Yesterday’s post on a Zoomer using only 1980s technology for a week elicited lively commentary on changing tech and its effects.
Without further preamble, here’s what you are saying about the tech of yesteryear …
Commenter Bayou Bomber writes:
I heard a saying once from a motivational speaker don’t take your work home with you and don’t take home to work with you. I.e – everything has its place.
I think the division of labor with older technology kept us sane and less prone to ADD. With a smart phone, it does EVERYTHING. No matter what you’re doing with a smart phone, chances are you’re being bombarded with a thousand other distractions. Talking with someone on the phone? Here’s 100+ messages about your IG post that just went viral. Wait there’s more, while you’re checking that out TikTok just called, your bestie just made a new post for the day. Round and round, it’s mental abuse what we are doing to ourselves. We are programming our brains into ADD because we habitually can’t focus on one thing for a fraction of a second.
Even since I swapped back to using a flip phone, I’ve felt more at peace. Even if I’m bored at work with nothing to do, I have little to no reason to pull out my phone and I’m forced to look into other things to keep me occupied. I feel like the non smart phone alternatives to entertainment feel cleaner.
At most, I use my old smart phone as a gaming device bc there’s still a game I play on there that I’m invested in, but that engagement stays at home where it belongs.
The only thing people are losing by using older tech is time, but let’s be real here, that time they are gaining isn’t being put to better use in most cases.
Marx was wrong. No amount of quantity adds up to quality.
Related: The Metaverse Biopanopticon
Rudolph Harrier comments:
Here’s something that’s easy to overlook: He’s using all this technology that has been “obsolete” for decades… and it all still works (well, with the exception of the smoking TV.) Now obviously stuff has broken down forever, but this is consistent with my searches through thrift shops and getting decades old technology that obviously hasn’t been maintained well but which works just fine. You can start to see the cracks by seeing what you can’t get easily used. Some newer technology, like blu-ray players, works fine for a long time and you can find easily in pawn shops and the like. MP3 players are almost entirely absent, because they break down. Same thing with smart phones. I guess Apple in particular is responsible for a lot of this.
Beyond stuff outright breaking, when you get to software, streaming and “cloud storage” you run into the problem where the thing you bought required connecting to an online server which has since been shut down, meaning that you can’t use it ever again. In contrast a SNES will still play games just fine if you put in the proper cartridge. A book is even more resilient; as long as the paper and ink themselves are fine nothing is going to prevent you from reading that book. I have books that have been passed down in the family since 1900, and only need a bit of repair to the binding.
It was quick, but also note him going through the Mac manual and noting that it is actually comprehensive and useful. Old software manuals really were works of art, and they had to be when the user might never get help from outside of the manual. Now we are in the age of “lol, someone might be able to help you on our discord channel, idk.”
When we win, full-color print instruction manuals will be mandated by law.
Related: Adobe’s New TOS Makes You the Product?
To which Dandelion adds:
I have never adopted smartphones. Still have a flip.
I have been given THREE smartphones by well-meaning people who don’t understand that choice, and… for a while I use them as camera, guitar tuner, couple geeky apps like astronomy, and they are cool… and then they die, for no apparent reason. Screen bricks up so the only bit you can see is part of the clock at the top. Or it won’t turn on anymore at all. Dead. Unusable. I’ve not had one last more than six months. No idea why anybody’d pay $300-$400 for one. How often do you typically replace them?
Meanwhile, I find one of the easiest ways to entertain my kids and introduce stealth learning into their lives is to buy them old tech. They have a tape recorder, a record player, an electric typewriter, a whole series of quite nice but outdated digitcal cameras… and they’re now very familiar with a variety of classical composers (records are a dollar at the St VdP) (they really like Bach and Tchaikovsky), they’re teaching themselves to touch-type, they’ve recorded a whole bunch of random interviews with each other, made little books and newspapers and menus, worked out a few sound and visual effects, trick photography, they make little movies where they work out a storyline, make costumes, write a script, and then film scenes. They troubleshoot their own tech when it isn’t working right. And they’ve learned *so much* just because the devices were there for them to use. It helps that they all cost next to nothing. They can take all the risks they want. If it breaks it breaks, oh well.
Young relatives who live in a ‘smartphone house’ come to visit now and then, and the contrast is stark. They have a device in their hand that could do most of those things: the trick photography, the movie filming and editing, access to every composer who ever lived, self-publishing… all that in their pocket.
And they use it to watch youtube and talk to Character.ai all. day. long. Zero learning, zero creative output, and they can’t be bothered to talk to the actual people in the same room because it doesn’t give them a big enough dopamine hit. It’s like their souls have been excised.
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