[jgroome]

I hear what you're saying, and I appreciate that you put the time in to write that out, but honestly I'm hearing this kind of argument from so many quarters ("we never look up!" "we all talk, but we never converse!" etc etc) recently that it's starting to get obnoxious.

Conversation is not dead. People have been moaning about how we're all becoming socially isolated since the publication of the first novel. The art of socialising has been declared dying ever since the first VHS was available to buy and watch at home.

Point is, it's bullshit. People still hang out (in person, not in "hangouts"). Yeah, people have mobile phones, and sometimes when hanging out as part of a group we check them, but it's not like it kills all conversation dead. A group of three people all looking at their phones is the exception, not the rule - it's not like that's what we plan to do when we arrange to spend time together.

As for your lady friend, like you said, that's her habit to break. But you can't assume everyone who hasn't taken a vow not to use a smartphone is the same - I have a smartphone, so do all my friends, and yet we're all somehow able to communicate to one another in person. When I go out and about in town I don't see crowds of people standing around looking at their phones. I see groups of people socialising and talking - if someone is by themselves then their phone can provide some distraction/semblance of "company".

There's also a tendency for us techy types to get caught in our own little bubble - I get my news from HN Reddit and Twitter, so my view on how people use these services is clouded. It's like when a journalist starts using Twitter and writes about how "everybody is obsessed with tweeting, you can only send short messages, therefore the art of meaningful conversation is dead". They don't realise that the "everybody" they're talking about is only those people in their immediate social circle.

I've kind of gone off subject, but my main point is this: Black Mirror isn't a documentary. It's so easy to project your own worst nightmares onto new technology. It doesn't necessarily make them a reality.

[waterlesscloud]

If you're hearing the same point made from a lot of quarters, then maybe there's an actual phenomenon behind it.

But more than that, Glass is fundamentally different.

It's designed, from the concept up, to always be in your awareness. That's what it is. That's the entire appeal of it.

That's not a book, and it's not even a smartphone that spends most of its time in your pocket.

It's something that always demands some fraction of your attention.

It's different.

[saulrh]

Two things.

First, when something is always available and you are always aware of it and taking data from it, it becomes part of you in the same way that your eyes or your clothing are part of you. It's part of you when you're talking to people in the same way that your computer is part of you when you're having an email conversation. It's entirely possible that you with google glass is generally less socially adept or more distracted than you without google glass, but I don't think the effect will be as extreme as you fear.

Second, and more important, is that Glass doesn't force you to break eye contact or change your body language. Having worked for years with people that wear head-mounted displays religiously (look up a guy named Thad Starner), I can tell you that those two features actually make a huge difference. Instead of imagining a person using a cell phone in the middle of a conversation, imagine a family talking around the latest episode of Star Trek or across the dinner table - you aren't really looking at other people, but the conversation feels perfectly natural anyway.

[damoncali]

If that is true and it catches on, then it is terrifying.

[derekchiang]

Dude I don't care what you think, but Google is the greatest technology organization ever existed. The "How It Feels" video literally made me in tears because the vision is so great, so compelling. The way we interact will change fundamentally, but that isn't a bad thing. People are always terrified by progress because progress means difference, and people feel comfort in falling back to the same thing. But, again, I don't care. The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed. We will all be living in an age of augmented reality.

[rayiner]

> but Google is the greatest technology organization ever existed.

Bullshit. NASA sent humans to the moon. Bell Labs gave us the transistor. U.S. Steel basically built our modern civilization. Google found somewhat better ways of searching documents in return for selling advertising, plus rip-offs of Hotmail, MS Office, iOS, Facebook, etc.

[vacri]

Google touches normal folks in far more profound ways than NASA's moon shot (How did that turn out? Are we still going to the moon? Oh). Sure, NASA is a force majeure and certainly nothing to be sniffed at, but the efficiency and power of google search on it's own revolutionised the web and was a major spur to its uptake. Google maps was equally revolutionary - available to anyone who could access the internet, and for free, something not done before - Google keeps on doing services like this.

I mean, if you're talking about google being a mere ripoff of other products that 'came first', why not apply the same ruler to NASA (there were previous rocket programs) and steel companies? Bell Labs certainly contributed heaps to everyday culture, but if they were #1, that wouldn't really knock Google very far down the list.

And classifying a steelmaking company as a tech company is a bit far-fetched.

[rayiner]

> Google touches normal folks in far more profound ways than NASA's moon shot (How did that turn out? Are we still going to the moon? Oh)

Our GPS satellites wouldn't be in space without the rocket technology developed by NASA.

> and power of google search on it's own revolutionised the web and was a major spur to its uptake.

Google started separating itself from the Yahoo!, Lycos, Excite, etc, pack around very late 1998 into 1999: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google#Early_history. That's roughly contemporaneous with "pets.com" which was an exemplar of the .com bubble that most people peg as starting in 1997. In comparison, Amazon was founded in 1994 and IPO'ed in 1997. Hotmail was purchased by MS for $400 million that same year. PG sold Viaweb to Yahoo! in 1998.

The uptake of the web was not only well on its way by the time Google got onto the scene, but the .com bubble was already well on its way by then.

> I mean, if you're talking about google being a mere ripoff of other products that 'came first', why not apply the same ruler to NASA (there were previous rocket programs)

There is a big leap from pre-NASA rocketry (in the U.S.) and post-NASA rocketry. There isn't a big leap (if at all) from iOS to Android. Arguably, MS Office to Google Docs is a regression. A lot of Google's tech is not only derivative, but doesn't even really advance the state of the art. V8 is like Lars Bak's third or fourth implementation of the same basic concept. Gmail didn't really do anything Hotmail didn't do, and the Hotmail acquisition by MS was a decade before Gmail went out of invite-only.

> And classifying a steelmaking company as a tech company is a bit far-fetched.

Steel-making on that scale was cutting edge technology for its time.

[tptacek]

Google touches more normal folks in far more profound ways than NASA's moon shot. So does Coca-Cola. I'm not sure this as compelling an argument as you think it is.

[krapp]

Landing on the moon was only quite possibly the pinnacle moment in human technological and scientific achievement, and one of the watershed moments of civilization. Google took something that already existed and made it less of a hassle. Its an achievement not even in the same league.

[agumonkey]

I agree but where Google felt different from others, is that all their rip-offs were simpler, faster and free-er than the competition. What other company gives free candies like that ?

Glass, and most importantly cars are even a stronger step in that direction. Actually, if Google cars ever make it to the public, I think it would qualify them for being up there with NASA, Bell and many others, don't you think ?

[kamaal]

>>Google found somewhat better ways of searching documents

And yes, that storing and searching the world's information on your finger tips is the biggest problem with regards to information distribution the world has faced so far.

[rayiner]

Google didn't invent search engines. It didn't databases. It didn't invent web crawling. It invented a better search engine (Page Rank) that didn't clog up the page with portal crap. Meanwhile, Bell Labs invented the transistor, C, etc. Xerox PARC invented the GUI, Ethernet, and e-mail. Etc.

I think that makes calling Google the "greatest technology organization ever existed" laughable, not to mention historically revisionist.

[rollo_tommasi]

The "How It Feels" video put you in tears because it's a cinematic compilation of a fantasy lifestyle set to stirring music. The vision you found so compelling is the vision of a life filled with aerial acrobatics, skydiving, exotic travel and the surface indicators of deep personal relationships.

It's a product pitch, not a manifesto. It is to a true vision of a better tomorrow what a thirty-second "I Approve This Message" ad is to the Declaration of the Rights of Man. It has been calibrated and hand-crafted by highly skilled advertising professionals to evoke an emotional response that you will imprint onto the product itself.

You are already living in the age of augmented reality. It just hasn't been augmented in quite the way you're hoping for.

[paganel]

When I first read Isaac Asimov's "The Naked Sun" as a kid in the early '90s I was thinking "hey, this is really only science fiction, we will never be like that". With the passing of years it seems that we get closer and closer to what I was actually thinking was only fiction. This is the story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Sun#Plot_introductio...

> The planet has a rigidly controlled population of twenty thousand, and robots outnumber humans ten thousand to one. People are strictly taught from birth to despise personal contact. They live on huge estates, either alone or with their spouse only. Communication is done via holographic telepresence (called viewing, as opposed to in-person seeing). It is likely that the society is based on that in E. M. Forster's 1909 short story "The Machine Stops".

Of course, the irony is that I had forgotten the exact name of the story and I had to use Google and a very fuzzy search to find it. And Google actually found it.

[damoncali]

To each his own, I suppose. While you were crying I was repulsed by the intrusion of little bits of low value information and the threat of constant mental overhead in dealing with that little floating box. But more so, I'm repulsed by the thought of having to fight my way past other people's little boxes in order to communicate with them. Progress indeed.

[silverbax88]

Google? Granted, they've done some really cool stuff after they copied other search engines and hit upon paid search as a profit model.

And not Bell Labs? The organization that built everything from scratch that Google uses to push bits around every day?

[killerpopiller]

I vaguely remember "the internet" before google and it seriously sucked. Partially, because searching was wading through yahoo-like sites and annoying pop-ups. And before that all was in black&white.

Searching was, and is, imho one of the main usage scenarios. Google toned that sonewhat loud and cluttered act down and improved it, a lot.

I am thankfull for that. http://h30565.www3.hp.com/t5/Feature-Articles/Searching-the-...

[rayiner]

I was on the internet half a decade before Google became popular and I'm not even that old. It's wasn't nearly as primitive as you make it out to be. Lycos, Altavista, Yahoo!, etc, weren't as good as Google would ultimately be, but they weren't so bad as to be a different kind of thing. I got DSL around the same time (256 kbits SDSL!) Hotmail and Amazon had been around for years.

[marssaxman]

It wasn't that bad. Sounds like you never used Altavista, which was far and away the best of the pre-google search engines.

[evilmushroom]

I went to the San Francisco Glass Foundry--- it was awesome. I felt loss after I had to hand the device back-- as if I was missing one of my senses. :)

Unfortunately as you undoubtably well know, I cannot talk any details due to NDA.

[timbre]

There's not much augmented reality in glass; only the turn-by-turn directions sort of qualify. I think the key thing about glass is that it's hands-free. As handy as smartphones are, it's remarkable how much of a difference not having to take the thing out of your pocket and push a button makes.

(The reason there's not much AR is that AR is very power hungry (you have to leave the camera on).)

[hnriot]

what nonsense, sure google's useful, but no more so than bing or any other company that wants to build the same. How about the cellular carriers, or the infrastructure companies that make internet in your house possible. Google was an inevitable company, someone would have made the web searchable...

Google Glass isn't progress, it might lead to some progress, but right now its a delivery platform for commerce and a camera.

Ok Glass, CTRL-ALT_DEL

[waterlesscloud]

What specifically in the video are you responding to?

[derekchiang]

The vision. Don't you see it? If we can pull this off, technology thereafter will be embedded into our consciousness. The reality, as we see it, will be transformed. We as human beings will literally become "supermen", in the sense that we will be able to "see" so much more than we could ever imagine. To an extent, this is a human evolution.

[waterlesscloud]

I understand what you're articulating as the vision, but I'm not seeing it in the promo video. I mostly see people recording a lot of activities.

What specifically in the video excites you?

[melloclello]

Yeah we'll all get super good at stalking each other on facebook.

[jrogers65]

Technically Google is an advertising organisation which uses technology as a means.

[Evbn]

When it's been said forever, it's not really a new threat.

Small talk was always pointless.

[aeturnum]

>Small talk was always pointless.

I used to have this view. I like talking about interesting subjects, comparing understandings of complex issues, understanding different viewpoints.

However, I realized that small talk is an important part of that. It's a system that lets you and the other party feel each other out without committing social transgressions. It's what lets you guess that someone would say "Hitler was right," without allowing them to actually say it.

I don't really do small talk with my friends. With them, I talk about things that I care about, or they care about, and that's fine. With acquaintances and strangers, it's essential.

[narrator]

Has anyone else become hyper-specialized in their interests because of pervasive connectivity? I've gotten to the point where on some topics there are zero people I know personally that I could have a conversation with about these topics unless I did all of the talking.

I find people to talk intelligently about these topics through online niche forums. It's so weird sometimes because I've got a small talk personae for "normal people" and then everything I talk about online which is highly specialized and takes a while to explain, even to an interested listener.

[aeturnum]

I find that's true for a few of my interests, but not to the degree that I'm disinterested in talking about those subjects on a more basic level.

[mieubrisse]

I agree wholeheartedly. Some people seem to like to suggest how very intelligent they are by claiming smalltalk is useless and a waste of their mental cycles, but said people also don't ever talk about how useful it is for easing the guards we put up when meeting someone new. I imagine these people don't often interact with strangers on a casual basis.

[Revisor]

Small talk is extremely important to build relationships.

See the book The Relationship Cure. They analyzed the interactions of tens of married couples and found a correlation between relationship hapiness and what they started to call "bids" - frequency of any contact made and the response of the other partner. Small talk was an important part of the bidding.

Don't underestimate small talk.

[hnriot]

that's simply not true, it's a fundamental building block of relationships.

[Evbn]

It doesn't demand anything. It offers what you want from it. Just like your phone.

[joe_the_user]

You've made a classic argument about technology. This is an argument that has been around for a while. The parent poster is kind of enough to share that he has been an adult for a much shorter time than this argument has been around, in fact.

In that fact I think you might consider this as a counter-point to your position.

You see, your classic argument revolves around something like "new technology, old (adult) people". The situation he describes revolves is centered around new people - kid's, whose neurology is shaped by technology as they grow up. Kids are handed a smart phone at 12, before they have a full adults' ability to choose or at a point when they would choose differently than the adult they will become. That's fine assuming they emerge intact from the experience. The question is whether there is a point where neurology is going to "lose the race" to one or another stimulation system's ability to "addict" people. Humans are quite adaptable but technology is arguably changing at a faster rate. I claim we at least have to start measuring whether there is a problem rather than dismissing the question is something we (adults) shouldn't have to worry about (which is ultimately what your classic argument does boil down to).

[csallen]

On the contrary, I think people are just resistant to change. My parents thought my generation was doomed because we spent so much time playing video games. And I'm sure the previous generation's parents were appalled at how much time they spent watching TV. And the parents of the generation before that were probably appalled at all the drugs and concerts. Etc.

And it wasn't just the parents. I'm sure there were conservative kids who were appalled at their peers as well. That isn't exactly a new phenomenon. I was picked on as a kid for being an early adopter of internet chat. Even today, I've had friends in their early-mid 20s criticize online dating and cell phones. And tomorrow people will pick on their friends for wearable devices. This is par for the course.

It strikes me as disingenuous to point out that kids' "neurology is shaped by technology as they grow up." Everything you do shapes your "neurology". Cell phones and Google Glass are not special exceptions. Hell, living in a basic civilization with written language and a primitive law system has drastic effects on your psychological development compared to... what are we comparing against, again? The natural state of being a caveman?

The people of the recent past were not mystical beings who were all at one with nature. They certainly weren't walking around in constant state of admiration of the beauty in the world around them. Five years ago I was the OP's age (20), and I had bad dates, too. And I'm sure people were having bad dates before me. The OP's complaint is just a more vivid way of saying, "The means by which people can be anti-social are changing."

[mkr-hn]

On the one hand, I completely agree. On the other, we need people like artursapek to make us think about how far we're willing to go into the digital abyss. And we need people like you to offer the counterarguments to the counterarguments. And maybe people like me to remind everyone that our natural social checks and balances are still working perfectly.

For what it's worth, I never see people with their smartphones out for more than a moment. Maybe it'd be different if I were closer to Athens, Atlanta, or even one of the smaller big cities at the east end of Metro Atlanta.

[blazingfrog2]

I don't know you or your background but I'm going to guess you may not be part of that younger generation (late high school, early college years) who was literally born with a computer in their crib and came into their teen years with with a smart phone in their hand.

I'm often reminded of the divide between them and my generation (born in the mid 70's) when I visit friends who have children that age, or even in public places where they hang out in groups. I virtually see each of them holding a smart phone, maybe not always using it but definitely at the ready no matter what the circumstances (middle of a conversation with a human being, shopping for clothes, driving, etc...). Even if they don't look at it for more a moment as you say, it's always present and slowly but surely encroaching on real human interactions.

That generation will be entering the world of grown-ups very soon and your argument will rapidly be invalidated.

[silverbax88]

As a tech guy in his forties, I find these arguments hilarious - especially when my own generation had the same things said about television ("They won't know personal contact or relationships!") , video games...every new thing is the end of human society as we know it.

Until it isn't.

I mean, honestly, stop being so myopic. There were people who decried the STEAM ENGINE. There were people - sometimes, legitimate journalists and "thought leaders" who would write articles and essays about ELECTRICITY. And RADIO. And the PHONE. And the TELEGRAPH.

And when the telegraph began to become obsolete, there was wailing and and gnashing of teeth. When the 'horseless carraige' was introduced, there were op-ed pieces written stating it was a sad state that America might not use horsepower in the future.

Yeah, society is going to change. It's always changing. People adapt. Some things we lose, some things we gain. It's only "the way it should be" to you because it's the world you know.

[melloclello]

"Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question."

~ Samuel Butler, 1863

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_among_the_Machines

[visarga]

What about the introduction of the printing press? After that moment, the amount of information available to people grew by a million times. There are abuses with reading books, too - remember the stereotypical novel reader that has no social life, preferring his story characters instead? Yet, even with such exaggerations, books do not destroy our life. Instead, books have been the main means of storing and transmitting culture in the last 500 years.

We'll adapt, we'll find social norms. There will be do's and don'ts. We will have etiquette. But now we are still in the infancy of this age.

It was year 2000 when I got a digital camera, and I've shot 50K+ pictures a year since. This is a sea change in remembering your life. The smart phones came 5 years later. Now I can't imagine life without it. But we'll assimilate this phase too.

[vacri]

None of the things you've mentioned interrupts the social interactions when you're actually out with someone. I do agree that the only constant is change, but also, the always-on internet is truly something new for us.

[silverbax88]

Television interrupts the social interactions, if there is one nearby. As do newspapers, books, people walking by...

[ctoth]

There are some interesting points both here and upthread, but I'll respond here as this provides a perfect jumping off point:

silverbax88 seems to state that the introduction of television was similarly heralded by people bemoaning that it would cut back on social interaction. He then dismisses this, as if the idea were absurd. I also see a lot of Singularatarian types with nearly religious fervor with comments like: "If others perceive you to be inattentive because you check your phone, that's old-world thinking." Now, upthread, joe_the_user makes a rather important point that the changes which we're discussing here impact younger generations the most, it's not the old farts who are used to the next big thing, but the children who have no natural resistance to the addictive stimuli. Back to the television. While Silverbax88, one of the self-admitted "old farts" was not drawn in by the evil TV monster, it strikes me as a child of the nineties as completely disingenuous to assert that a sea-change did not take place in terms of consumption of television, and specifically on how the increased consumption of TV time correlated with a dramatic drop-off in social interaction.

I refer specifically to my generational cohort, and how I observed our outside time diminishing as we got older. I remember many afternoons in 1998-99 playing Duke Nukem 3d for hours and being prompted by parents with phrases like, "Don't you want to go out and play with your friends?" something I thought especially silly the few times I would go out and no one would be outside as they were all... playing video games and watching TV.

This is hacker news, not anecdote TV, so let's see if I can dig up some actual statistics:

According to Vandewater, Bickham, and Lee [1] :

Results indicated that time spent watching television both with and without parents or siblings was negatively related to time spent with parents or siblings, respectively, in other activities. Television viewing also was negatively related to time spent doing homework for 7- to 12-year-olds and negatively related to creative play, especially among very young children (younger than 5 years). There was no relationship between time spent watching television and time spent reading (or being read to) or to time spent in active play.

So we're left in an interesting situation. On one hand we have a lot of people who are concerned over the explosion of potentially isolating technologies, and on the other we have people who seem to blindly assert that everything will be dandy, because, you know it always has been before. Who do we consider conservative here?

To bring this to sort of a close: I feel the same sort of fundamental discomfort as does artursapek with the concept of replacing socialization, something which I've only recently began to really embrace as a nerd, with an electronically mediated digital analogue. While researching my TV statistic, I saw a lot more papers about the PC-accessed Internet, which I think to be a better metaphor for Google Glass than TV ever was. A lot of these papers such as [2] come to conclusions like: Results suggest that frequent users tend to be lonely, to have deviant values, and to some extent to lack the emotional and social skills characteristic of high EI.

[1] http://www.pediatricsdigest.mobi/content/117/2/e181.short [2] http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/109493104322820...

[csallen]

I don't think anyone is making so extreme a claim that technological changes cannot "cut back" on social interaction. The average amount of time spent socializing certainly fluctuates from time to time and place to place. It's certainly not unimaginable that the introduction of TVs, phones, wearable devices, etc might result in less time being spent socially.

What silverbax88 and others are saying, however, is that there is a limit to this. We are not on a trajectory to a world in which social interaction ceases to exist. In fact, we're not even close.

Consequently, most of these gloom and doom complaints seem overly extreme. If we accept as premises that (a) the world is only changing by a small amount, and (b) it has changed by comparable amounts innumerable times in the past, then our conclusion can only be making a big fuss about this change in particular is extreme.

Which is more likely: That Google Glass is finally the thing that will push social interaction off the edge, or that the people of today (like the people of last decade, and the one before that, and the one before that...) are nostalgic and resistant to change?

With respect to our generation, you said, "...I observed our outside time diminishing as we got older..." Okay, so what? Is this change somehow a bad thing, or is it simply change? Is decrying this change a necessary and useful thing to do, or is it simply nostalgia-fueled alarmism? Of course the people of today will behave differently than the people of yesterday. Why is this surprising? Why is this bad? Why should we care?

[kbenson]

When a mobile network terminal (which is really what these phones are) is seen as a logical extension of you brain (google is always at hand, stored notes, etc) and perceptions (a text message can be likened to a friendly wave from across the room, you get to choose your own interaction level from that point), it's natural to have it always at hand, and ready.

If others perceive you to be inattentive because you check your phone, that's old-world thinking. I'm sure many people have attention problems, and may not apply the correct amount of attention to local stimuli, but then again, maybe they just don't find what happening immediately around them all that interesting at the time.

A phone can enhance a conversation. One participant can take a few moments to research something that was just discussed while listening in on further conversation, and then re-enter the active portion of the conversation with new, and useful, information.

Is short, we are in a transition period. There's learning to be done about the best way to deal with all the new capabilities we have (because that's what they are, enhancements to us), as well as social norms that need to adapt.

[sliverstorm]

I am hovering between the generations in this regard, and I definitely see (or think I see) a strong gradient. I know vanishingly few adults over thirty who spend life buried in tech- even the tech-savvy ones. Then as you work backwards in age down to high school, you see progressively more and more absorption into technology.

Most everyone I know along the "scale" is sharp enough to use whatever the latest tech is. The different is not savvy, it is usage patterns.

/anecdote

[socillion]

My personal experience has been similar. When a group conversation peters out, its easy for a lot of people to pull out their phones instead of continuing the conversation - and when one person pulls it out, everyone else does as well.

It definitely seems more noticeable among the ~17-18 age group than ~20-25 (20 here but I had an odd childhood and behavior patterns like this were explicitly discouraged.)

Good news is that not everyone does this.

[mkr-hn]

It's hard to predict the course of an upcoming generation based on what they experience now. I've never been without a TV in my own room. When I was growing up, I read frantic posts on Usenet about how people my age were glued to the TV and video games, and how that would ruin social interaction.

It wasn't long before people said the same about the web, instant messaging, early social networks, and everything since.

I seem to get along with people without issue despite growing up immersed in these society killers. Why are smartphones a special case?

[xj9]

Its because the new thing is always a special case. Its natural for some people to think that the old way of doing things is the only good way and that anything new that could displace or alter that way of doing things would just ruin it.

[Lagged2Death]

People have been moaning about how we're all becoming socially isolated since the publication of the first novel. The art of socialising has been declared dying ever since the first VHS was available to buy and watch at home.

You're not offering anything more than an assertion that they're wrong, though. That is, you're using the same anecdata standard of evidence that they are: "My friends and I have cell phones but we talk to each other..."

More serious thinkers than you and I have made actual measurements that show our frequency of in-person, in-public type socializing and civic engagement really has been in long-term decline for many decades. VHS would be one of the culprits, yes, and now so would smart-phones, tablets, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone

[graeme]

Good point. I just finished a social history of Montreal in the 40's and 50's. TV had a lot to do with the closing down of cabarets and theatres.

You didn't have to go out for entertainment anymore. But the latter is inherently more social than TV.

[thenonsequitur]

Some of what Putnam reported was flawed, and his book that you cited was interpretative. These "actual mesasurements" that you speak of do not show that in-person social engagement has been in decline -- that is Putnam's interpretation of the data. Others have different interpretations (which I happen to agree with much more). For example, see http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/96apr/kicking/ki....

[GHFigs]

See also Sherry Turkle[1], Nicholas Carr[2], etc.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Alone-Together-Expect-Technology-Other... [2] http://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp...

[Apocryphon]

Anecdata, of course, but comedians, who usually (try to) have their fingers on the pulse of society, have commented on the phenomenon of smartphone-induced antisocial bubbles.

Seinfeld: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-0ZpH4Lhy8

Aziz Ansari: "I’ve been trying to call people more. Even friends. I’m sick of being addicted to my phone and going on the same seven websites for 30-minute loops, so I’m going to go to a hypnotist that helped a few friends quit smoking and see if he can get me to stop being addicted to my phone and mindless Internet browsing. Wouldn’t that be awesome if it worked?" http://www.avclub.com/articles/aziz-ansari-candid-about-love...

It's interesting how both comedians are on opposite sides of the age spectrum.

[test001only]

I think there is a major distinction between novels, VHS and the smartphone. Smartphone is an active distraction and is portable. This combination is what makes it more likely to be conversation killer than anything else. For me whenever I am talking to somebody and suddenly they open up their phone to see the message or attend a call, it just kills my flow of thoughts and flow of conversation.

[callmeed]

"More than a third of divorce filings last year contained the word 'Facebook'"[1]

I totally disagree with you, and not just because of the article I posted. I've said this in the past—online services/apps/games need you to spend more and more time looking at a screen (especially Facebook & Zynga types) and they'll likely employ every form of behavioral trick that's legal.

For goodness sake, one of the main mantras here on HN is "you need to A/B test everything", the goal of which is to get people to stay on your site longer.

[1] http://blogs.smartmoney.com/advice/2012/05/21/does-facebook-...

[tripzilch]

Your experiences seem to be different. I personally found that it is different depending on the group and the people.

Some of them may not see the big deal, some of them may simply not have the self-control, but I've definitely have had similar experiences as the GP, of disrupting discussions.