Seventy-seven percent of middle-age Americans (35-54 years old) say they want to return to a time before society was “plugged in,” meaning a time before there was widespread internet and cell phone usage. As told by a new Harris Poll (via Fast Company), 63% of younger folks (18-34 years old) were also keen on returning to a pre-plugged-in world, despite that being a world they largely never had a chance to occupy.
I have trying to find the poll by following link and found nothing but this.
According to a new Harris Poll shared exclusively with Fast Company
So there is no actual source, no ways to check if the poll actually exist or not, no way to check if poll’s question phrased in a way to get certain response, how many actually responded to the poll, etc. And, compare to most big news published poll result, a confidence and margin of error.
There for, I simply view this as click bait article to generate engagement, which it did.
Well, as we all know, 73% statistics are made up on the spot
I think the % is much higher cause even I sometimes say stuff like “I believe like 80% of my post is about games”. But the reality is that I never actually tried to count it.
It’s exactly counter to established research that places huge values on internet enables services.
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/how-much-are-search-engines-worth-to-you
18k per year valued for search engines, 9k a year for email and 4K a year for maps.
Of course framing might be slightly different, but getting people to saying thing is very different than getting people to put money where their mouth is. I would much rather trust the dollar signal, especially in the US.
I feel like, for the 35-54 bracket at least, this must be less about giving up all the modern conveniences we have today but more about wishing they could raise their children in that simpler time. You don’t want your kids to be left out of what’s new and cool but you also don’t want them exposed to EVERYTHING these platforms bring. It’s a tight rope to walk and I’m not looking forward to it when my kids are older. I know a lot of people who have gone down the road of, “I didn’t have a cell phone growing up, my kids won’t either.” But it’s not very realistic in today’s world.
I agree with your assessment. I have a lot to say about this, and I’m glad to have found this article, as I’ve been having some serious inner turmoil about this lately, and this makes me feel a bit like I’m not totally alone or crazy. (But also I can’t find a link to the original survey, which makes it hard to trust, as I can’t find any description of the methodology or the exact wording of the questions)
I’m an older Millenial (sometimes consider Gen X, depending on the terminology used) with young kids. It’s true that I would rather have them brought up 30 years ago than today. Sometimes when I see posts about parents letting their young kids (like let’s say 10) have their own smartphone and then complain about, people get snarky like “You’re the parent. If you don’t like it, just take their smartphone away.”
But it is a tightrope to walk. I don’t want them expose them something like Instagram, which gives them eating disorders, depression, anxiety, chips away at their sense of privacy, etc. But I also don’t want them to be “the weird kid” who can’t relate to any of their peers. When I was growing up, I remember "the weird kid"s who weren’t allowed to watch TV, weren’t to play video games, etc. I can recognize that in many ways they probably benefited from not sitting in front of the TV for hours each day, but I can also recognize they probably didn’t benefit from not being able to talk to any of the rest of us about the latest episode of Fresh Prince. I do see it as a balancing act between teaching them that there’s a lot about their generation that sucks, but also letting them experience enough of it to see for themselves, and relate to the other kids around them.
What are you thinking you’ll do? How are you planning to strike the balance?
I don’t have kids and I’m not sure I will, mostly because I have a lot of un answered questions. How I would handle raising them with technology is one. So I’m curious, if you don’t mind sharing.
It’s a big question and I don’t think I can give an answer that will cover everything. A lot of it will depend on what they want to do, too. As long as we can have a real discussion about things beforehand, I don’t think there are many technologies or services that I would flat-out ban.
I’ve realized lately that a lot of the problems I have with how society at large uses technology is it’s not deliberate/intentional or thoughtful. I think if you’re going to buy a smartphone, or download an app, and click “Accept” on all the permissions, you should at least have a goal in mind before you use it. What specifically are you intending to accomplish with it? If it’s to stay in touch with your friend, that’s fine, just have that goal in mind when you’re using it. If it’s to follow the goings-on of your favourite celebrity, okay, as long as that’s your intention. But I think too often, people buy something or download and install something just because of FOMO or without any idea or understanding of what it’s going to do. It puts you in a passive position of allowing a large tech company to decide your use and your experience for you, and that might not be what’s best for you. That kind of passive exploratory attitude I think worked well up until the introduction of “dark patterns”, but it’s a bit dangerous now.
The other major thing is I want is to introduce them to community-developed technology first. Before they get to the point where they have to decide if they want to install Instagram, I think they should have experienced the Fediverse first, that kind of thing. I think they should understand that there is still technology out there which is completely good (by which I mean free/open source software and community services are sometimes useless, sometimes buggy, sometimes lacking in features, sometimes cumbersome to use, but they’re never antagonistic or evil or deceptive). At the very least they should know all of what kind of technology is out there for them.
Ideally I would also like them to understand how things work. My oldest is 4 now and can read a little bit. Not complete sentences or even long words, but enough that I know it’s not going to be too many more months before she’s capable of reading properly, and maybe typing, and maybe even some programming. A fair amount of software depends upon ignorance (remember when SnapChat claimed your pictures/videos “disappeared”?) and I think understanding of technology can help navigate bullshit a lot easier. But, a lot of that will depend on her and what interests her…
If you are longing for a world that you never lived in, there’s probably some “grass is greener on the other side” in play. The world before smart phones was considerably worse. I bet that most of the people who are asking for this don’t know how to read a paper map and have never seen a phone book.
The good news is that, if you don’t want to use a smart phone, you can just… not. Nobody is forcing you. If you really wanted a world without smart phones you would already not be using one!
Nobody is forcing you.
That is not really true, I mean depending on your definition of “forcing”. Okay, it’s true, nobody is holding a gun to your head.
But depending on where you live, it may be impossible to use a taxi. It would be impossible to work at a lot of workplaces. I work at a university where thankfully faculty are not required to own a smartphone, but students are (if you do not check in for attendance with the university’s app, you automatically fail the course). Soon here it might be impossible to have a bank account without a smartphone app. Any event that requires tickets, forget about it. We’re also getting closer to it being a requirement to see a doctor (some doctor’s offices here already do not allow any patients that haven’t installed their app, and the number is growing).
There’s a lot of soft pressure, too. The supermarket by us doesn’t require you to install their app. You can pay cash without a smartphone…if you’re willing to pay 2x the usual amount for groceries (which are already quite expensive).
I work at a university where thankfully faculty are not required to own a smartphone, but students are (if you do not check in for attendance with the university’s app, you automatically fail the course)
You could always not work/attend that school
I found your comment posting at the same time as mine with the same thesis (complete with “can just …”) pretty funny.
Do people really want to go back to the dark ages before Wikipedia existed? I know I don’t. Knowledge is power, and the Internet is a treasure trove of it, if you know where to look.
That said, I do want to go back to computers that obeyed only their users and no one else. Malicious hardware like TPM and Pluton is really scary.
As much as I share your centiment about tech. I don’t quite realize how is TPM scary? It physically separates security important operation from the main CPU.
It doesn’t obey the user. There is no way for the user to examine the keys stored in it. The entire concept of remote attestation is disobedient to the user. And so on.
Do people not realize they can just log off? Go watch TV, it’s still there. Turn off your phone, it has a power button. Read a book or go outside. None of the pre-internet options have gone away.
I mean, yes, that is true for your spare time. But with the way things are working now, everything has to happen immediately, you might feel you need to be available 24/7, even if you don’t technically.
Work in general is more fast-paced because of it (emails and phone calls over snail mail), everything you do is attached to your phone making it difficult to turn it off (banking, cards, travel apps, dating apps etc).
In the purest sense, yes, you can take breaks from it all, but it’s still there, and while I don’t think it’ll happen anytime soon, I do believe we’d benefit as a society from being less chronically online (I say writing this on an app for a federated social media site, but y’know, small steps).
Maybe I’m just lucky, but I’ve kept office hours for the totality of my career thus far, nearly 25 years. Most of my colleagues do as well. We all understand that we have lives outside of work, and that those lives take precedence. So long as we all get our shit done, nobody much cares about when you’re clocked in and when you’re not, outside of core hours (around 10 to 3 each day). If we want to turn off our phones, nobody much gives a shit so long as we’re back on the chat the next day.
Like I said to the other commenter, I think I must have been unclear, because I’m not even talking about working in your free time. I don’t believe I stated that in my original comment at all.
I’m just saying everything is so much more fast-paced now due to technology which I think in turn makes it more difficult to relax, plus you have to engage with your phone for important matters as everything important happens online, like the examples I mentioned, so even if you want to turn it off, you might feel like you cannot.
This is also pretty common. People tend to think like that about everything they had in their formative years.
It’s nostalgia plus a realization of how entrenched tech bureocratic processes have penetrated their lives, oftentimes making them worse, not better (many of the improvements are taken for granted).
But my point is you can take this “old times were better” in most of every case when doing these surveys. About music, TV and everything.
What people really want are the benefits without some of the cons that they’ve very willingly accepted out of laziness and/or ignorance.
They’ve lost a ton of privacy and rights and ability to discourse and act by being so heavily surveilled and “panopticon’d” into superficial uniformity of opinion.
Many of the things they complain about they can still do “non tech/non online” but it requires more effort than pretending that there should be just one way so they don’t have to choose.
I like the internet. It’s been integral in my life becoming myself. I’ve met some of my favorite people through it.
It’s my hope that the era of social media comes to an end and the internet transitions back to how it used to be pre 2008 or so (iPhone and Facebook changed things), less centralized and all-consuming. A return to smaller communities as opposed to these larger algorithmic, advertiser-servicing platforms. Discord servers and focused forums. Communities of friends over public places to chase clout. In addition to handy services like shopping, banking, maps, etc. In essence, the internet as a tool rather than a social expectation. Because in many ways it is a really powerful tool, and I don’t want to see that go away and I don’t think it ever will at this point.
There are cracks showing in the social media model, Twitter and reddit in particular at the moment, but it yet remains a hope that we can turn it back to a more positive thing in our lives.
Seems reasonable to me. I’m in the upper end of that range, center GenX (yes I know you don’t remember us). I vary between wanting it to be 1970-2000. 1990 was nice, good industrial music, many of the old blues musicians were still alive & playing, computers were still fun, BBS’s, the early non-shitty Internet, pagers and car phones if you wanted to be reachable that much, but you could just NOT be. Go out for cigarettes and never come back.
Anyone who thinks this panopticon hellscape we live in is better, is nuts.
I can’t help but feel like a lot of the “the internet was better back in the day” is rose colored glasses. Things were just as fragmented, but were even less welcoming to our groups, there was more questionable content that people were trying to trick you into viewing. It definitely wasn’t all bad, but it feels like it’s coming from the same impulse as every other “things were better back in my day.”
A key difference is that nothing was being shoved at you as soon as you got up from the computer.
You can always put your phone down. I also get the pressure to return a text/dm right away, but as far as I can tell no one that I actually want to talk to expects that immediate response.
That was a key thing to finally learn. I’d removed all the people who expected I was on call for them from my life for other reasons, which wasn’t an easy process, so everyone left is a reasonable person who texts for non-business reasons with a 1-2 day response expectation, though it’s usually much faster. If it’s more important, it’s a phone call. If they just want to chat, they text to see if I’m available before calling.
I set my phone to not ring unless the number’s in my contacts. If someone needs to get a hold of me, they can leave a message … but never do. I get notifications for weather alerts, text messages, my transit app and when a new xkcd gets posted. I certainly check my email and other apps on occasion, but I don’t need notifications.
Other than surrounding yourself with the right people, the whole thing takes minutes once you’ve hit that mindset.
How much did a computer cost back then? How much were the first graphics cards? How compatible were computers with each other? How much did one album cost on CD? How easy was it to obtain information on a problem? How easy was it to price compare things between stores?
The issue is social media and allowing everyone to voice their immediate thoughts on things in pseudo anonymity. It’s also the tendency of people to look at people’s fake persona and then compare themselves to it. I could rent a Lambo for the weekend and use a filter like I’m actually fit and still have hair and make all my former classmates insecure because they never see me in person. That’s the shit everyone wants to go away, they don’t want to give up Spotify.
People forget, or just weren’t around, when only the rich had a mobile phone the size of waffle iron and it just made expensive calls. Even early cells had exorbitant rates for long distance conversations between states, so we had to wait until night when it was more affordable to talk. If I wanted to watch a specific movie, I needed a credit card with a $500 hold to rent a VHS player for 24 hours, and hope that Teenage Mutant Turtles wasn’t on a wait list. Ask Jeeves was better than encyclopedia brittanica, but digging deep required a trip to the public library. And scanning, copying, or printing anything meant driving to Kinkos with your checkbook ready. Anyone else remember pulling up MapQuest and writing down the directions before going someplace new?
Reminiscers can unplug, but I’m keeping my on-demand movies, cheap phone rates, endless knowledge, GPS, and streaming music.
In 1991 I lived in a small town. You had to sign up at the library for computer time. Once or twice a month I had the opportunity to walk to the library and play Oregon trail on an apple IIe with a green monochrome monitor. We were also fortunate enough to have a lab at school with the same apple IIe computers and got to use them every once in awhile. There wasn’t any Internet for us to use, I don’t recall anybody mentioning BBS or fido net or anything like that.
The most advanced computer I think I saw was in the school library. It had a cartridge based CD rom drive. I remember how awesome that was when I saw it.
It wasn’t until around 95’ that the internet really took off and we were actually able to use it. It was also around that time that we even got our first family computer and dial up service.
Before that we had an NES, SNES, and og Grey Gameboy. We also borrowed a commodore 64 for a time.
Before that we were typing essays on the electric typewriter we had.
I know everyone thinks all this retro tech is so cool. The thing is, as a kid, I had no idea this stuff even existed other than basic VHS players and Nintendo because things like PCs and laserdisc players were insanely expensive.
I’m sure there’s stuff today that I’m blissfully unaware of because it’s so far out of my price range that I have no business knowing about it anyway.
Been there, done that, and fuck no.
But I also have no problems with leaving my phone on Do Not Disturb and reading a book. I am happy to ignore the world. I don’t let connectedness rule me. I use it.
Usually. I also have ADHD, so sometimes I just need my stimulation
I agree with the commenters who said people miss certain things but forget about convenience of the connected world. I wanted to add that people likely misattribute their nostalgia to unconnected world because they were kids. It felt great being a kid not because we were pre-internet, but because we were kids. We had no bills to worry about. We’d always have food. And that was the only food we ever knew about so we loved it. Our worries were to just have enough time in the day to play all the cool things with friends and explore the world. We didn’t feel guilty for just playing video games the whole day or hanging out with friends the whole day. Our bodies could fall from a tree and our bruises would heal in a week. We’d find a motherfucking ant and be fascinated by it for hours! Have you tried staring at ants now? It’s mindnumbingly boring. Of course we miss the way we felt when we were kids. Technology ha nothing to do with it. Every generation misses being a kid.
(TDLR: Technology (in its infancy) was something new, exciting, fun and enjoyable. Today, it is manifested more as an overlord whose primary capacity is to spy, intrude and take your personal information in order that they might gain from it.)
I grew up in a world before all of the modern day technology took over. They were good times, but when technology did eventually begin to develop, it effects were initially benign. It was initially adopted by those who were considered ‘geeks’ and people who were willing to spend money on it (even IBM clones such as the Tandy 1000 were going for $1,000 back in the day).
I remember when pagers were coming on the scene and allowed people to reach out to each other if they weren’t at home or at work (which were the only places they had access to a reachable phone number). It gave greater freedom for those who were in positions where they were on call 24x7 - it allowed them to go places and still be reachable instead of being stuck at home and waiting for a phone call that might never come.
Of course, things grew from there which provided many other benefits including access to a huge repository of information. Nowadays, that access to information has become a means of harvesting information from the very individual seeking to obtain it. The innocence of what was once revolutionary has been been upended by and ideology that has figured out and embraced how to consume its own consumers.
I spend more time today figuring out how to keep my data and personal information private and secure. Using Linux on my computer, running GrapheneOS on my phone as well as other considerations all in an attempt to keep at bay invasive companies and their ever evolving techniques in order to pry and spy upon me. It’s a shame that what was once fun and exciting is now something to be feared.
Today, it is manifested more as an overlord whose primary capacity is to spy, intrude and take your personal information in order that they might gain from it.
In other words, it’s not so much technology that’s the problem, but capitalism.
It’s not so much capitalism as it is a weakness of human nature. There are plenty of non-capitalist governments that desire to control, spy and manipulate their citizens.
No, there aren’t. So called “socialist” or “communist” governments of countries are 100% capitalist. Capitalism is defined by the relations of production, not what a government or political party calls itself.
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Not a lot of meat to the story, and it conflates tech itself with the social expectations that have sprung up because of it and the way it’s used. “Instagram’s pedophile network” (which seems only to be brought up for shock value) is not “cell service.”
I’d hazard a guess that what respondents really want to return to not being expected to be available to anyone at any time. And, crucially, they don’t feel they can just … do that.
I’ve been saying for a couple of years now that I think within the next decade there’s going to be a resurgence in “dumb phones.” And other methods of disconnecting from the web as people start to get fatigued from being connected to everything constantly.
I almost went down that route when it came time to upgrade a few months back. Ultimately though, my lifestyle is dependent on having a smartphone. It’s just more convenient to have a wallet of virtual cards on my phone, GPS is right there without needing a second device. If I had gone for a dumbphone, I’d have essentially been delegating any smartphone requirements to my wife.
Ended up just going for a 13 Mini, figuring that the smaller screen might make me less inclined to waste so much time online. It’s partially worked.
Return to it and have my knowledge of all the positive and negative aspects erased would be something I’d consider. But having used all the technology for so long, I couldn’t imagine just don’t having it anymore tomorrow
