Hyggelig

That Escalated Quickly: Smart Phones

• Me: I know what you mean about the crew neck sweater being a sign of low income. I'm talking with a toothless black man named Casey at a bar ad he's wearing a torn red Champion crew neck sweater. He looks the part.
• Mike: Hahaha now you see.
• Me: I break the mold. I am hipster-toothless-black-man-crew neck sweater-guy.
• Mike: No, you are mold.
• Me: I'm the kind of mold you find on gravestones that Nicholas Flemming found and turned into penicillin and treated syphilis and revolutionized healthcare and casual sexual encounters.
• Mike: Hahaha
• Me: I'll have you know that's without a smartphone. Just a smart person.
• Mike: That's why there are smart phones so that those of us who can't pull random facts out of our brains can now do it anytime.
• Me: Which doesn't make you any smarter but gives you the err of confidence that is dangerous for its sense of false security. know thy self.
• Mike: That was the most incomprehensible rant I've ever heard from you. You have some personal vendetta against smart phones ad progress in general.
• Me: Just because you don't comprehend complex thought doesn't mean it isn't a valid point. People with smart phones feel confident in their interactions with people and treat texting as a form of communication that seeks to justify personal thoughts while lowering the efforts of processing what others have to say. Think of smart phone users efforts I pulling together their thoughts. If you wanted to say the same thing I just said about penicillin you would've had to google it, make the reference, fact check the correct usage, and then be ok with sending it. And you'd be so proud of yourself for seeming smart. But truth be told, it took no genuine intelligence and only a working knowledge of iphone user interface.YOU in particular might not do that, but iphone users in general. That's the trap of the smart phones. It gives people a false confidence because you'd never take the time to learn about penicillin in the first place if you could easily look it up and 'know' on the spot. Why know it for real when Siri can help. That's the point I was making.
• Mike: No, I disagree. There is no false sense of security. Factual knowledge is simply loosing importance. The day when pulling out facts from your phone will someday be equally as fast as your brain, then what's the difference? Factual knowledge will be obsolete soon. Soon concepts ad skills will be what matters.
• Me: *losing importance
• Me: I know what you mean and what you're saying but using those same concepts you speak of to deconstruct the language, like Jacques Derrida, words are simple place holders themselves for concepts. Why is 'chair' a chair? Because we've used that word to signify what we perceive as a chair. It's the shorthand way of explaining and communicating what we perceive. What happens when people on longer have those words as place holders or form the wrong connections between word and concept. Like lose instead of loose. You might not think it matters but you're denying a word its proper function. Where do you draw the line at excusing words of their duties? You use a phone instead? Then you've never even learned it in the first place. We lose a large part of intellectual thought that way.
• Me: Think of it like the Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It's written beautifully, I mean perfect. Long run-on sentences that don't quite run-on. They don't seem to be so log because each word holds such perfect meaning and intention. It literally forces your mind to bring each symbol ad sign into focus to elicit a larger conceptual understanding. No machine can do that. No phone will help with that. If we allow ourselves not rely on these phones it's only a matter of time before the Fitzgeralds of the world are obsolete and I don't want that future. We'd lose so much of our foundational past in human language - hell, in communication as a whole! It literally bothers me more than anything else in the entire world. The death of communication by the advances in communications technology.
• Mike: I have had a very primitive thought that resembles your argument. Just like calculators numb mathematics. At the same time, that's where good parenting makes the difference.
• ...
• Mike: What future do you see? A bunch of ignorant citizens roaming the planet? The digression of intelligence?
• Me: I see a future of entitled idiots who outwardly perceive and preset themselves as self-righteous, knowledgeable people. They guide their actions, and of those around them with less intelligence, with the err of confidence ad leadership that is unfounded in genuine knowledge but taken easily by the powers of easily accessible propaganda and ideological dissemination - Thanks to the ease of access and lack of creativity that smart phones provide and represent. The ultimate tool for the powers that be to keep a civilization encamped in an ideological sphere of influence under the guise of information progression. It advances civilization into blithering idiots while maintaining their assertion that their thoughts are their own.