rosstheboss":39w3d4gk said:
We_are_Stevo":39w3d4gk said:
I miss the good old days when you walked out the door in the morning and unless there was an emergency you didn't have to talk to your family until you walked back in the door that evening...
...I simply cannot understand the mania to be constantly plugged into a mobile phone or personal stereo, especially the morons who walk down the street looking like Princess Leia their 'personal' headphones are that big!
What's wrong with peace and quiet? No wonder people don't have anything meaningful to say to each other any more... :|
http://gawker.com/louis-c-k-s-explanati ... socialflow
I agree!
I think some of that smartphone thing goes back to something I passed comment on a while back - there was a time when things like technology, mobile phones, they were a conduit to social behaviour - a means to an end. Now I'll buy, perhaps they've encouraged a certain impulsive, lack of deferred satisfaction that's supposed to elevate humans - but all the same, were a means to an end.
Not so, anymore - the infrastructure built up around it, and how many behave, now, make what was the conduit - the networking - an end in it's own right. Many live vicariously through technology, social networking, and that "always-on" beacon to the world, or at least their subset of social circle.
Is it less about true interaction with people you encounter everyday? I'm kinda ambivalent to it - my misanthropy never went down well in social situations - or is it more about people being more selective about who they interact with? And the answer is a resounding no - people aren't necessarily being more selective - perhaps less, really - just going more with an instant gratification in the medium, than may be likely for some with true human interaction.
I agree with a lot of the thing with kids and phones. And them getting locked into things. For me, my stance, currently, is consoles live in the lounge - they are family things, not things to be used to retreat into some world on their own. How long my stand on that will survive, well who's to say.
The one thing I don't want to do, though, is make my kids miserable for my agenda or concepts. In terms of things like phones, I'm not just going to bow to "I want!". It will have to make sense to me, rather than effectively being just like sticking a dummy in a baby's mouth. All the same, I have my principles and my ideas on life - some of which I'd like to think should make sense to my kids - but all the same, I can see the join, and realise, that there is a line, whereby you could simply be ego-led by trying to impose certain things on kids as they grow up, that are more about you, than their well-being.
Being a parent - especially if you do so in a family where parents are no longer together - is often about rational compromise and realising that for all the good ideas and principles you may have as a parent, if they're more about serving your notion of what's good, rather than really and truly what's best - on balance - for everybody, then sometimes, compromise is a very important lesson in life.
