Has it really changed that much in 10 years, or is part of it just the sense of alienation everyone experiences getting out of jail after a long time?

I mean, 10 years ago people lamented over the exact same thing; and before that, and before the before.

I can't prove it of course, but I'd bet you might feel that "human interaction" is not quite what you remember it to be if you had only just spent 10 years behind the bars.

And that's even if the technological progress on the outside had stood perfectly still for some reason.

>has it really changed that much in 10 years

Yes (although I'd probably put the real dividing line at more like 12 years). Facebook wasn't available outside of certain institutions until 2006, the same year Twitter dates to. The iPhone was first introduced in 2007 and arguably didn't really take off until the 3GS in 2009.

So, yes, the internet was well-established by the 2000s. But today's always connected world of social media and everything else is only about a decade old.

ADDED: Of course, if you turn back the clock about another ten years, for many people it would be the difference between pre-Internet and a mostly broadband-connected very commercialized internet.

I'd argue it hasn't changed much for technology people. I had an iPhone in 10 and used it constantly for the same thing I do today: news, web browsing when away, and chatting with friends. My google history confirms this. I still use the same gmail address, reddit, social media, Steam, bank, etc accounts.

I think the biggest difference for me is that I use spotify now for music, rather than downloading it. And streaming video is now legit, so there's less need for torrents and newsgroups.

What's changed is social media. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram all use machine learning to provide just the right feedback for us to keep cominng back for more. This has hijacked our dopamine feedback loops and changed the way we interact with each other.

I know personally, my attention span is much worse than it was years ago. It's tough to find friends, and if I weren't married, I bet it would be tough and highly competitive to find a mate. I think this has something to do with it.

>I had an iPhone in 10

I think you're partly agreeing with me. I didn't have an iPhone until 2010. Before that I had a Treo, which was much less capable. So prior to 2010, I didn't really have a lot of mobile connectivity other than email and some (slow) web surfing.

I'll disagree with many of the commenters and say, "No, it hasn't changed that much."

15 years ago I was saying the same thing, but about SMS and Internet Messengers. Almost 20 years ago I was complaining about how online chat had killed email, and I rarely got emails that were more than 1-2 sentences, and that instant messaging content was very shallow with nothing of substance. I actually stopped using Instant Messaging around 2002 for this very reason.

14-15 years ago a colleague visited S Korea and Japan, and was struck at how the norm was that couples would be sitting at a table staring at their phones and not talking to each other - before the iPhone was launched.

For me it has changed a lot and very quickly. I empathise with a lot of what he's saying, even without being incarcerated ;)

> 10 years ago people lamented over the exact same thing; and before that, and before the before.

Is the logic there that if people have complained about something frequently in the past then it's not true? On the scale of human history 100 years is a blip so it's quite possible that for many periods of 10 years things people can observe troubling patterns and in fact a problem can be compounding over time.

People complained about racism and mistreatment of blacks in America 10 years ago, and 10 years before that etc etc. Is your logic that we don't have a problem with racism?

People have complained that destruction of our ecosystem is getting worse, and they did 10 years ago, and 10 years before that etc, etc. Would you really argue that "therefore it's no big deal"?

13 years ago there was no iphone, 13 years before that basically no one used the WWW, 13 years before that virtually no one had personal computers. Now you can disagree about whether the effects of change are good or bad, but communication the fact that communication has changed rapidly in 30+ years is not something that can be argued and is hardly just a fact of human life throughout history.

10 years ago, the iPhone had only existed for 3 years... society was much different.

Ten years ago "looking at a cellphone" was still universal shorthand for "is a dick" in fiction. So was "talking to no-one" (bluetooth headset) which carried a further meaning of "business douche" ("carries a cellphone at all" was shorthand for this for most of the 90s—see the movie Hook for an early example). Both are normal and common now.

Ten years ago much of the population still considered paying any attention whatsoever—any—to a cellphone in the company of others, maybe unless it actually rang (remember phone calls that weren't spam?), to be incredibly rude.

All that changed very fast over the following 5 years or so.

The normalization of this behavior makes me incredibly salty.

Likely the same people that denigrated nerds for liking tech are now glued to their device while others are talking to them _in real life_.

The only reason that 3/4 (conservatively) of the population isn't walking around with their Borg implant Bluetooth earpieces these days is that, in most situations, if something is actually important someone will send you a text. And, yes, I clearly recall when being affixed to a Bluetooth earphone was widely viewed as douchey behavior outside of certain circles because it implied the person was just waiting for a call that was more important than you.

This has pretty much been normalized as more and more people expect immediate response to whatever trivial whine they have.

I agree with that. Yes some persons and young people now live completely connected in a kind of parallel world of social networks, but depending where you live it's a small minority. The physical world and human interactions in it haven't changed, and lot of interesting things still happen offline.

I can't find it now but I saw a before & after picture of Cuban street life. For reasons Cuba got smart phones all at once, recently. The before picture shows a lively scene, in the after picture everyone is alone, staring into a phone.

>has it really changed that much in 10 years

I'm inclined to follow Peter Thiels view here. We were promised flying cars and got 140 (now more) characters on Twitter.

Tech has changed. But everything else is so much the same it almost hurts.

> We were promised flying cars and got 140 (now more) characters on Twitter.

This is entirely due to tech financiers like Peter Thiel investing in software to the exclusion of other forms of technology. He could be funding flying cars in the way that Elon Musk is funding space travel.

Addictive always-on social networks are really recent. 10 years ago what was considered addictive were email and mailing lists.

There are plenty of people who generally feel the same way and stay away from social media in general(myself included). Which is incredibly odd when you are building things that are aimed at those exact people. A case of "don't use your own supply" I suppose.

The more involved you are with anything to do with data, the less likely you are to use it.

I don't like social media very much because it's created a culture of bullying people into conformity. It's not so much my opinion that data trends predict individuals, as some may argue, but that people are pressured to conform to trends, rewarded when they do, and punished when they do not. This philosophy is deeply entrenched in the language and behaviors of groups, and it's violently prone to manipulation.

Social media didn't create the culture. It just gave more people a chance to be part of it. Before, marginalized voices were almost universally bullied and abused into conformity. Some of those marginalized people handle having a voice now poorly, but it doesn't mean the culture they participate in is new.

I partially disagree. Verbal communication requires people to do at least some degree of thinking if they want to respond to a view that they disagree with. Whereas social media allows people to "participate" in a discussion (in the sense that they produce feedback which influences the course of the discussion) using a mode of thought that can be summarized as "does this make me feel like pressing the upvote or the downvote button?"

I believe that this latter mode of participant-community interaction is especially conducive to echo chambers, because it reduces any kind of content to a one-dimensional axis: does the community like this, or does the community dislike this?

Before social media, the bullying was typically confined to school yards. Now, it follows the bullied everywhere they go. Social Media didn't create the culture, but it poured fuel on the fire and cranked the volume knob up to 11.

I would agree but that argument goes for pretty much any aspect of human behavior. Where I make a distinction is by defining dominant behavior.