101–110 of 405 posts
I can imagine not using it much after I retire. Honestly it doesn't offer a whole lot IMO. I'll likely keep email and use maps/navigation though, as they are useful.
I used to work in the Caribbean when internet there was ridiculously expensive. Local social life was fantastic - I missed nothing about the internet. Also - I missed nothing about not keeping up to date on latest news - locals just didn't care what was going on for the most part - the latest "outrages" were 100% irrelevant. If you went to bar at night, and IF they had a TV on, it was sports. So you'd come back to th…
People always bring up how people in Fiji or the Carribean are so happy and not stressed, and I’m not sure what the message is. Of course if you just want to relax and not worry too much about what you want to accomplish in life then yeah go to some corner of the world and live happily? However for a lot of people that’s not what they want out of their lives; they want it to mean something in their own way. Of course…
Unless you're suggesting that social media outrage is productive and helps people to accomplish something meaningful in their own way, you're not actually addressing the OP's comment, you're addressing an unrelated idea that you've heard in the past.
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Part of what you’re describing can be attributed to lack of internet. But other part is just being an outsider that doesn’t really care that much (and I mean that in totally non offensive way - it’s just a benefit of being an outsider). Outrage existed long before internet. Daily tv news, newspapers, gossips at work, coworker with totally opposite world view, etc, were all great sources of outrage. At smaller scale,…
My outrage quotient has dropped significantly in the two and a half months since I deleted facebook and twitter. Just removing those two things from my life has made a measurable improvement in my quality of life.
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Being on social media is only a subset of being online. Plenty of people are not on social media but still watch tv, bank, and get gps directions online.
This is very true. However it is certainly the subset I find myself on the most, ha. I think also for a lot of people, social media is the internet and almost inextricably so. How often do we see on this very site people bemoaning only visiting the same N websites when there's more websites than ever? I think maybe perhaps for me a "read-only" internet would be useful, like a feature phone in a way. Might have to go…
I'm glad you've posted this. I've been observing this for a long while, and it drives me crazy. My spouse (30) is actually a good example of this. For most people smart phones and tablets aren't the "super computers in people's pockets" often touted on forums like these. They are really simply just gateways to social media.
I'm on mobile so this will be short, but it seems there are consequences of this: it seems like most people aren't actually good at finding information on there internet. Many no longer seem to have a concept of physical data storage. Many still struggle with understanding the very basics of internet security, or passwords. It also seems like so much more work has just been offloaded to the individual under the guise of "you can do this from the comfort of your own home".
Or maybe it's just me...
A significant portion of the US is illiterate [1]. One might assume that being illiterate affects internet usage. Not quite as romantic as neo-Luddism, or even making a conscious choice not to expose oneself to potentially problematic patterns of communication. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/datapoints/2019179.asp
My first reaction was “7% sounds low”, but again, that’s probably biased by my own experiences.
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My outrage quotient has dropped significantly in the two and a half months since I deleted facebook and twitter. Just removing those two things from my life has made a measurable improvement in my quality of life.
I found I had to get rid of a decent portion of the news too, and news-adjacent comedy shows like Colbert. It's not enough to personally not read FB/Twitter, since they have gotten so integrated into mainstream media. Maybe 10 years ago you could just ignore social media, but by 2018 (when I started making an effort to avoid it), you could end up seeing thousands of tweets without ever using twitter yourself, if you…
By just reading a quality daily newspaper and a couple of newsmagazines, I’m better informed than when I was a news junkie with cable news on in the background and news websites refreshing on my phone.
“Breaking news” is broken. Print media, especially weekly newsmagazines, have the luxury of time to actually think about their coverage and provide adequate research and follow-up. Conversely, space is limited, so if it’s not adding value, it gets chopped.
Live news, on the other hand, needs to alternate between being first to report, then filling time until something else occurs, all while making whatever is occurring seem more important than it really is.
I used to work in the Caribbean when internet there was ridiculously expensive. Local social life was fantastic - I missed nothing about the internet. Also - I missed nothing about not keeping up to date on latest news - locals just didn't care what was going on for the most part - the latest "outrages" were 100% irrelevant. If you went to bar at night, and IF they had a TV on, it was sports. So you'd come back to th…
Part of what you’re describing can be attributed to lack of internet. But other part is just being an outsider that doesn’t really care that much (and I mean that in totally non offensive way - it’s just a benefit of being an outsider). Outrage existed long before internet. Daily tv news, newspapers, gossips at work, coworker with totally opposite world view, etc, were all great sources of outrage. At smaller scale,…
- When living and interacting locally I think folks moderate their views a bit - call it "politeness"?
- Views locally are somewhat more homogenized?
- For better and worse, I'm not sure you'd last that long in Caribbean if you were just a twitter bomb thrower, even if justified - my impression was even things like whistleblowing would not be very well received (ie, if I'd complained about various govt officials not being at their desks when they should have been - it wouldn't have come over well). This may be wrong and certainly has changed as folks become more aware of what should and shouldn't happen.
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I'm curious to know in what ways you mean.
Before the internet bbs boards existed. Calling a board was a different experience. Playing games on computers didn't require an internet connection. Often you traded disks. Having no internet opens up the possibilities the computer can do. You start exploring and using more of it.
If you don’t know how to do things then not having internet is pretty limiting. After all, most software out there doesn’t come with robust documentation built in. It’s been all online for a while.
You might be idolizing your younger years when there were quite a few pain points that you’re glossing over. If you don’t like certain parts of the internet then don’t visit them. It’s not like you’re forced to be on social media. It’s clear from people I meet on forums that they don’t go almost anywhere else but that forum...
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People always bring up how people in Fiji or the Carribean are so happy and not stressed, and I’m not sure what the message is. Of course if you just want to relax and not worry too much about what you want to accomplish in life then yeah go to some corner of the world and live happily? However for a lot of people that’s not what they want out of their lives; they want it to mean something in their own way. Of course…
You could try programming in the Caribbean. Nice beach shack, a couple of manuals and offline copy of stackoverflow perhaps.... I heard that Travis Kalanick coded the initial code base of Uber in Varkala beach in Kerala[1],[2]. [1] https://www.gadgetsnow.com/tech-news/guess-what-uber-ceo-tra... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varkala
Honestly, I wish I could stop using the internet. I make a lot of things and enjoy sharing them because other people might find them useful. It has often led to wonderful and inspiring conversations. Yet it's obvious there's something very very wrong happening with American culture that began around the time of social media platform consolidation. "Being online" entails a distinct mindset and attitude that is incompa…