In response the mayor promised new investment into sports, recreation, libraries and book sharing... In other words, there's more going on here than just the "phone ban", but a broader attempt to reconnect and rehumanise the village life.
My concern is that even with the social and financial will to restore a more convivial lifestyle, those young people won't be able to engage. Having been raised by screens they are already so psychologically altered (damaged?) as to be lost.
The assumption that life can "go back" may be misguided, and that makes this an experiment worth watching.
No there isn't: "In response the mayor promised". Namely, the mayor and their gang achieved THEIR objective first and blah blah the rest.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/508614/school-phone-ban-...
p.s. I exaggerated slightly, it took me 3 days before I installed TikTok. I'd watched silly viral videos that appeared on the news for years and so I was intrigued about it. I've loved it ever since. Just gotta get it set up right so your filter bubble is what you're into. I get half my tech news from HN and the other half from TikTok.
What counts as "a book" here (the seven volume À la recherche du temps perdu seems a bit of challenge to rip through in a day) ?
All the same it's a high number, .. I'm guessing more than a few were light pulps and the best you could find given the library at hand?
I read a lot of books, several thousand, from 12 to 17, and kept a log of them - later I worked in (and led) a team that digested a few thousand technical documents a day (with a heavy dose of computer assistence to find|pick out key parts), there's a lot of material you can fly through quickly and not miss much, there are rare books that can take a year or a lifetime to fully digest and finish with.
That's definitely problematic and not where anyone wants this to go, right?
Ah yes that's quite a different matter.
My thoughts are that sure, when you are living and working alone, as happens to many of us at times, it is possible to successfully apply "force". Like making objects of temptation unavailable, maybe using a time-locked safe or taking a week away at tech-detox bootcamp.
IIRC Johann Hari in "Stolen Focus" seemed to think this only ever created a temporary relief, a bit like dieting and then gaining rebound weight.
What I wrote about in Digital Vegan was based on my interaction with heroin addicts, and is all about the friction that comes from peer pressure and groups that reinforce (mutually enforce) behaviours. Friends are a bigger problem than self-will in the arena of addiction. External force, even in peer relations, tends to have the opposite effects.
Not dissing your idea, which is accurate, but I can't not-find it funny to then remark that most Americans couldn't even take a 2 week vacation without cheating with sick days.
Now what would they have done before the advent of the smartphone? Turn the clock back and have them do that.
Last week I met friends at a board game cafe / bar (I live on the west coast now) and there were tons of college students enjoying coffees and beers and pizza. There was still alcohol, but it wasn’t the point of the evening. When I was their age, we got loaded to forget / escape our boredom.
What I’m saying is that there’s a positive outcome that can be reached through community investment.
So what are High School students supposed to do? They often don't have the money to go spend to hang out someplace, and even if they did, can they actually get there? Maybe with an hour of transit time each way or with a friend's parent who can drive them.
The complaint of "I don't have anything to do without my phone" is probably coming from a younger group than College Students in general.
Now we've traded it in for solipsistic, depressed, pill hooked anti-social teens because of an obsession with health at the cost of everything else. The pandemic of course did its part to accelerate that trend. Hitchens anticipated it a generation ago.
Your body will recover from some stupidities in your teens and young adulthood, having your mind glued to your phone instead of having a real life for your formative years, not so sure.
Or at an arcade? Or a rec center? Or at church?
Or some other thing outside of their house that doesn't exist anymore in any real way?
The death of the third space outside of school/work and home has been awful for society tbh.
I mean, we all know how this is gonna end.
Just under 11% of the village support the measure strongly enough to vote for it. Not 54%. Only 20% of the local electorate voted at all.
On that basis, it's probably a good thing the measure is unenforceable.
After all this is the way the US conducts its elections. Many elections have very low turnout, yet the results are binding.
Abstaining leads to your opinion not being represented, which is to be expected. It doesn't follow that therefore other people's vote hence represent you.
For the vote mentioned in the article, which is non-binding, non-enforceable, and ridiculous in its scope, I'd guess that most abstainers' real opinion on the matter, is that it's a waste of their time to participate.
Democracy is working great here and everybody is really happy about it.
40 years ago if you lived in a small town and had nerdy or niche interests, you were mocked, bullied, and socially isolated from your peers. Now you can find thousands of other people who share your exact passions and interests and connect with them through the internet.
The status quo is always defended by people who are well adapted to it. But the status quo doesn't work for everyone. The internet age is making life a lot better for a lot of people who were previously marginalized.
I'm sure that when Gen Z gets old, they'll be nostalgic for the good old days of TikTok and Instagram. They won't understand whatever new VR metaverse their children live in, just like Boomers and Gen Xers don't understand the current situation. It's a story as old as time, but the world will move on and continue improving.
Hell, the way I got even more into tech (in the very early smartphone days) in the first place was because my friend group - which isn't easily changed when you're not an adult - was not very accepting of my hobbies/interests. I still remember the mocking I got for not being able to match the quality of a AAA game or mocked for tinkering with electronics by people who were 100% confident in their opinion that cheap earbuds would spontaneously explode.
There's also the mention of asking for directions instead of using map apps, have we already forgotten how frustrating an experience it used to be, trying to find a place, getting vague and often wrong directions, circling around the same place until finally getting the right directions?
It's like how CA taxes you on your unemployment insurance income.
Dear fucking God I will go to my grave complaining about how much I hate this trend.
It's all just a social experiment which hopefully ends up trickling up and making owners aware how stupid it is to expect everyone to bring a phone in their pockets in order to being able to order food.
Some times it's not even a lie: as part of mentally cleaning up from an intense addiction to social media, I've forced myself into offline mode and purposely leave the phone at home from time to time.
Also some times I didn't feel like doing the theatrics, and upon asking for a menu, they'd say "it's there in the QR code, please scan it" and leave me to it, as if they had done a good job. Not on my watch!
Or it'll actually boost profits from people having the menu on their phone for dine-out ordering, allow the restaurant to update pricing more easily matching their costs, and of course the savings from not having to print physical menus.
Time will tell. I'd bet on the latter.
First, in a physical store, if I wasn't familiar with that location I'd often have to pester a store employee for information of where a product is located. Now I pull up the store's app and it tells me the aisle and often bin location. Saves me time, lets the staff do their regular job (stocking shelves, etc), and it works out good for people who have a difficult time navigating social interactions with strangers.
Now the negative of this -- stores can have less staff (as they aren't getting pestered as much), and the staff they have doesn't really have to know the products that much (so you lose out on a 15 minute talk with a retired plumber working the plumbing aisle at the hardware store, getting sage advice). Flip side of that is sometimes you can get better advice by looking it up on your phone, but quick internet research isn't something that everyone is really good at.
Online ordering -- yes, I can now get access to things that were never available to me before (unless I happened to be in a very high population density area that could support certain specialty stores). Years ago I had always wanted to try something like Vegemite, and finally ran across a very small jar in a World Market store in the city. Now I can order multiple jars of the stuff on Amazon for a reasonable price.
The negative of this is once I needed an air filter for my lawn mower (about 10 years ago or so?). Craftsman mower, so I went to Sears. Couldn't find it on the shelf, grabbed an employee, they looked it up on their computer and basically ordered it for me on sears.com and had it shipped to my house. Had to wait a few days instead of fixing my lawn mower right then (like my Dad would do back in the day, by grabbing a needed part from the local small town Ace Hardware or similar). Heck, I couldn't even get a headlight switch for my (at the time) 10-year old truck from Autozone without ordering it. (But today I'd just model it and 3D print the thing).
The proposed solution that at least 54% of this village have recognized is that the internet has really eroded societal bonds. The optimization of everything, coupled with the easy on-demand connection provided by phones is a big problem for society. It's like eating cake all the time, its easy and feels good in the moment but it will likely have negative societal impacts.
I'll speak for America, but I am sure it isn't unique here. The optimization of everything to short term profit & loss coupled with phones has made society pretty unpleasant.
- Grocery stores have removed handles from bags and most tellers.
- Extremely uniform big box stores are primarily all that are left
- Shopping is fully online
- Workers have been reduced as much as possible to automata in low status jobs.
- Due to the quality and quantity of data, of all goods are priced to the absolute max society can bear and wages are suppressed to the extent possible as well.
- Connection with society is primarily done through a screen and id ephemeral
I could go on. The point is that in concert, this has seriously changed our society even if any single change alone would be positive.
Phones are simply a symptom of a society that is lonely and disconnected and a biological psychology that makes adaptation to this change hard/impossible. It's not neccesarily negative, but we will see how this shapes society when gen-z and gen alpha are in their 40s.