follow new trends for there's a lot of energy in exploring things 'a la mode'. But also not to be blinded into thinking old is useless. Progress is not an arrow, it's a wiggling hyperplane.
- veddox 11y agoI'm young, I still find newness exciting. Fortunately I also find history exciting, and one big lesson that has taught me is that it is foolishness to equate "newer" with "better". Often it is, often it seems to be, and often it isn't. The trick is knowing which is which.
- agumonkey 11y agoExactly. It's especially hard to compare, when things don't move straightforwardly, every new thing is 9/10 old and 1/10 new, and all new things have their own 10th. Things wave back and forth, in spirals. Knowing history avoids looping too much. I didn't understand that about it as a kid (it holds in tech but in society, politics, musics etc too). Good for you you're already sensible to that.
- TillE 11y agoThat's not an argument. I mean, there's a similar trap in thinking that anything new is good (or neutral). I don't particularly care about other people's behavior (and I don't have this problem with friends/family), but I can certainly see how it would annoy people, and probably even detract from the experience of the person who is doing it.
- hellofunk 11y agoI am sympathetic to this author. I wrote this a while back on here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9883769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9883769 I am nostalgic for the land before internet. While there are many technological divides and revolutions between generations, not sure many in history compare to the dramatic change to global society and behavior as a result of the internet, and by its extension, the mobile era.
- xixixao 11y agoThe invention of the car (and then of the plane)? Imagine the nostalgia for times when you had to walk for hours to meet someone across a city, or travels for days/weeks/months to meet far away places. Same with phones (and mobile phones), when you had to stick to a time you decided to meet somewhere, and you didn't show up... Good old times. Transportation and communication are really one thing, and any significant advancement in them will have the feeling. I will be remembering my youth, before VR, before shuttles/portals to Mars, whatever the future will bring. The way we look at the changes is much more tied to us than the change. You can always flip a coin and think of how marvelous these changes might seem to people in the past: "While I'm sitting in cafe with someone I can simultaneously communicate with someone else half-way across the globe? Wonderful!"
- hellofunk 11y agoI believe the internet is far greater a revolution for mankind than either the car or plane or telephone were. Unlike those, it has provided the possibility for 24-hour permanent connection with the rest of the world, at all times, at all locations you may be in. That is the sort of disruption that can significantly fade behavioral patterns that existed before.
- xixixao 11y agoI don't want to downplay the impact of Internet, but I do think it is similar and the other advancements also faded some behavioral patterns, such as exchanging letters, which used to be an integral part of people's lives (for some perhaps the most important one). Second, we are not there yet on 24/7, anywhere connection, but we are working on it. Perhaps if we have instantaneous world-wide telepathy one day, Internet will also feel as just another advancement, like the car plane phone.
- amelius 11y agoI'm worried more about the way people are using the web while at work. If somebody would have said a few decades ago that in 2000, every employee would have a television set on his desk, people would not have believed this person. However, the situation is actually much worse.
- Kiro 11y agoWhat do you mean with television set?
- llamataboot 11y agoWhat are you worried about? In my experience many jobs simply don't have 8 hours worth of work to do in a day, so there's downtime. (And the ones that do have 8 hours+ worth of actual work to do, without breaks, are the ones that pay near minimum wage and are a bit terrible). Since you're on hacker news I presume you're aware that it is nigh-impossible for a programmer to just program in flow state 8 hours a day every day 5-7 days a week. I usually get 4 hours of good work out of myself on bad days, 6-10 on great days or under deadline pressure, but can't keep that up many days in a row. Slack-ing off and the web help me decompress my brain in between uses.
- DougWebb 11y agoDon't become a consultant. My company bills in 15-minute blocks, so I track my time with that precision. I bill for more than just in-the-flow coding, but I dont bill for downtime. I regularly bill 35+ hours a week, and the rest of my 40hr week is usually spent on company business. It's not hard, if you're professional.
- Kiro 11y agoI long for the day I can be completely absorbed by technology.
- methehack 11y agoIMO, all of this applies to meetings at work as well, which are, after all, conversations. It's hard enough for people to listen to each other when they're actually listening. Throw in a laptop, a phone, and the mistaken belief that a person can 'multi-task' without a quality hit, and its a disaster straight out of the gate. I'm curious: Does anyone have rules at work around no laptops / phones at meetings?
- Xcelerate 11y agoEveryone's ragging on this article, but it matches my experience exactly. I feel like I can't talk to anyone nowadays without fearing that little buzz in their pocket, at which point they pull out their phone and start playing with it while I'm mid-sentence. And I'm not some grumpy "get off my lawn" old man; I'm barely 25 years old. Friends say "but it was [such-and-such nonsense]. I had to check my phone!" Really, you had to? Your life depended on you checking that text? People get frustrated with me because my phone is dead all the time (and thus I don't text back immediately), but I hate feeling tethered to some device. I notice an overwhelmingly huge difference in the quality of my conversations with people when their phone is not present in the room with them. This isn't to say I'm anti-technology at all — I spend 10 hours a day programming. I just don't attempt to do it while conversing at the same time (nor could I; without uninterrupted focus, I make a lot of mistakes in my code).
- mixmastamyk 11y agoAgreed though I don't let it bother me much. I have a front row seat to the internet all day, so the last thing I want to do at lunch is futz with a phone.
- lfender6445 11y agoI feel the same - I have also found myself apologizing before hand if I absolutely must use my phone or answer a message quickly.
- daviross 11y agoThis seems like something of a selection bias issue. By the same token, I don't know that I've run into anyone lately who's checked their phones while talking with me. Not to say that it doesn't happen, of course, but you might need to find new people.
- methodover 11y agoIt's funny. On my development team we have four younger guys (mid-late twenties) and three older guys (35+). By far the most distracted people on the team are the older ones. In meetings they tend to lose focus, look at their computers, misremembered what's said, or just seem to tune it out. I've made a habit of specifically managing how they are perceiving what I'm saying -- looking at their eyes, seeing if they're distracted, asking lots of confirming questions. And outside of meetings, they don't pay attention to our online communication channels enough. If anything, my experience has been that it's the older generation that sucks at paying attention to the right things in the new super connected world.
- slavik81 11y agoThe stereotypical family morning used to involve the father reading the newspaper while eating breakfast. Eating and reading with others is a tradition long predating smartphones. We're in a golden age of text, with dramatically higher engagement due to an unprecedented access to more useful, interesting and relevant information than has ever been available before. The title uses a new fancy word, but it might as well say "Stop reading. Let's talk."
- javajosh 11y agoOne of the basic human needs is to be loved and feel like you belong. We do this by both "keeping in touch", "getting together". The usual assumption is that "getting together" is a higher quality way to meet these needs than "keeping in touch". Your smartphone represents almost everyone you know. In a face-to-face meeting, the ratio is precisely (n-1)/n. So if you both have 100 friends, realize that you're competing to meet the need of love and belonging against the 99 other people in their pocket, who can also give that to your friend with surprising effectiveness. (The argument generalizes: you are also competing against every stranger that's ever put anything online - the person who wrote that Wikipedia article or Yelp review has a call on your attention, too!)