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From Pine View Farm by Frank Bell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.pineviewfarm.net.
From Pine View Farm

The Year of Living Disconnectedly 2

James McWillians recounts the experience of one person who ditched his smartphone for a year. It was not pretty. Here’s a bit:

But if Miller became more present-minded, nobody else around him did. “People felt uncomfortable talking to me because they knew I wasn’t doing anything else,” he said. Communication without gadgets proved to be a foreign concept in his peer world. Friends and colleagues—some of whom thought he might have died—misunderstood or failed to appreciate Miller’s experiment. Plus, given that he had effectively consigned himself to offline communications, all they had to do to avoid him was to stay online. None of this behavior was overtly hostile, all of it was passive, but it was still a social burden reminding Miller that his identity didn’t thrive in a vacuum. His quality of life eventually suffered.

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March 16, 2016 | Posted by: Frank | Posted in: Geek Stuff |

2 comments

  1. George Smith

    March 17, 2016 at 5:28 pm

    So that’s what’s been working me over all these years, not having a smartphone. Well, still screw them all, anyway.

     
  2. Frank

    March 17, 2016 at 10:29 pm

    I’ve got a smartphone. It’s an HTC One and it is a beaut, but I use it. I don’t let it use me. Every smartphone I’ve had has been an HTC.

    I am reminded of the old story of the Vermonter who broke down and got himself one of them newfangled phone thingees. His neighbor was visiting him one day when the phone rang.

    The neighbor asked, “Jeb, aren’t you going to answer that?”

    Jeb looked over his shoulder, spat, and said, “I got that thing for my convenience, not for the convenience of any damn fool who can afford a nickel to make a call.”

     
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