Everyone's ragging on this article, but it matches my experience exactly. I feel like I can't talk to anyone nowadays without fearing that little buzz in their pocket, at which point they pull out their phone and start playing with it while I'm mid-sentence. And I'm not some grumpy "get off my lawn" old man; I'm barely 25 years old.<p>Friends say "but it was [such-and-such nonsense]. I had to check my phone!" Really, you <i>had</i> to? Your life depended on you checking that text? People get frustrated with me because my phone is dead all the time (and thus I don't text back immediately), but I hate feeling tethered to some device.<p>I notice an overwhelmingly <i>huge</i> difference in the quality of my conversations with people when their phone is not present in the room with them.<p>This isn't to say I'm anti-technology at all — I spend 10 hours a day programming. I just don't attempt to do it while conversing at the same time (nor could I; without uninterrupted focus, I make a lot of mistakes in my code).
> 89 percent of cellphone owners said they had used their phones during the last social gathering they attended.<p>Right there is where the author looses me. That online collaboration via the phone IS a social gathering unto itself. One is not fundamentally different than the other. Physical proximity is great, but it is a serious limitation. Not everyone has the time/money to physically meet their friends over coffee every twenty minutes. Not everyone lives in downtown Boston or NY.<p>> They say it’s a skill they mastered in middle school when they wanted to text in class without getting caught.<p>And why do kids text so much at school? Because they are bored to death by mind-numbing subjects and teaching that doesn't actually teach. Texting is the symptom, not the disease.<p>The ability to 'not get caught' while communicating with others is a valuable skill for nearly everyone these days. It should be encouraged.
> COLLEGE students tell me they know how to look someone in the eye and type on their phones at the same time, their split attention undetected. They say it’s a skill they mastered in middle school when they wanted to text in class without getting caught.<p>In my experience, they haven't mastered that nearly as well as they think...
I'm worried more about the way people are using the web while at work.<p>If somebody would have said a few decades ago that in 2000, every employee would have a television set on his desk, people would not have believed this person. However, the situation is actually much worse.
This isn't unique to millennials. My dad and I had this problem where he would be on his blackberry when talking with me until we had a conversation about it and agreed to be more mindful of being on glowing rectangles rather than present in the conversation.
It's funny. On my development team we have four younger guys (mid-late twenties) and three older guys (35+).<p>By far the most distracted people on the team are the older ones. In meetings they tend to lose focus, look at their computers, misremembered what's said, or just seem to tune it out. I've made a habit of specifically managing how they are perceiving what I'm saying -- looking at their eyes, seeing if they're distracted, asking lots of confirming questions.<p>And outside of meetings, they don't pay attention to our online communication channels <i>enough</i>.<p>If anything, my experience has been that it's the older generation that sucks at paying attention to the right things in the new super connected world.
Turkle has written some good stuff but her recent work has been too close to "Kids these days! Why back in my day..." for my tastes.<p>(I was going to use that Socrates quote about "Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority" but it turns out not be by Socrates but from someone in 1907 paraphrasing complains from antiquity <a href="http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehaving-children-in-ancient-times/" rel="nofollow">http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehaving-children...</a> )
We've spent generations filling our every waking moment with more forced broadcast stimuli, I don't blame 'millennials' for wanting to put up a minimum filter and default to their own bubble of controlled media. Why should we talk if you don't have something more interesting to say than my phone?
> In one experiment, many student subjects opted to give themselves mild electric shocks rather than sit alone with their thoughts.<p>This screams of a lack of mindfulness that hopefully can be fixed through working to become more aware of your own thoughts.
I am sympathetic to this author. I wrote this a while back on here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9883769" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9883769</a><p>I am nostalgic for the land before internet. While there are many technological divides and revolutions between generations, not sure many in history compare to the dramatic change to global society and behavior as a result of the internet, and by its extension, the mobile era.
The stereotypical family morning used to involve the father reading the newspaper while eating breakfast. Eating and reading with others is a tradition long predating smartphones.<p>We're in a golden age of text, with dramatically higher engagement due to an unprecedented access to more useful, interesting and relevant information than has ever been available before.<p>The title uses a new fancy word, but it might as well say "Stop reading. Let's talk."
One of the basic human needs is to be loved and feel like you belong. We do this by both "keeping in touch", "getting together". The usual assumption is that "getting together" is a higher quality way to meet these needs than "keeping in touch".<p>Your smartphone represents almost everyone you know. In a face-to-face meeting, the ratio is <i>precisely</i> (n-1)/n. So if you both have 100 friends, realize that you're competing to meet the need of love and belonging against the 99 other people in their pocket, who can also give that to your friend with surprising effectiveness.<p>(The argument generalizes: you are <i>also</i> competing against every stranger that's ever put anything online - the person who wrote that Wikipedia article or Yelp review has a call on your attention, too!)
IMO, all of this applies to meetings at work as well, which are, after all, conversations. It's hard enough for people to listen to each other when they're actually listening. Throw in a laptop, a phone, and the mistaken belief that a person can 'multi-task' without a quality hit, and its a disaster straight out of the gate.<p>I'm curious: Does anyone have rules at work around no laptops / phones at meetings?
Lately I've been feeling despair and dread at the scene of hundreds of people glued to their phones .. after a particularly hard week at work I stood at the station and watched the train roll by, full of commuters glued to their little machines. It was an entirely dystopian scene, and as much as I've been a promoter of the technological revolution that is the Internet and all its devices, I'm feeling more and more disaffected with the results of what we've done.<p>It could be different, but its not. These phones are brick walls, carefully channeling the minds of the enslaved back to the master.<p>So I started thinking about what I would do to make it different, and really, I think one small tweak to our technology would make a huge difference. Of course, its not in the interests of the manufacturers or network providers: make it possible for phones to auto-discover each other locally, without requiring a server somewhere upstream.<p>If only we had some way to get people connected to each other - in a local context - i.e. anyone on the train can search for and find others on the same train without requiring a client-server relationship with an upstream connection. Host-AP mode: too restrictive.<p>We need local peer search and discovery.<p>About the only way I can think of to get this right now is to man up and put a device in AP mode with some sort of SSID named "LocalUsersNetwork" or something .. some sort of recognizable brand that people can use to connect with their local peers.<p>It would make the forward march towards further electronic enslavement so much more palatable if it were possible to have at least a local context in which to freely operate.<p>EDIT: events like this make me think there <i>is</i> a market for "local stranger discovery services", its just nobody has worked out a branding process for it:<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/1480766915558797/" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/events/1480766915558797/</a>