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by pixl97 900 days ago
https://brendenmulligan.com/in-1950-i-doubt-anyone-ever-chec...

>I just wanted to share the above photo of a subway car from 1947 where every single person, even though they’re in a confined space together, aren’t paying any attention to each other because they’re reading media on a newspaper. The recent version of this is, of course, cellphones and iPads, yet the same people out there who hate change continue to cry foul.

1 comments

Slight difference is that:

1) everybody read pretty much the same content. And not highly curated personalized content. So if you did strike a conversation with someone you’d have some common ground.

2) When starting said conversation the newspaper didn’t keep vibrating in your fingers or making sounds begging your attention back to it and you didn’t experience the FOMO of not giving said attention to it.

In other words. Sense of community was easier to establish and the artificial attention grabbers weren’t there for the social aspect of our beings to come between us as we try to do that social thing our species is known for.

Also, it was when much content was meaningful. Scientific American was interesting. Popular mechanics had actual mechanical projects. Computer magazines were all adds but even the adds were showing amazing things full of real potential. Now corprat curated content is much cheaper empty calories.

There is great content but you have to dig and sometimes I am just to tired from real life.