When I was in high school in the mid-90's, we would hit the local Perkins on a Friday night and order bottomless thermoses of coffee and smoke at our booths inside. Same for college--my dorm had a designated lounge (replete with commercial air filter) where we would hang out, pack tubes with Top tobacco on a little machine, and chain smoke. After college, some of the (dive) bars in Philly you could still smoke in, though others were starting to make you step outside.
Nowadays, I know very few people who smoke analog cigarettes. I don't think it's just my age. I work on a college campus, and I see very few students smoking either. It's just not cool. Vaping isn't really that widespread either, though. Most of the people I do see smoking tobacco are lower socio-economic class, and they're not doing it to be cool, but because they are addicted, and maybe it is one of the few precious things they can look forward to on break from their shift or whatever.
I predict social media in all its forms is going to follow a similar trajectory. Myspace and Facebook were fun and interactive 15 years ago. People are starting to feel the dis-ease now, though, if they haven't already. They don't derive the same pleasure from it, find themselves wasting inordinate amounts of time on various platforms, realize their mental health and productivity is being negatively impacted; also, it's not really novel or cool anymore. The people who remain on it are eventually going to be like those shift workers smoking in the dirty alleys outside the restaurant or at the bus stop.
And I'm not even talking about this platform or that app in particular. I'm talking about an existence of perpetual connectivity in general. Those in big tech obviously engineered smartphones and social media apps to exploit our psychological vulnerabilities. They don't let their own kids use it. The addiction is not an incidental; it is inherent. Cal Newport thinks that handing your kids a smartphone today is the same as handing them a pack of cigarettes. We were all guinea pigs in this massive social experiment. But all it takes is a few kids in the class to simply say, "Nah," to swing the pendulum. Suddenly being a neo-Luddite is nouveau riche.
In the movie Idiocracy where a man of average IQ is suddenly the smartest guy in the world because everyone else has been so dumbed down, he only seems to be by comparison. Likewise, those who unplug from the Big Tech matrix and do adopt more neo-Luddite sensibilities regarding technology will eventually find themselves having better concentration, increased memory, sharper focus, less anxiety, being comfortable with boredom and solitude, and not being ruled by compulsion to the point that it will appear to be a superpower.
I'm of the generation where I remember a time before internet, cell phones. I remember those times fondly. For the younger generation, though, it is complete existential paradigm shift, and just as existentially scary. We can't necessarily "go back" completely or put the big tech genie back in the bottle as a society--but why not at least try for a pro-scripted amount of time on an individual level and let the data speak for itself. Say, maybe, forty days?
Lent is just around the corner, after all.
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