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Comment by ciguy | Hacker News Reader

Clearly you haven't been here and seen it in action. Groups sitting around the dinner table, or drinking, never interacting with one another or looking up from their phones. There is no cultural stigma to sitting on your phone and ignoring your friends like there is in other countries and it's rather terrifying to see it in action.

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I'm a Westerner in the Philippines now, and just the other day I went out to a restaurant and there were a group of young people having dinner at the next table. As they ate, they all were staring at their phones and not conversing, just eating. I thought, "oh well, after they finish eating they'll probably be social over drinks." Nope, I was wrong. After the plates were cleared away, they all remained zombies glued to Facebook. Not a word was passed between any of them. It's really sad to behold what Facebook is doing to the Philippines. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say what people are doing to themselves via Facebook.

Same here, I'm American but live in Manila at the moment. There are many things here that happen due to lack of cultural precedent such as rampant unchecked phone use during social outings. One can only hope that the culture will evolve eventually to make this type of antisocial behaviour less acceptable.

Oppo, which is a top Chinese smartphone maker, has a huge share of the Filipino market. And how they market these phones here in the Philippines is very revealing. The ads say: "Oppo: the selfie phone." That's right, the phone is actually marketed as a device primarily for taking selfies, not voice, SMS, or web.

That's pretty standard everywhere, though? It's not like the newest iPhone would be marketed with "iPhone - the phone that makes calls and sends texts"

Apple doesn't market the iPhone as a selfie phone. No, they wouldn't market it as a device designed exclusively for calls and SMS either, but that isn't quite the same thing since the word "phone" is still part of its name.

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