4 ms·
Lately 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 sta
by fit2rule 11y ago
Lately 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.
- djent 11y agoWhy would people choose to speak to strangers when they can communicate electronically with their friends 24/7? The fact is that whether you're introverted or extroverted, phones now suit all your needs as both a device to keep you occupied and as a means of communication.
- eropple 11y agoBecause strangers are interesting and different and you can learn new things. Because strangers can become friends. Because that stranger is attractive and I'd like a date on Friday night. Our obsession with hiding ourselves in our little toys drives me absolutely bonkers. And I'm not blameless, I know I do it, too--most of us fall prey to the fact that hiding is so easy that we do so goddamn much of it.
- skwirl 11y agoDid people start reading newspapers in the middle of conversations with others? I don't think the analogy entirely holds.
- djent 11y agoI was not alive when newspapers were at their prime. I cannot answer that question definitively, but I will say that it is entirely possible, and does not take away from the analogy. Would you interrupt someone reading a newspaper to talk to them? How about if they were reading a book? Would it be okay to interrupt someone typing or scrolling on their phone to try to start a conversation with them?
- smacktoward 11y agoOccasionally, but because the newspaper was large enough to present a physical barrier between you and the person you were talking to -- large enough to hide your face! -- you didn't do it unless you wanted to send a very clear message that "this conversation is over."
- TeMPOraL 11y agoNo, but newspapers also served as a clear sign of "I don't want to engage in casual conversation". Really, it's not like before smartphones people were actually talking with each other on the bus. Hell, in the fine era of 1990s, when people stopped reading so many newspapers but didn't have smartphones yet, no one talked with random people either - it's sort of a cultural norm in the west.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- johnchristopher 11y agoI read some years ago about a social dating app in Japan that matched users and when encountered in the wild (or was it the metro ?) the app would trigger some kind of msg or interaction to incite users to get to know each other (based on their dating profile). It used bluetooth.
- veddox 11y agoWhile I share your dread and find your idea interesting, I honestly wouldn't use a service like that. "Local stranger discovery service" - why not just strike up a conversation with the person sitting next to you? I do so fairly frequently, and I have had some incredible conversations that way.