And yes, this article is patently ridiculous. Way to overthink something that should be about relaxing and having fun.
However, there is also no evidence that people 20 years ago were walking around all day with their heads buried in newspapers, reading them in grocery store lines, during walks in the park, and in class when they weren't really supposed to. Maybe on benches and on the bus.
Well, I found that article incredible useful.
Like, one of the main reasons I'm depressed right now is because I just can't relax. I'm away from family and friends and apparently don't know the basics of human interaction.
I'm just grateful that there are people overthinking simple things out there so I can catch up and fix some of my anxieties.
Sounds like they were meaningfully interacting with their friends.
Back before the internet, they'd have probably rushed inside and fought over who got to use the phone to call their friends first, and describe the incident outside over the phone to them.
That's a meaningful interaction to you - texting?
Yep. "How to Win Friends and Influence People" was published in 1937.
idk how much time you have spent being deliberately manipulative, but unfortunately i have in my earlier years. unless you are naturally this way, it takes a lot of work in the moment and people are not usually fooled.
I did not tried manipulate people much and hate a lot when people try to manipulate me. People in the past did that to me. Hence my distaste with the book.
It was crafted by a student, Kenneth John Freeman, for his Cambridge dissertation published in 1907. Freeman did not claim that the passage under analysis was a direct quotation of anyone; instead, he was presenting his own summary of the complaints directed against young people in ancient times. The words he used were later slightly altered to yield the modern version."
Thanks for sharing this the-dude, you've helped make me a little less misinformed, even though I'm sad to learn it's not a direct quote :)
these things have been going on a while
What social consequences (specifically pertaining to human behavior) do you concede computing has had, if any?
A staple plot of teen movies going back forever (to at least the 80s, but probably longer) is a kid who somehow makes friends with the cool kids and they actively teach the "loser" to be "cool".
Point being, sure there is maybe less chance of learning these skills organically, but I think that intentional learning of these skills is not a new thing that modern life has brought about.
EDIT: I do have a different expectation for parties, but understand that parties have a spectrum, from people going to a party to drink/smoke/bump what have you to reach a point of near senselessness on one end of the spectrum, to perhaps a gathering of people in the same industry who are trying to "network" at the other. My expectation for informal parties is in the middle of this where people may drink but where it isn't their expectation that they will get drunk, and the discussions will be more intimate and not business related.
The actual alcoholics drink alone. (And that's essentially the problem.)
Some would say it's sad that we can't just gather around a table just to talk. But the advantage of the drink (not necessarily alcoholic), is you have to be there and not on the phone.
Compare it to other “drug cultures”, e.g. cocaine. Of course users socialize heavily, but that does not mean that they are not addicted or harming themselves.
You also have the problem that people get suspicious of people hanging around not drinking alcohol.
It sounds like they wanted a hobby meetup group or similar.
Once you're out of college I think this is mostly in your imagination. Nobody will judge you for drinking water or diet soda and you similarly shouldn't judge someone for enjoying a beer at a social event.
The only major thing that seems to have changed are the names of the distractions.
this is a true statement, but idk how different it really is for the kids. when i was a kid i would happily spend hours rereading the same garbage star wars expanded universe books over and over and over, even though i had basically memorized the plot. with the abundance of content, i doubt today's children would be as satisfied to revisit the same thing so many times, but i also doubt that they waste much more time than i did.
My point is that the nature of what kids do at parties hasn't changed in any significant way to support your original claim that there are "so many basic things we just don't learn how to do anymore".
The worst are work “parties” and happy hours where everyone feels forced to go, no meaningful team building really happens, and the cliques in a company become more evident and visible.
Plus I’ve lost some hearing due to one too many loud metal shows, so party conversation is pretty stressful.
Are your work parties dry?
I work at BigCo we have a monthly "free beer and pizza" on our floor and it's the great at getting people to meet each other and de-siloing.
They aren’t but it still ends up being the same people grouping up and talking to each other. Maybe it’s the company culture but it makes the whole affair feel pretty uninviting.
In my youth it was common to drink at a "party", until it was fun. Then I decided that parties where I need to be drunk to enjoy, are not worth my time. But trust me, there are different ones ...
> Texting is now the preferred form of communication [among teenagers], with 35 percent of teens saying that’s their favorite way to communicate, compared with in-person (32 percent), social media (16 percent) and video chatting (10 percent). In 2012, in-person communication was the most popular. (Emphasis mine)
Source: https://www.recode.net/2018/9/10/17826810/social-media-use-t...
One upon a time if someone wanted to start a conversation with a stranger there was a clear and practiced way of doing so. You could easily identify whether a person was of a similar class and background to yourself. Then there were acceptable and unacceptable times and places for such conversations. It was rigid, formal and often evil (racism etc) but it gave everyone guidelines.
Vestiges of this still exist today. Two doctors or lawyers know how to identify and address each other. Certainly the military has formal rules. It isn't about common backgrounds, it is about knowing exactly how the other person expects to be addressed and how they will respond to you. Such knowledge makes starting that first conversation easier.
Of course those books assume that there are things like a junk model T in the backyard that you are free to take parts from or otherwise destroy. Just to name one change in circumstances.
I certainly lost the illusion of online communities being like real communities. I mean, I certainly don't post to HN to feel socially competent.
this was a really sad part of growing up for me.
I.E. Standard/Manual Transmissions
Socially, maybe not, but my example still stands.
Im middle class (bachelors degree, not from a wealthy family) and the "medicore" , "average" person just talks so much shit out of their ass. Its like a public twitter forum where stupid cliches about "Trump is an idiot" or so much drugs and even orgies have become a not too crazy idea.
Can we have the 50s back without the racism. The people are not the same but parties are not the same either.
I wonder if the rich have stayed classy? Parties are like a rap video. Twerking being a phenomena should tell you all you need to know about the "party" culture in America.
Hell give me the 70s, at least the disco seemed fun. But I guess thats where the drugs started too.
Anyways I would appreciate just ignoring the comment instead of being snarky. This board has standard I hope it strives to keep.
It seems to have done its best to downvote you.
I think we're seeing 2 problems:
1. People really don't want to get together due to the consequence of callout culture/(PCism/SJWism). This has caused people (I'm seeing the effects with the communities I currently and have previously maintained) to be less likely to share, be willing to meet with people, and even branch out their friend circles. Censorship/Censorship has been the conservative "let's all get along" response.
2. Technology has become a detriment, I'm not sure when we're going to have our WWI for personal technology. (WWI introduced the concept that all of these improvements in technology may also bring death and destruction) Given the hooks of technology, we're going to get to a really nastic predicament here. I'm not sure how to describe what it will be, or how we can fix it. But we're losing valuable communication skills and we're making things worse for society. (That has been an ongoing thing for a while) My theory: We're going to go into a dark age.
----
Lastly: If you found this article somewhat helpful, I would suggest reading Captivate by Vanessa Williams/Edwards?
Anecdotally, SJW/PC call-out culture appears to have a much more depressing effect on public discourse over the internet where posting opens you to criticism from anyone on the internet.
As far as expressing disagreement goes, the rule is the same as it's always been as far as I can tell: The degree to which a view outside the local Overton Window is expressible is directly proportional to how much the listeners respect your politics/thought process/moral grounding and how far outside the Overton Window the view is. The more the listener respects your politics/thought process/moral grounding, the more radical the idea you can argue to them without being dismissed. Go too radical for someone who doesn't know you well and you lose the listener.
So in direct response to your question, I'm very comfortable stating disagreement on topics that it's socially acceptable to disagree about generally and am comfortable disagreeing about anything with certain specific groups of people. This is, as far as I can tell, the most any society has ever achieved. A Bay Area neoreactionary will be shunned by most for expressing their belief that a woman's place is in the home just as a progressive in Birmingham, Alabama would be shunned for suggesting there's nothing wrong with abortion.
I would go so far as to say that if this level of self-censorship is new to someone then they have been fortunate to spend much of their life in communities in which their views fit comfortably inside the local Overton Window; for everyone else this is normal.
Second, for a group seeking social cohesion a certain amount of censorship is desirable. We also don't allow people to casually disparage people of color because if we do those members of our community who are people of color would either leave or cause a ruckus, neither of which we want.
Third and lastly, mistakes are tolerated, we're people not caricatures and know that the pronoun stuff can be difficult to track. If you slip up you'll be given a "look" and a chance to correct yourself. If you don't correct yourself, and continue to slip, interventions slowly escalate from friendly reminders of the form, "hey, please watch what pronouns you use" to longer discussions about why your behavior is not acceptable in this context. We use this same approach for people who use unacceptable language, or have trouble controlling their volume when speaking, it's the only way to keep a group of random people tolerable to be around.
As I stated, you are immediately shown the door if you are intentionally misgendering someone. So if someone tells you they want to be called she/her/hers and you very emphatically refer to them as he/him/his a dozen times in three minutes you get the boot. Just as we'd throw out someone who was being extremely rude to our members in a more conventional manner.
On an interpersonal level, I respect the overton window. On a group level, I'm highly concerned with it. It caters too much to the needs of the over sensitive.
I'm on the level of if you're abusive towards other members, you've lost the support of the group and a rule about that is fine. Setting the line at "don't abuse other people" is generic and supported to all people.
But when you codify a rule about pronouns, you're just giving an endorsement to the most oversensitive member that would be 'victimized' by that 'crime.' (Are they going to be easily set off by mistakes?, unintentional misusages during excitement) It also communicates to everyone that it's something you will be rejected and ostrisized from the group over. (That's where the silencing effect comes in).
Anyways, that's my 2c and what I've seen about some groups and how I run my groups to be inclusive.
The thing I see all the time, online and off? Comments like yours where people (mostly guys) self censor out of fear of this hypothetical life catastrophy.
I think we dudes are hurting ourselves here. Far more than PC culture wants to harm us (which seems on the internet like a lot, but in reality, is effectively nil)
Especially with the internet, it's easier than ever to shut yourself in and never go out into the real world and have real meaningful interactions, while still feeling like your online life is full of real, meaningful interactions. Just immerse yourself into a sub-community filled with 2k people, and you feel like a social butterfly.
And it's not just social lives. Things like learning how to interact in basic ways with your cashier at the store, or how to make new friends outside of work, so many of us just don't know how to do this, because our heads were in The Cloud™s while we texted and browsed reddit in line at the grocery store.
Things have even changed profoundly within a single generation. When I was in school, Tamagotchis were the thing. When my little brother was in school, his teacher was using YouTube to teach them. Now my son is in high school and all his classmates have Android phones, which are such a game changer that they aren't even allowed to even have them turned on in school.
And going back a little further, my oldest son and daughter have The Dangerous Book for Boys and The Daring Book for Girls which teach stuff that 100 years ago everyone knew, and now you need to buy novelty books to learn, despite many of the skills and tricks these books teach still being useful.