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from the too-busy-shitposting-to-go-outside dept.
Human Contact Is Now a Luxury Good:
Screens used to be for the elite. Now avoiding them is a status symbol.
[...] Life for anyone but the very rich — the physical experience of learning, living and dying — is increasingly mediated by screens.
Not only are screens themselves cheap to make, but they also make things cheaper. Any place that can fit a screen in (classrooms, hospitals, airports, restaurants) can cut costs. And any activity that can happen on a screen becomes cheaper. The texture of life, the tactile experience, is becoming smooth glass.
The rich do not live like this. The rich have grown afraid of screens. They want their children to play with blocks, and tech-free private schools are booming. Humans are more expensive, and rich people are willing and able to pay for them. Conspicuous human interaction — living without a phone for a day, quitting social networks and not answering email — has become a status symbol.
All of this has led to a curious new reality: Human contact is becoming a luxury good.
As more screens appear in the lives of the poor, screens are disappearing from the lives of the rich. The richer you are, the more you spend to be offscreen.
I remember when the tag line for AT&T was Reach out and touch someone and it was portrayed as a good thing.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by lentilla on Tuesday March 26 2019, @05:26PM
Entirely possible but I'm not sure that is the major issue at play. I believe it is more likely that most people haven't stopped to consider how technology may be a mixed blessing.
By and large, people usually do what they do and they don't stop to consider why they are doing something. It takes a certain kind of personality to stop and say "hang on, but why?" Technology has inertia, and like the boiling frog, we just follow in yesterday's ruts unless something changes to make the passage suddenly intolerable.
By and large, most people don't seem to form their own opinions on most actions - their choices appear to be governed mainly by osmosis and rote learning. People can get very easily stumped when you ask them "why did you do that?" because they never actually considered why. (Perhaps not so much people on this site, who appear to fall in the action-by-deliberate-choice end of the spectrum.)
Don't discount network effects. If I and all my rich buddies spend the day - offline - on the golf course, then nobody misses out. If all my friends are heavily invested in social media, then I will miss out if I eschew that method of communication.
A feeling of control is as present here in the technology arena as pervades all area of human life. If I feel in control, if I have the expectation that I am the master of my own destiny - then it is merely reflexive to exercise choice over how far I allow technology into my own life. When I simply muddle through life, allowing the prevailing current to choose my destiny, then it probably won't even occur to me that I could simply choose my own path.
So yes, rich and poor, smart or average, we all have considerable leeway to decide if we are to use technology or to become enslaved by it. I believe the issue is that people (for the most part) simply haven't stopped to consider the downsides, and it hasn't occurred to them that they have a choice, and that it might be of value to exercise this choice.