Yeah, isn't that on par with rolling back vaccine use? One of the greatest signs of progress of our times?
"why is that weirdo just looking around?"
Are you just starring at women's butts? Be honest.
To answer the OP, I continue to look at my phone in most idle moments. I try always to have the current book on it, so quasi-productivity.
I'm also curious about 1. What are you doing instead? Did you feel like looking at your phone was bad for you in some identifiable way? Or did you just want to remember what dead time used to feel like?
Like a Tao thing? Only in boredom, interest?
I'd speak up for the non-connected choice, but we've done that before and I don't have new things to say. Except that, in the Trump era, I am even more grateful that connection ends when I leave work. My mind is colonized enough.
4 to 7. Non-connected isn't the same as not looking at your phone.
I'm an inveterate phone prodder, but, I have to admit I do it less, and I'm much more likely to be reading a book (albeit on a Kindle) or just listening to music than I was, say, 2 years ago. A lot of that is just TrumpBrexit, which means that most social media, and most news sources are relentlessly depressing. But also, partly, it's a minor reaction to feeling too tied to the phone all the time. Slack for work will literally suck in every waking moment if I don't consciously just ignore the phone. And I've almost completely disengaged with Twitter.
Pokemon Go is a great way to be on your phone and yet be disconnected from work/social media/news sources.
Well, I have a flip phone and no home internet. Seemed faster to say non-connected.
To get the same functionality as a smartphone with Pokemon Go, you'll need to throw rocks at birds and other small animals. Pretty risky if the neighbors see.
It's really hard to hit a small animal with a book.
Now I'm going to think of Little Free Libraries as Pokestops.
I have finally freed myself from Pokemon Go. What a relief!
But I am absolutely going to remain tied to my phone while standing in line. I badly need constant input of at least mediocre quality.
Did you get to level 40 and quit or are you just a complete failure?
38.5 and a secondary account that made about 33.75.
I am all about games that tap into that rat-hits-lever-gets-reward part of the brain. I figured it would be years before I could get that Pokemon monkey off my back.
Or Pokemon Mankey, as the case may be.
As I've said, I've deleted Facebook from my phone. The other things I do when I would have been browsing the news feed aren't too much more productive or edifying, but they couldn't be much worse.
His name is Mankey, HG. Or Aipom. Or Chimchar.
I'm personally enjoying this post office line 10000% more than I would have pre-smart phone.
Did you have to pay your taxes by mail because the website was fucked?
30% of the time my phone isn't properly charged and 30% of the time I've forgotten it at home, and the remaining 40% it doesn't occur to me that situations 1) and 2) are not in play. So I don't use it much, is what I'm saying.
re: 26
Makes me anxious just reading it. While I use the internet bit of my phone less and less, I _always_ have it with me, and _always_ have it charged.
26 is me. Also I have made a conscious effort not to become a phone addict, because I get really annoyed at people who don't respond when they're spoken to, especially by staff in shops and restaurants, and I don't want to be like those people. OTOH I have a kindle which goes with me any time I might encounter an actual waiting room.
28: 2. most waiting rooms don't have good reading material, so that's fair.
1. The people who continue to talk on their cell phones when checking out with a cashier make me so angry.
I sometimes resent when people expect me to put down my phone and interact with them just because they happen to be in the same room with me. Obviously, if I have approached someone, including a cashier, I should give them my attention instead of reading my phone. But if I'm reading my phone and they come up to me, I think they should have the decency to be brief and to the point so that I'm not interrupted more than necessary.
I'm not sure what's the polite way to tell somebody that interacting with Facebook is less painful than interacting with them, but I'm sure in time somebody will develop one.
Just make a "swipe left" gesture in front of their face.
I was thinking like some kind of personal card with a specific corner bent. Otherwise, they won't know who it was the found them too dull or evil.
I'm not sure what's the polite way to tell somebody that interacting with Facebook is less painful than interacting with them
Loudly declare "I'm changing my privacy settings to: 'Nobody can talk to me'"
What is the point of being bored? I always used to carry around a paperback book. One always wound up waiting on line for something or stuck on hold or the like. Having a book made it easy, even fun, to wait it out. When the Palm organizer came out, I downloaded books from Gutenberg and caught up on the classics. Some of them were quite good. Now I use my phone. It has all sorts of books on board, not all of them great works, but most of them entertaining.
As for people on Facebook, I always thought that Facebook was an alternative to having friends, like having a VCR to avoid watching television shows or a Xerox copier to avoid having to read academic papers. As Marshall McLuhan pointed out, disengaging was the whole point of technology.
OK, this isn't as weird as when I found out that everybody prefers to adjust their mirrors so that they're useless, but I'm surprised at how strong the "why be bored?" reaction is. Obviously a 10 minute line is a good phone opportunity, and pulling out one's phone is (probably) a better use of time than pulling a National Enquirer off the rack to browse, but is the world so insanely devoid of interest that none of you can imagine looking around yourselves for the length of time it takes 1 or 2 people in front of you to check out?
I don't think I'm abstaining as much as ogged, but I have been trying not to pull out the phone quite as instantly. Some of it is the agitating news thing noted above, but some of it is remembering that it wasn't actually that awful to, you know, observe my surroundings. I'm not a people watcher as such--someone who speculates about the lives of passing strangers and such--but seeing the people around me is at least as interesting as scrolling past the latest repost of the Borowitz Report.
I dunno. I spend so much of my life alone in an office in front of a screen; I probably need to experience disconnection more than most of you. That's not supposed to sound sad--I don't mind, at all--but it changes the balance.
We can swap lives, if you want. You'll never need to disconnect again.
OK, this isn't as weird as when I found out that everybody prefers to adjust their mirrors so that they're useless
People don't "prefer" to do that. People were taught to do that.
I don't really recall being taught anything about adjusting my mirrors.