I wouldn’t necessarily call it have vs. have not. My preference for cell phone or smartphone has nothing to do with having either.
It’s more a matter of what you’ve become comfortable using. I’m far from being a technophobe, but I don’t like Facebook. My children, all over 20 years old, have been asked to contact me by e-mail, but I never hear a peep from them unless I actually visit Facebook. The medium I’m comfortable using is e-mail presently, so it irks me to have to use a medium that raises my level of discomfort, the result being that I’ll make up unjustified and perhaps strange objections for using Facebook.
I dunno. They tend to get hushed up because of the nature of the sport and the money involved, but there are plenty of cases of football players (especially collegiates) committing acts of domestic abuse and rape - certainly more and more frequently than you hear about video gamers doing the same, and those would be stories the media would be not just unafraid but even eager to tell in the current climate of opinion.
But again, it’s not that either pastime actually drives people to violence or crime, but that they tend to in some way appeal to those already predisposed toward those behaviors. A hulking steroid-fueled athlete playing a game which encourages competetive violence in a culture that glorifies victory, status, wealth, and power is naturally more inclined to misapply or abuse their strength - and be unwilling to settle for less than what they want - than the average person is.
He was right, though. We suck at remembering things and rely on ready references. Readily-available books did some of that, the internet and smartphones did more. I think it’s a worthy tradeoff, but it’s still a tradeoff.
Well sure. The tradeoff is that the brain processing time that would have been spent on remembering something that can be looked up can be spent on something else. In some cases that might be enough to allow someone to come up with a new idea or something important. Most people will probably just be thinking pointless bullshit but they’d probably be thinking pointless bullshit anyway.
Playing a game obsessively doesn’t make you a programmer, does it? I’ve been earning a living as a programmer for 20 years now. I don’t play games, I haven’t got the time.
Yes. Happened more or less everywhere movies were shown for the very first time. That’s hard to comprehend from our position on the timeline (low-res black and white without sound!) but it takes time to get a handle on new things. The default setting in our reptile brain is still the fight-or-flight reflex.
On the other hand, the ‘War ot the Worlds’-panic wasn’t at all like in the movie. In fact, it practically didn’t happen. Some people freaked out, but not even close to mass panic level. Orson Wells always was a genius when it came to promoting himself and the impact the radio play had was his ticket to Hollywood, next stop Citizen Kane.
It’s painfully obvious that this isn’t a new topic and probably will stay with us for some time, so I won’t waste too much time on it.
Anyway, someone who really had a way with words had the best comment on this topic I have ever seen.
Douglas Adams’ set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
Always worth mentioning that Weizenbaum, before he wrote this book, proclaimed that a computer would never be able to beat a human in chess (per Steven Levy’s Hackers). Guess what happened next?
Neurologist George M. Beard might very well have been on to something. I’ve heard some physicians and psychologists make the argument that since we’ve spent the vast majority of our evolutionary history living in very small groups, our nervous systems simply have not evolved yet to handle being flooded with the vast amount of information and stimulus that comes from living in large cities, yet alone information flooding in from around the world via either newspaper or internet. Another related idea is that when we lived in those small groups, our lives were mostly dull, punctuated by moments of terror that quickly resolved, one way or the other. Now we’re constantly in a state of never-ending stress due to all of that information. Research has proven that the human brain loves to empathize with other human brains, even if those brains belong to fictional characters. When you read a book, or a news story, your brain is actually pretending that it is that character in the book , or it is that person in the news story.
One thing that happens is that the thrill-seekers start to stay home playing GTA rather than go out thinking of stupid things to do. There are serious suggestions that this is one component of the drop in violent crime.
I would argue that it’s not so much the game as the culture that surrounds it. Basket ball is pretty non-violent, but the participants are not characterized by by being profoundly less prone to being involved in off-court violence than football players.
