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The social expectation of your reachability is learned by the people you interact with (and those they interacted with prior). If you frequently immediately res

The social expectation of your reachability is learned by the people you interact with (and those they interacted with prior). If you frequently immediately respond, people will assume you will immediately respond in future events. If you do not, they will not have the expectation that you will always be immediately reachable. I am not an immediately reachable person a lot of the time. Not necessarily intentionally, but I can and will go many hours without checking my phone. Everyone in my social circle knows this about me, and yet I still have a social circle. Will you probably not end up being friends with those who demand plans to always be done last second? If you are always unreachable, maybe. But it's not like you're always going to be unreachable. You might miss out on some spontaneous events once in a while if you're intermittently unreachable... so what? If you are always slow to reach, you just end up around people who don't only do last second planning. Oh no, isn't that what you wanted?

yojo 4y ago
Your point is valid, but assumes I have a deep enough social pool that I can drop friends and replace them with more compatible communicators. That might or might not be true, but I’m hesitant to test it. I like my friends, other than their stubborn refusal to embrace my anachronistic tendencies. I think by talking about myself I distracted from my intended point though, which is the experience of being a child in the age of smart phones. The sense of freedom and adventure of being a teen away from home seems incompatible with having an internet connected device on one’s person. An anecodte: My neighbors are totally reasonable people. Their teenage daughter was an hour late home from school one day, and not answering her phone. They started canvassing the neighborhood, driving her usual route home, checking to see if any neighbors had seen her. She was fine, she went to get a burger with some friends and her phone was out of batteries. Nothing about that story strikes me as unreasonable today, but when I was a teenager it would have seemed a ridiculous overreaction. Kids had impromptu hangouts regularly. Rarely would they phone home. Most parents were gone until after 5:00 anyway. Our culture has changed in a direction that feels sad to me. I feel like something has been lost. It’s clear that this is a minority view on HN. Hopefully that means the average person experiences phone culture as a positive change.
- balfirevic 4y ago
  > They started canvassing the neighborhood, driving her usual route home, checking to see if any neighbors had seen her. That's exactly what would have happened to me, before the age of phones. Unreasonableness of parents has nothing do to with phones. If anything, having a phone would have helped me stave off my parents and afforded me more freedom (not that it makes their behavior fine, but practically I would have probably been better off).

yojo 4y ago

Your point is valid, but assumes I have a deep enough social pool that I can drop friends and replace them with more compatible communicators. That might or might not be true, but I’m hesitant to test it. I like my friends, other than their stubborn refusal to embrace my anachronistic tendencies. I think by talking about myself I distracted from my intended point though, which is the experience of being a child in the age of smart phones. The sense of freedom and adventure of being a teen away from home seems incompatible with having an internet connected device on one’s person. An anecodte: My neighbors are totally reasonable people. Their teenage daughter was an hour late home from school one day, and not answering her phone. They started canvassing the neighborhood, driving her usual route home, checking to see if any neighbors had seen her. She was fine, she went to get a burger with some friends and her phone was out of batteries. Nothing about that story strikes me as unreasonable today, but when I was a teenager it would have seemed a ridiculous overreaction. Kids had impromptu hangouts regularly. Rarely would they phone home. Most parents were gone until after 5:00 anyway. Our culture has changed in a direction that feels sad to me. I feel like something has been lost. It’s clear that this is a minority view on HN. Hopefully that means the average person experiences phone culture as a positive change.

balfirevic 4y ago
> They started canvassing the neighborhood, driving her usual route home, checking to see if any neighbors had seen her. That's exactly what would have happened to me, before the age of phones. Unreasonableness of parents has nothing do to with phones. If anything, having a phone would have helped me stave off my parents and afforded me more freedom (not that it makes their behavior fine, but practically I would have probably been better off).