Global connectivity is amazing but a part of me has this feeling of losing something. It will be no longer possible to be away from everything unless you seek it actively. Overall it’s a good thing but it still makes me sad in a particular way that I don’t have a word to describe it.
Exactly, and likely the availability/affordability of nutritious food as well.
And to loop the analogy back – I don't think ubiquitous network reachability is ultimately a big problem; it's what we do with it: Social expectations around constant availability to respond, addictive/heavily gamified applications, etc.
"Personal failing" has idiomatic meaning, it specifically refers to things which are that person's fault. Medical issues generally don't count as "personal failings". If you did something wrong that caused a medical problem, that could be a personal failing. For instance if your organ failed because you drove your motorcycle too fast and crashed, that could be described as a personal failing.
When I was much younger I also felt a profound sense of loss when I found that the Iridium constellation covered the globe.
Thankfully our shared thought that you can't be away from everything is not true: caves, anything underwater or dense forests around the world are totally inaccessible for any satellite devices.
Also, not sure if you've used any satellite devices but even in most conditions you're still pretty away from things. You have to set up the device with a view of the open sky and wait several minutes for a text-only message of a handful of bytes. Using it in a Costa Rican rainforest was almost impossible.
Things have shifted though. I took multi-week international trips in the 90s where no one expected to be able to reach me (especially not easily) and certainly not as a matter of routine communication. Maybe I'd send a postcard.
A lot of people today expect that most travel maintains some degree of connectivity back home, especially if something urgent/serious happens.
Implicitly, maybe. However, being disconnected is usually just a perk of getting away.
The problem with getting disconnected is that we don’t want to do it, we are afraid of missing out and we usually invent other activities to rationalize it.
In a sense it’s a bit like enjoying the radio in traffic, taking the long ride home after work. This is not something that you would rationally do unless you have to, but there are some benefits that people are still seeking from it.
If you must for emergencies, bring it turned off locked away, and promise yourself you will only take it out in an emergency. But then you didn't need one for emergencies before it was possible, so I'd argue you still don't need one.
> But then you didn't need one for emergencies before it was possible, so I'd argue you still don't need one.
No, people didn't have phones, satellite messengers etc. Nor did we have penicillin or water filters, and as a result, people sometimes died from (by today's measure) trivially preventable causes.
So that's not a very good argument for not bringing a phone or satellite beacon/messenger on a hike – permanently connected and livestreaming, turned off and at the bottom of your backpack, or anything in between. The choice is all yours!
That would be irrational, the trick of going somewhere far away is that you rationalize it through something else and you don’t have the option to have the Internet or the phone.
No one goes somewhere far away, explicitly for being disconnected, that’s an implicit goal.
Otherwise, you can just turn off your phone do I have to leave it.
so, uh, I lived in the Yukon for 4 years and have spent months in the Arctic Circle and all over AK and Yukon. I drove from Alaska to Argentina, I drove right around Africa and I drove around Australia, including the world's most remote 4x4 track - 1,050 miles in ten days without seeing another person or vehicle.
I, umm, know a thing or two about going remote without communications.
Don't worry. We will normalize intentful disconnecting for periods of time out of necessity. It's far too obvious that being hyper connected 24/7 is bad for our health. We won't all be addicted to digital cigarettes forever.
Being hyper connected 24/7 isn’t bad for health. Overuse of corporate, censored, algorithmic agenda social media is bad for health. It’s not the L3 connectivity or texts from loved ones that harms us.
I used an account on one of the uncensored non-algorithmic mastodon sites for a bit. I saw that I don't really want uncensored streamed content (and I cleared my browser cache afterwards).
The human brain is not designed to handle that and is entirely abstract from normal pre-internet situations. Normal experience is low bandwidth input of mostly known self-reinforcing stimulus. A signal that's approximately analogous to 100% noise screamed at 120db does not improve the human condition. It just leads to mental breakdown and psychotic episodes.
Carefully filtered bias-reinforcing echo chambers are actually a good thing and are what we should be living the majority of our lives in. Having the option to not do that is a good thing, but it should not be the norm.
Libraries are not raw unfiltered samples of everyone's brains. They're carefully filtered and curated to provide maximal learning ability (with quiet environments to reduce distraction to allow focused learning).
Right, constant streams of unfiltered random content, uncorrelated with our intentions, are not what we evolved for.
We are also not evolved to handle constant streams of highly curated content, harnessing the psychology of addiction, leveraging our individual interests (conscious or subconscious) to advance other’s economic interests.
What we need: content curated by our chosen specified interests and quality bars, however refined we wish those too be, and completely agnostic otherwise.
Yes you can! It's just that you never seem to want to, even though you regret wasting the day when you put your head to your pillow.
Stop treating human brains like all-capable, all-rational, all-free-willed things. Stop treating any technology as a neutral tool. It's disgusting and harming.
Project much? Like teetotalers claiming that one drop of booze turns decent men into degenerates, it says more about the complainer than the subject of his ire.
> We won't all be addicted to digital cigarettes forever.
Yeah we will. Why wouldn't we?
> It’s not the L3 connectivity or texts from loved ones that harms us.
Yeah it is. The fact that you feel you need to "announce" yourself real time is depressing. Can you not deal with being away from your loved one. Are you that clingy that you need to be in touch 24/7? Or is it trust issues?
"Hi hun; love you, ill be back in a few days" does wonders for a relationship.
What's wrong of explaining your vacation after you touch base?
Agree with your comment on L3. The only exception I will make is communication in true life/death scenarios. Even then I understand the desire for some to intentionally disconnect that too.
>> We won't all be addicted to digital cigarettes forever.
>Yeah we will. Why wouldn't we?
That's why I called them cigarettes. Smoking cigarettes used to be ubiquitous. We have dramatically reduced smoking and it's now more normal to not be addicted to cigarettes.
As we better understand how things negatively impact our health we gradually adjust our behavior. This makes sense from both a natural selection stand point and by simply observing consistent advancement in healthcare.
I don't claim it will go away entirely but it will be more socially acceptable to disconnect from the bad parts and you'll have better tools and support to do so.
> Yeah it is. The fact that you feel you need to "announce" yourself real time is depressing. Can you not deal with being away from your loved one. Are you that clingy that you need to be in touch 24/7? Or is it trust issues?
These all sound more like L8 problems, to be honest.
Certain communities will, but it requires people have a third place to pick up good habits. Eg you probably won’t disconnect per a work goal, but Catholic groups have already instituted digital Lents for almost a decade already.
