My experience in that regard has been pretty much the opposite. People are still stuck in a pre-smartphone mindset where you have to give people directions instead of an address, where you have to remember the locations of businesses you haven't visited in a long time instead of looking them up, where you have to guess about traffic conditions instead of just checking, etc.
It amuses me to no end when a crowd of techies get into a discussion about driving directions these days. No longer necessary!
So, what you see as a simple task I see as more of a practice, a way of living. This is just how I am about most things, being something of a perfectionist. And that's fine!
Dead reckoning and using the sun will get you really far in navigation. Unless you're trecking across the tundra or sailing the high seas, you'll need something a little Mir modern.
This is getting stupid, you're insisting on using a horse and carriage in a time of motor vehicles. Fine, I will just pass you on th highway, tip my hat and be thankful for living in a country where we have the freedom to be as eccentric as we want.
* Because I may not have an internet connection near my destination
* Even if I do, my maps app has a thing for taking me to the wrong place. Anecdote: some friends and I went biking through a popular bike road through the woods. When checking the route on their phones, all they could see was "you are here", and nothing else because apparently the road didn't exist.
* Paper is more reliable than electronics: a paper map will survive a fall, water and mud, and it will never run out of battery.
I don't deny the usefulness of electronic maps for daily use, but I honestly don't trust them for visiting unfamiliar places.
But I'd find a traveler foolhardy to not at least consult a map ahead of time when visiting some very new, distant place. The good thing is that it's normal in the US for gas stations to all carry local maps. So I'm usually not more than a few minutes from being able to stop off and get my bearings if needed -- last I had to do that was in a tricky part of NC (damned business/non-business routes) in 2007.
I do similar stuff with mental arithmetic, to make sure I can, and exercise it.
I think the main reason I go straight to fancy electronics when driving is because I don't really like driving all that much,and want to make sure I get to my destination as quickly as possible. I'd rather save the pain and effort for other things.
Or is that maybe not what the human mind is best used for? Maybe, humans are best at being creative, and our tools help us at that task by freeing us of tedium and ignorance of simple facts.
True, some people misuse GPS technology by driving their cars into lakes. Some people misuse book technology by taking Von Däniken seriously. I'm not seeing a big difference between the two, moral or otherwise.
"for this discovery of yours [writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves." [1]
[1] - http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Phaedrus#On_the_decline_of_Gre....
Historical evidence implies that it is true that the people who are able to leverage the tools at their disposal (be that actual tools like cell phones or just applying recent scientific breakthroughs) tend to do well in their life.
On the other hand, we have the idea that the mind is a muscle and it works best if we train it hard. In this mindset, we see objects as crutches that are best to be avoided in order to improve the mind as efficiently as possible.
I and people around me tend to focus on the first paradigm, leaving the second one unexplored.
One of the reasons may be that it is still largely philosophical: if you wanted to improve your memory, what would you do? There are books on people that use tricks to remember large digits and other chunks of data (the brother of Jonathan Safran, Joshua Foer, wrote one).
However, most of us believe that this is not the same type of memorization that can enable us to do pattern matching in our memories faster (which is what mathematicians need the most, being able to see parallels to math they've done before).
And even if we had a trick to pattern-match faster, in order to raise it from the level of "it was described in popular literature, but has no scientific basis" like mind maps and such, we would have to conduct very large studies to verify its validity, which is something that is not done at all in this area.
As a side remark, this is the same problem I have with nootropics. What works and what doesn't? For memorization and focus, it seems ADD medicine works somewhat. For Paul Erdös it was amphetamines which boosted his creativity -- is that better for us mathematicians? And what do these drugs do with us in the long term? Almost all evidence is anecdotal, and I'm not willing to risk my health to be a smarter scientist.
Those crutches frees up time to let one work on other muscles; muscles that might not have any known crutches (like practicing reading maps instead of practicing navigating by the stars some centuries ago).
I just started working for a new company a couple of months ago and my co-workers are all techies. We all decided to carpool together (I wasn't driving) and the driver was aimlessly looking around for the location.
I asked him about using google maps and he looked at me like I was an alien. Nobody else in the car ever used Google maps (or any form of GPS) regularly.
When I don't know how to get somewhere, I use GPS.
Over the last few years my attitudes have changes considerably to the point where I no longer carry a personal smart phone around with me.
I started to notice that many, if not most conversations, I was having with real people were being interrupted by texts, emails, and other notifications, sometimes for only a second or two, but often to the point where the spoken topic of conversation was forgotten by the person i was talking with.
This included colleagues but also family members and friends.
I once tried to explain this to my own father during a lunch, but he took a ph call while I talking to him.
I have a zero tolerance policy toward this now. I don't get rude about it, but if someone will break a real life conversation with me to look a a notification, I usually excuse myself from the conversation.
As regards my own behaviour: I keep a smartphone, but I have no notifications for email or SMS. I'll receive an interrupt for a phone call (something my relatives only tend to make in emergency situations) and that's it.
I think that, for me, this is the ideal balance between giving my full attention to conversations and being contactable.
Smalltalk is easy and requires very little thought or concentration anyway, but I no longer give my full attention if it is not reciprocated.
I don't make a point of doing it, but if I am left hanging mid-word while someone checks their phone, and they subsequently attempt to pick up the thread again, I just change the topic to a bullshit one (How 'bout that game on the w'end?).
I actually find it very hard to believe that someone who develops for a living wouldn't use google maps, which are far superior to paper maps (traffic, for one thing). I'd be very suspicious of your code!
Personally, I am trying to be selective about the technology I employ, based on what I get out of it. Vacuums? Check. Digital cameras? Check. Smartphones? Not sold on it, and I had one for a few years.
There's more of us than you think, and we don't appreciate the jab at the quality of our work.
A smart phone is a digital camera.
Paper maps are like horse drawn carriages - sure they still work, but they are outdated, inaccurate and a relic of the past. It's like saying you still pull out an encyclopedia.
You can argue all you want about how hipster it is to use a dumb phone, and you're entitled to reject any technology you want, but I'm still highly suspicious of your work, out of band Luddite tendencies are a red flag.
You show me a smart phone with a telephoto lens, and I'll show you a smart phone that is a camera.
they are outdated, inaccurate and a relic of the past
Paper maps don't run out of batteries at the least opportune moment. At the very least, they are a good backup for your tech in the backcountry.
ou can argue all you want about how hipster it is to use a dumb phone
You make this much too complicated. A smartphone costs more money, and offers me no added value that I care about. Is that Luddite-ism? Or is the Luddite-ism the part where I don't feel compelled to tweet or "check in" every where I go?
I'll probably end up buying a new iPhone as I develop for it, but for now, I'm quite happy with it.
Maybe a cell phone camera would not be useful to you but I reject your snobbish assertion that a "camera" is defined by anything beyond its ability to capture and store photon information.
Btw they make lots of clamp-on lenses for iPhones et al. Some are even telephoto. I suppose it's still not a camera because it doesn't have a prism or a hot shoe or some other nonsensical thing you want to fixate on.
I suppose I should clarify; a camera I can use. I didn't mean to say "interchangeable lenses", although I like those too. Certainly other people get by with smartphone cameras, but they do not meet my needs. Is that so hard for you to accept?
A few reasons, some of which only apply in some situations:
1. When traveling in Europe without data-roaming, I printed out some maps ahead of time to navigate. I sort of liked the experience; compared to doing point-to-point routing on demand, it was more of a lay-of-the-land thing where I studied the map to get a feel for how things fit together, where I should be heading, and how I could recognize where I was. It felt like I got an idea of the area faster, whereas when routing is always available it's like when you're following someone else who's navigating: you don't really learn how things fit together because you're just following them.
2. Having done that, I found that, while sometimes unwieldy, a traditional fold-out map is typically much better designed than the collection of one-page views I printed off of Google Maps. For one thing, a good one will have some useful insets, visible landmarks both marked on the map and in an index, and much more reliable printing of street names (if you print out a map from Google Maps, the names of streets will infuriatingly often be left off, depending on the zoom level and density).
3. The online maps' data quality is often worse than a paper map for an area. A few weeks ago I was using a Google Maps map to navigate in Crete, and the "road" I thought I would be taking dead-ended and turned into a footpath with a gate, resulting in an inconvenient 5-point turn and detour. The transition from road to footpath wasn't marked on Google maps, which showed the whole thing as a thru road. A paper map of Crete I switched to did not have this mistake. Sometimes—in areas with many editors—OpenStreetMaps is better in this regard, especially if you want to find footpaths or stairs, which Google Maps often omits. But in Crete the OSM data was not good either.
4. I find it easier to discuss locations with other people by pointing to a paper map than by us both looking at a smartphone screen. Admittedly, the larger screen of a tablet might solve this problem.
This lay-of-the-land feeling you're talking about is really important when you're not in control of your own vehicle and have to make decisions such as where to get off. It's like some fun game, really.
footnote: I don't recommend hitchhiking for anyone who's not sure they want to do it. It's dangerous. (For others though, I can definitely recommend, since it's great fun and the amount of lone people driving their cars all over the continent for business appointments is insane. Sometimes you get a tour guide intoduction to the local landscape, sometimes there's an in-depth introduction to elevator construction in dams.)
On not using smartphones and being on this website ... I don't see the contradiction. I am a software developer, mainly working on sever-side software and some desktop development tools. The skills I claim to know (Erlang, JavaScript, Python, software design in the large ...) I know very well. No conveniences or lack thereof are going to change that. I don't really develop for mobile, except incidentally. My computing happens at a desktop or on a laptop, and I don't feel my experience or knowledge are limited, except in the mobile sphere. Even if all consumer computing were to move to mobile, there would still be lots of server-side software to be programmed.
There's a whole lot of computing that happens outside of desktops, mobile devices, and networked services. I know little about firmware development and manufacturing software as well, for instance.
I noticed you suggest you wouldn't care for my code ... it's true that best software I've written has not been open source, and I have a nasty habit of pulling down any project I am not very proud of. Peruse at your leisure: https://github.com/oinksoft
"I'm not writing it down to remember later, I'm writing it down to remember now." – Unknown.
In the past 3-4 years, when smartphones completely hit the mainstream, I have noticed a very significant change in those around me, even in some people I am close with. They seem more ... robotic! I am certain if I moved in different circles, I would've noticed a similar pattern years before among BlackBerry users, who were the butt of the "CrackBerry" joke ca. 2004.
I'm not sure how else to describe somebody completely fixated on a small device, resorting to it almost like some security blanket when an everyday problem needs solving. Portable video games like Game Boy, and traditional mobile phones, which no doubt have been similarly derided in the past, offer a poor comparison for their limited scope. The small screen provides some strange tunnel vision I don't care to encounter.