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Sounds nice, but it shouldn't take -that- for people to interact with each other. It's so incredibly rude to dick with your phone at a gathering of friends, ye

Sounds nice, but it shouldn't take -that- for people to interact with each other. It's so incredibly rude to dick with your phone at a gathering of friends, yet so common, especially among but not exclusive to younger people. I went to a small superbowl gathering once with some folks I didn't know(friends of friend), where the host quite literally spent the entire time on their phone, reading twitter. They'd announce "someone posted 'x'" about a play or commercial. The others would feign laughter, then go back to playing with their phones until they heard cheering or laughing. I left at halftime in disbelief people operated this way.

joshspankit 4y ago
> It's so incredibly rude Rudeness is subjective and based on implied social agreements that a) change, and b) are not as universal as they are assumed to be. Based on my personal experience I can agree that if someone uses their phone in a gathering of people it can disconnect them from those people, and that some people see “choosing to disconnect” as disrespectful, but I think that to unilaterally call that disconnection rude is to ignore the world we’re currently living in as well as the legitimate chance that those people are addicted beyond their control.
- JasonFruit 4y ago
  This is a generic argument that could be used anytime a negative word is deployed. "That's just the world we live in, and they might not be able to help it, poor dears!" It's so soft it's difficult to find a hard point to attach an argument to, "nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so," rewritten in warm spit.
rtpg 4y ago
This is definitely dependent on the group of people, but if you have like 2 or 3 people doing it, everyone ends up doing it. Nobody wants to talk to a person on their phone, even if they can multitask
jjulius 4y ago
I guess I'm equally surprised that people on a forum built around an industry that relies on people being glued to these devices are surprised, in 2023, that the industry has succeeded in that effort.
- dmix 4y ago
  Yet expecting some harsh top-down measure to deal with it is often as useless as expecting the drug addiction epidemic to end if only drugs were illegal. Ultimately we need to not only put effort into hard limits tech-wise for those in exploitative/extreme situations but most importantly developing social awareness and strategies to deal with the issue. Not having a phone at the dinner table (with family, with friends, etc), for example, could easily become a social norm/taboo, and it already is for most people I know already. The benefit of these rules (vs more aggressive top-down rules like no phones in the venue period) are there can be exceptional exceptions when you really need to be on-call. While I'm sympathetic to the motivations behind stuff like gov/venue controls for stuff like this, in practice it's usually a much tougher social issue that needs to be nurtured rationally/carefully, with respect towards those tangibly victim to the downsides. We all are inclined to seek cheap boogie men to blame for social issues but we also tend to disregard the downsides of the utility of hard/aggressive rules while simultaneously being fully aware of the natural inclination to bypass such rules when it matters.
  - flangola7 4y ago
    Drugs are a poor comparison. I can make many drugs in my basement using cheap and widely available supplies. I cannot make a highly available global network optimized by corporate psychologists to be as addictive as possible. If we decided to we could have our government snuff them out for good in a single bill.
- _nalply 4y ago
  So it can make sense to offer voluntary counter-measures, be it locking phones away or faraday-caging the venue.

joshspankit 4y ago

> It's so incredibly rude Rudeness is subjective and based on implied social agreements that a) change, and b) are not as universal as they are assumed to be. Based on my personal experience I can agree that if someone uses their phone in a gathering of people it can disconnect them from those people, and that some people see “choosing to disconnect” as disrespectful, but I think that to unilaterally call that disconnection rude is to ignore the world we’re currently living in as well as the legitimate chance that those people are addicted beyond their control.

JasonFruit 4y ago
This is a generic argument that could be used anytime a negative word is deployed. "That's just the world we live in, and they might not be able to help it, poor dears!" It's so soft it's difficult to find a hard point to attach an argument to, "nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so," rewritten in warm spit.

rtpg 4y ago

This is definitely dependent on the group of people, but if you have like 2 or 3 people doing it, everyone ends up doing it. Nobody wants to talk to a person on their phone, even if they can multitask

jjulius 4y ago

I guess I'm equally surprised that people on a forum built around an industry that relies on people being glued to these devices are surprised, in 2023, that the industry has succeeded in that effort.

dmix 4y ago
Yet expecting some harsh top-down measure to deal with it is often as useless as expecting the drug addiction epidemic to end if only drugs were illegal. Ultimately we need to not only put effort into hard limits tech-wise for those in exploitative/extreme situations but most importantly developing social awareness and strategies to deal with the issue. Not having a phone at the dinner table (with family, with friends, etc), for example, could easily become a social norm/taboo, and it already is for most people I know already. The benefit of these rules (vs more aggressive top-down rules like no phones in the venue period) are there can be exceptional exceptions when you really need to be on-call. While I'm sympathetic to the motivations behind stuff like gov/venue controls for stuff like this, in practice it's usually a much tougher social issue that needs to be nurtured rationally/carefully, with respect towards those tangibly victim to the downsides. We all are inclined to seek cheap boogie men to blame for social issues but we also tend to disregard the downsides of the utility of hard/aggressive rules while simultaneously being fully aware of the natural inclination to bypass such rules when it matters.
- flangola7 4y ago
  Drugs are a poor comparison. I can make many drugs in my basement using cheap and widely available supplies. I cannot make a highly available global network optimized by corporate psychologists to be as addictive as possible. If we decided to we could have our government snuff them out for good in a single bill.
_nalply 4y ago
So it can make sense to offer voluntary counter-measures, be it locking phones away or faraday-caging the venue.