this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
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The conversation was clearly more developed here so I resubmitted it :|
Coming back to your point, I'm not being obtuse, a smartphone is not as life changing (for the better) when it comes down to your daily life.
I was born without one, I can relate to the experiences my parents had, and none of it screams "back in the days life was radically different".
Sure you'd go to places to purchase object you can touch and your brain wasn't melted by being exposed from an early age to Tiktok.
My peep, smartphones redefined the way humans go about the world and in turn how the world is structured. What the hell are you on about? As someone who lived even without internet, I can assure you that the way we handled the world was indeed massively fucking different in so many ways, I wouldn't even know where to begin to explain. The smartphone is as impactful, if not more than the telephone, the radio and the television. All of those techs literally reshaped the world and our social interactions.
Do you know how much the world changed because people don't "go to places"? Because they text instead of phoning? Because they can record everything at any time? Because they don't carry a fuckton of devices, paper and other support tools? You literally don't know what you're taking about. And yes, impact to society includes the bad stuff as well.
If my sister and I got into a debate at the dinner table one of our parents would go get the dictionary to decide who was right. If you wanted to know something specific you would have to go to the library and actually do research. Now you can just get the tl;Dr from Wikipedia or whatever.
Sure but those of us old enough to have competed with each other in knowing facts we ban phones until after the argument
I get caught for bullshitting after winning an argument much more now than I did before Internet in your pocket
You clearly haven't thought about it and take a lot of things for granted, which is weird considering your stance on the relationship between labor and capital.
Developing new medicines is world-changing innovation, cheaper and more plentiful food is. iPhones are so inconsequentials that most people don't have one.
Let's now talk about Smartphones and your daily experience. You wake up (alarm clock?), you wash yourself (inconsequential), you check heavily manipulated news (I guess it gives a slightly more diverse option than TV or Newspaper, but I'd consider that a credit of the Internet), you go to work (gps were a thing before smartphones, and you get survelliance as a tradeoff, but I guess it's one of the most tangible advantage to be notified live of traffic) or connect with MS teams. Time to eat, I guess you go somewhere, take a walk, or use the smartphone (the internet I guess) to get a limited selection of various cathegory of hyperprocessed slobs. You work and then you stop. But wait, you are always connected so your boss hit you up live and make you work for the big family another 2 hours. You text your buddies to go have a beer later, which you could have 100% done preplanning it or using basic phone. You have fun pulling from your own personal unique life experience or maybe you consume/comment together some idiotic vertical video just like millions are doing at the exact same time everywhere else. You go home.
Such innovation, many plus.
The fact that many people don't have one doesn't mean it didn't reshape the world! Holy shit! It's like saying antibiotics didn't revolutionize medicine because many people didn't need one ever.
Honestly this discussion is too inane to continue. I'm out.
I mean, same? I was mostly engaging for the sake of other people, you clearly have a very narrow idea of what constitutes progress and what an alternative more balanced society would bring (it's not the extraction of toxic rare metals).
Reading through this discussion and considering my own daily life, I find that indeed my utilization of smartphones is limited to primarily other existing advances in technology not directly associated with phones. Primarily Internet. In fact, I might be a bit abnormal because my 8 hours at work, my phone is not directly on my person and rarely used. I do, however, need to utilize it for 2FA authentication ~1-2 times per day. Which, digital personal keys were a thing before phones.
So yeah, I'd say that smartphones aren't a big advancement, but the combination of multiple other technological advancements.
Continuing to exclusively look at their impact from a "well how many things do I do with them" angle is so pathetically narrow it's no shock you feel they mean little
Smartphones made HUGE changes to our world: Facebook wouldn't have been what it was had it not lined up with the phone boom, tinder and similar dating apps, YouTube, in fact most social media as it exists today, vine/TikTok, the way we design web pages and software, how accessable someone is expected to be has massively changed socially, music listening and buying patterns are entirely different
Multiple industries have been severely crippled or killed directly because smartphones became big. They've impacted our lives to degrees even people who study this shit don't understand yet, you're just so immersed in using them that you've forgotten
Even when you're not using your phone, you're likely being impacted in some way by what phones did to our world
Big minus: people waste a lot of time on their phones
Big plus: you can waste a lot of time where in y2k you'd have been bored
I listened to a lot more radio before I had a smartphone. Now there's so much YouTube, so many podcasts