As a fairly casual user of social media (I could give it up in an instance...heh...) - and a late adapter for most tech - I still grok the sadness/pain/annoyance of capitalism overtaking socializing/community-building.
I don't subscribe to this notion though: "Before smartphones, people didn’t invest their in-between time into forging social bonds or doing self-improvement. They mostly suffered through constant, endless boredom. So let us not lament or malign the time we waste on smartphones, at least not so much. It is bad to be seduced into argument or conspiracism, to shop or lust or doomscroll, to bring one’s job into the dentist’s chair or the living-room recliner. But it was also bad to suffer the terror of monotony. Now there is too much happening, but before, ugh, nothing ever happened." https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/07/before-smartphones-boredom/674631/
Like you, I'm old enough to explicitly remember what I did before smartphones. And there are times it is nice to be disconnected. Granted, for some of us, we did everything we could to get connected even before you could put it in your pocket. I enjoy remembering how that worked, and I regret not figuring out how to side-step my educational issues well enough to be on the ground floor of it. But I think boredom is a state of mind that has little to do with the technology you do or don't have.
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I don't subscribe to this notion though: "Before smartphones, people didn’t invest their in-between time into forging social bonds or doing self-improvement. They mostly suffered through constant, endless boredom. So let us not lament or malign the time we waste on smartphones, at least not so much. It is bad to be seduced into argument or conspiracism, to shop or lust or doomscroll, to bring one’s job into the dentist’s chair or the living-room recliner. But it was also bad to suffer the terror of monotony. Now there is too much happening, but before, ugh, nothing ever happened." https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/07/before-smartphones-boredom/674631/
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