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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: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday March 27 2019, @03:05PM
Some of this ISN'T a choice, it's the lowest common denominator. I've known wealthy families where one person works and their spouse stays home full time and essentially manages the social life. I've known poor families where two parents are working 3-4 jobs between then. If you're rich and you leave Facebook, you keep up with your friends and family by talking on the phone or typing out personal emails or whatever else -- because you have the time to do that. If you're poor and you quit facebook, you lose friends because nobody has that kind of time to spend just for you to be a special snowflake. And organizations don't have the money to send out individual mailings to every member, so if you're not on their Facebook page, you don't get invited to events. Even email lists are getting difficult -- nobody knows how to use Listserv anymore, and those aren't free anyway. Free email services have limits on how many people you can send a mail to. So they use MailChimp if they can afford it; Facebook if they can't. And I know people who were required as a condition of employment to turn over their private facebook password so HR could look through it -- and that sure as shit isn't happening for jobs paying six figure salaries.
Avoiding credit cards is an expense too -- this assumes you don't need the 2% cash back, and it assumes that you can actually afford to wait until you get paid to buy your groceries. That's quickly becoming a luxury too. And often there's fees for withdrawing cash. And with banks increasingly closing branches and moving services online, many people have no way to get cash back into their bank account once they withdraw it, so if you misjudge how much you need to withdraw for groceries you can't put that money back so you can pay your electric bill with it.