Spent a morning out on the town on my day off, and everyone is just fucking buried in their phones 24/7. This realization was so absurd to me
Of course I’m not exempt from this shit, but no wonder people are having so much trouble making friends and creating meaningful relationships in this day and age. So fucking bleak
They posted a picture that contextually implied “this is the same thing as contemporary phone usage.”
To some extent, yes, newspapers were “do not disturb” gestures of their day, but they also lacked the technologically sophisticated engagement maximization strategies used by contemporary devices, among other differences.
they didn’t say it was good or bad, they didn’t imply nothing has ever changed or can ever change?
“people are buried in phones” was met by “people used to be buried in newspapers” then you just assumed the only way to arrive at that observation is through all those ideological offenses, which is a pretty silly assumption to make on a leftist forum. people here criticize more traditional media all the time.
So what was the intention of the picture since you have privileged access to that knowledge and are apparently also aware how wrong I am?
Considering how often quotes these below have been posted in the past to dismiss peoples’ concerns about worsening material and personal conditions in ways large and small, from online dating to employment precarity, by way of saying “people were unhappy before about things so being unhappy now is exactly the same:”
It did look like more of the same to me, and without additional text, the further implication was a sort of “case closed” message.
i’m simply reticent to make a sweeping generalizations about someone’s whole ideological outlook from a single datapoint. its justified to call into question the comparison being made, but the distance from there to a fundamental disbelief in societal change is wholly unsupported, which is why you have to bring in all this vaguely related stuff that’s superficially similar. but assyrian old men yelling at the sky don’t have anything to say about newspapers vs. phones in capitalist socialization
It may be at an impasse anyway; the person who posted the picture didn’t clarify the original intent in their one reply so far and to be fair to them I came on pretty hard, as you said.
I appreciate that you acknowledged that posting the picture on its own had dubious intentions, but this particular well may have already been poisoned because I came on too hard and I think I now regret that.
That quotation from “Socrates” is made-up by some 19th or 20th-century moralist.
I didn’t think highly of it to begin with.
I know you don’t - the people posting that quote are lying to make a bad argument even worse.