| 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... |
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?