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"Hi. Is <my friend X> in?" There was a time, when I was a kid, that to meet your friends, you went to their house, rang the doorbell, and asked the above quest

"Hi. Is <my friend X> in?" There was a time, when I was a kid, that to meet your friends, you went to their house, rang the doorbell, and asked the above question to the parent of X who opened the door. Or you called them, and then their parents would answer the phone, and you asked the same question. Now, all kids have mobiles, and just call or text each other directly, completely bypassing the parents. Parents get to meet the friends of their children much less, and kids get to meet their friends' parents much less, and I think we're worse off as a society because of it.

heed 17y ago
>I think we're worse off as a society because of it. I'm curious, why?
- potatolicious 17y ago
  All interactions increase the richness of your social graph, IMHO anyways. It's the difference between ordering your lunch from a human vs. tapping it out on a touchscreen and having it appear from a pneumatic chute. One of the themes I'm getting from other comments here is that modern society makes you too independent - everything we need we get from machines, and in the places where we must interact with other humans there's a corporatized formality to it that robs it of human substance. For example: Your local grocery store is probably a gigantor-chain, the person at the counter is probably running through a script of unenthusiastic niceties - a far cry from smalltalk with the grocer you see every day at the corner store.
- lmkg 17y ago
  Not the parent, but I'll answer for myself: it's a good thing to have more people in your life in your formative years than just your immediate peers and your parents because you get experience developing more types of relationships with people. You understand how to relate to someone who is older and more experienced than you and has a different point of view than you do outside of the context of them having a direct authority over you. You also get exposed to more points of view than just your parents', which can be a good or bad thing depending on what those points of view are, but plurality on average tends to be beneficial, especially in your developmental years. By contrast, when you interact only with your self-selected peers of your own age group, your social circle becomes a bit of an echo chamber. In addition to the intellectual incest, if you don't have to deal with outsiders or people with different backgrounds or perspectives, you never figure out how to, and that's an important life skill. At the societal level, when people don't have to interact beyond their selected circle, they start becoming more insular, and that impedes the ability of groups to understand each other and communicate with each other, creating friction that can lead to conflicts and the inability to resolve such conflicts.
- henrikschroder 17y ago
  To add to the other replies: For parents, it was a great way of getting to know their children's friends, it forced an interaction whereas today, parents have to actively seek that out. On the flipside, giving mobiles to kids makes it much easier for parents to keep track of them, or for the kids to get help from their parents. But it also helps kids keep secrets from their parents, which is good in some cases and bad in some cases. Technological change certainly is a mixed bag.

heed 17y ago

>I think we're worse off as a society because of it. I'm curious, why?

potatolicious 17y ago
All interactions increase the richness of your social graph, IMHO anyways. It's the difference between ordering your lunch from a human vs. tapping it out on a touchscreen and having it appear from a pneumatic chute. One of the themes I'm getting from other comments here is that modern society makes you too independent - everything we need we get from machines, and in the places where we must interact with other humans there's a corporatized formality to it that robs it of human substance. For example: Your local grocery store is probably a gigantor-chain, the person at the counter is probably running through a script of unenthusiastic niceties - a far cry from smalltalk with the grocer you see every day at the corner store.
lmkg 17y ago
Not the parent, but I'll answer for myself: it's a good thing to have more people in your life in your formative years than just your immediate peers and your parents because you get experience developing more types of relationships with people. You understand how to relate to someone who is older and more experienced than you and has a different point of view than you do outside of the context of them having a direct authority over you. You also get exposed to more points of view than just your parents', which can be a good or bad thing depending on what those points of view are, but plurality on average tends to be beneficial, especially in your developmental years. By contrast, when you interact only with your self-selected peers of your own age group, your social circle becomes a bit of an echo chamber. In addition to the intellectual incest, if you don't have to deal with outsiders or people with different backgrounds or perspectives, you never figure out how to, and that's an important life skill. At the societal level, when people don't have to interact beyond their selected circle, they start becoming more insular, and that impedes the ability of groups to understand each other and communicate with each other, creating friction that can lead to conflicts and the inability to resolve such conflicts.
henrikschroder 17y ago
To add to the other replies: For parents, it was a great way of getting to know their children's friends, it forced an interaction whereas today, parents have to actively seek that out. On the flipside, giving mobiles to kids makes it much easier for parents to keep track of them, or for the kids to get help from their parents. But it also helps kids keep secrets from their parents, which is good in some cases and bad in some cases. Technological change certainly is a mixed bag.