Humans evolved in environments that usually involved absorbing a limited amount of fairly stable information, and dealing with communities of limited size (say, less than 100?), also fairly stable. Now we have to process thousands of faces (some in person, some through media), millions of pieces of information (news, commercials, trivia, education, business emails, social media feeds) and thousands of different micro-skills (learn the latest feature in smartphones, adapt to your bank changing its electronic banking policies, based on latest research now you need to learn to look for a low-carcinogen version of your favorite food, etc.)
I wonder whether this is what's causing many people to zone out, some to retreat into private shells and a few to resort to senseless armed violence...
Call me oldschool.. I'm just 43 and I still have that split second confusion every time I see someone speak aloud in the metro or tram here with their glassy stare, looking in front of them, while speaking to apparently no one. Every god damn time I'm like "(0.3 seconds) OH..."
But am I not wrong. I don't need to "understand" anything. My body is that through which I know myself and everything else. All of what we call "reality" is experienced through, and as, a body.
If anything technology should honor, and augment that instead of dissociating us.
In the UK we have 'silent carriages' on trains but after a while the 'loud and impolite' people started to realise there was little or no enforcement so, although we still have them, they are pretty much redundant.
In Spain (where I'm living now) there seems to be a class divide (much more in the UK) regarding etiquette for loud talking and phone conversations. Local busses and trains can be sheer hell yet longer distance services and flights tend to be quite civilised.
That is my real concern - nobody lives a perfect life or is perfectly happy as a teenager. But you take action to find a better life, and grow in those years, on multiple levels, and come out of it having developed into the person you will really be. So who will these kids be who spent those formative years staring at devices? I really don't know... is it just a new flavor of the same growth, or will it be different?
I think that this is a relatively new phenomena, which occurred during the urbanization caused by the industrial revolution. Urbanization caused social bonds to be broken, and people became unhappy and hard working.
There is a super creepy tshirt from one startup I know, which has the text "the pyramids were not built by happy people". I've always wanted to ask them about what this means. But I've never had the nerve.
But it has always haunted me.
I’m now reading Marx’s “Grundrisse” and at some point, while he has just started explaining the essence of capital, he mentions the story of an English priest who on visiting the island of Jamaica complains that everyone in there is lazy, that they don’t want to work more in order to achieve more in life than just obtaining their daily food, and that was the way to disaster. When asked by said English priest on why they were working just enough to put some food on the table the Jamaicans answered him that there’s no reason for them to work more than strictly necessary, they’re happy with what they have.
Marx’s book was written in the 1850s so that I reckon that the English priest’s story dates from the early to the mid-1800s, i.e. when the Industrial Revolution was on full throttle in Britain.
Though I think the hacker space example is not bad, the technology helped people come together, and brought them closer (at least initially)
That said, I believe that once addicted to social media, the bubble of safety that we feel from "eating social junk food". The screen bubble, can become alluring and some people fall into it. I remember at the Prague hackerspace, how we'd all be sitting around the table, and I'd be confused, why people were laughing and interacting without words. It was a while till I realized that they were chatting on IRC.