[munificent]

> I was astounded hanging out with my friends in person last weekend how every one of them at some point pulled out their phone mid conversation to watch TikTok, or Wordle, or whatever.

To kill time, sometimes I watch those random "America's Funniest Videos" type videos where it's some random family at home and something funny/weird/etc. happens. I've started noticing that in almost all of them now, everyone is just sitting around staring at a phone. Sometimes an entire family will be in the living room, three on a couch, each in their own little world.

Even my family does the same. It's a very very hard habit to break. Like smoking, except anti-social where smoking was at least social.

[mlrtime]

The thing I noticed early on is going to VERY nice resorts and seeing families at dinner all on their phones.

I'm talking around $800/night at a beautiful hotel or island resort, perfect scenery, and a couple both scrolling videos.

This is what I keep in my head when I find the urge (and it happens) to pull out my phone and doom scroll around family.

[dingaling]

30 years ago they'd all have been staring at TVs in their respective rooms.

50 years ago they'd be reading their own newspapers and magazines.

The name changes but the song remains the same; people have their own interests, even within a family, that aren't shared with others. I wouldn't bore my partner by monologuing about my hobbies, and she likewise. At least we're in the same room together.

[chmod775]

Reading was a hobby most people chose not to engage in that much. If you read books/novels etc for 6 hours per day, people would remark on that like "he reads a lot", often asking you to put down your books to join them in whatever activity.

Few people would have had their own TVs in their room 30 years ago. That wasn't common. They were huge, expensive, and not remotely interesting enough to capture the attention of most people for prolonged periods. It was common to have family rituals where there was about 2-3 hours of watching TV during/after dinner together. That was when they aired a movie after some news.

Even game consoles, if you could afford them, really wouldn't capture your attention that much. Nobody plays Super Mario every day for hours weeks on end. And at least to us that was just another social activity anyways. We didn't play these by ourselves.

But I think all that misses the point. You would be doing pretty much none of these in place of another social activity. They either were a social activity, or they filled in otherwise dead time.

When you're having dinner with your friends or family and everyone is looking at their phone, that is replacing something. I remember getting playing cards and chatting at the dinner table when I was young. Nowadays people just get out their phone or disappear to other personal devices as soon as they are done eating if there's any dinner ritual left at all.

[brycewray]

> Few people would have had their own TVs in their room 30 years ago. That wasn't common. They were huge, expensive, and not remotely interesting enough to capture the attention of most people for prolonged periods. It was common to have family rituals where there was about 2-3 hours of watching TV during/after dinner together. That was when they aired a movie after some news.

Depends on where one is from. In my country (U.S.A.), even many lower-middle-class kids tended to have at least a small portable TV (or, more often, the former family TV that had been replaced by a newer one in the living room) in at least their end of the house or apartment, if not their own room, ’way back in the late 1960s to early 1970s. What was common for kids in other countries at that time is, of course, a different matter. As for watching the TV together as a family rather than on separate TV sets: that often depended more on whether the family TV was a newer color model and the kids' room TV was an older black-and-white model --- or, as kids grew older and their viewing preferences changed from their parents’, which shows were on opposite one another. Sometimes it even came down to which room made it easier to watch TV while you were doing homework, talking to a friend who was visiting you from down the street, etc.

[watwut]

Reading used to be super common, including among working class. They used to read what was called "junk literature", basically written equivalents of fun tv.

That changed into watching youtube now.

[insane_dreamer]

It’s not at all the same. It’s now ubiquitous, available at any moment, any time, always available to fill up every “empty” moment.