Dumb Phone
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I don't understand the first point because I can access my calendar, email, contact, etc all during a call on my phone without problem (Android 10).
The second makes sense if you look at it from the lens of you not having infinite markup possibilities in your digital calendar compared to writing whatever you want on a desk calendar, but my calendar is with me everywhere. You can get a lot done with plain text notes and the 'description' section of a calendar event.
I consider my phone an all in one productivity machine, not an entertainment machine, and I think that works well for me.
Not all phones could. Verizon in particular had a lot of phones in the previous decade which couldn't access voice and data services at the same time.
Regarding the limitations of the post-1980s "smart phone" ecosystem (both desk and mobile devices), the limitations and UI/UX failures:
1. Apply to a number of different devices. Not merely flagship smartphones, but several other variations on featureful telephony equipment, including a number of generations of office phone systems (typically Rolm desksets), VOIP systems, and consumer landline / wireless handsets, etc., with which I've had direct experience. These tend to exhibit a range of UI/UX failures, to a greater or lesser extent.
2. The opening quote was from an aquaintance, who's more than slightly technologically literate.
3. The statement isn't absolute, but conditional. Frequently implies "not always".
Comments so far seem to miss both the focus on overall workflow, and the nuance on feature completeness and/or suitability.
Perhaps I'm a less effective communicator than I'd hoped.
Perhaps the technological blinders are more formidable than I'd feared.
Part of the entire project is to see what the response is, and how it responds (if at all) to different communications methods.
Challenging assumptions, let alone slaying sacred cows, is a fraught task.
And to correct a misapprehension: it's not that the 1970s-era office phone ecosystem was better. It's that it was different than the set of affordances and features of present comms devices and systems embody and the underlying design understanding evidences.
In the earlier Reddit piece the article references, the immediately preceeding concept addressed was Chesterton's Fence. Many here are eager to move it.
This might be a weird question but are you always connected to WiFi?
Not familiar with any issues with using data while on a call as some comments have alluded to. I have Google Fi as a provider and haven't experienced any issues with them, or Verizon before.
If that's actually a common problem for this person then they should start carrying a bluetooth headset. Personally I always have my bluetooth earbuds in my pocket so I'll pop one of them in if a phone conversation lasts more than a minute. The complaint is incredibly silly because no one is stopping you from carrying your phone and a headset and a notepad and all the other things or even a second phone. You can totally go back to doing the way it used to be done. This is like whining that your evening walks are ruined because the light on your phone isn't as good as the flashlight you used to carry. If you don't like it then use the damn flashlight instead.
> They aren’t available whilst a call is in process
> They have vastly less capability or flexibility than the systems they replaced
What function isn't available during a call on a smartphone? Playing music?
And when the author says "capability or flexibility", this is what the author is comparing a smart phone with:
> The user
> The phone itself
> A Rolodex or addressbook / contacts list
> The local PBX – the business’s dedicated internal phone switch.
> A secretary or switchboard operator, serving also as a message-taking (voice-to-text), screening, redirect, directory, interactive voice response, and/or calendaring service
> A desk calendar
> A phone book
> A diary or organiser
> Scratch paper
Yes, having a dedicated secretary is more flexible and capable than a smartphone. But modern businesses still have secretaries don't they? I don't understand how this is a viable comparison.
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In 2021, a functional phone is no longer functional for my use. It hasn't been so for years. My university account required a Duo app (2 factor) to login. My family relies on chat programs to talk, because we live in different countries and SMS is expensive. And so many other things......
I know that some people find themselves wasting time on smart phones. But others have been several times more productive on smart phones. It all comes down to choosing what works best for you, and how you use the device.
(Edit: format)
I strongly suspect that much of the reason for the lack of awareness and consideration of these methods, tools, and concepts is that this was "secretarial work", that is, women's work. It was conceived of specifically to free the minds of executives and administrators from having to deal with these problems. Further, as secretarial and administrative positions were eliminated from organisation, the knowledge, context, and even the culture in which they were embodied, was lost.
Well, they have admins/assistants for seniorish execs but, no, they mostly don't even have a shared admin for anyone below that level
Compared holding the phone with one hand and flipping through an address book with the other it's much less flexible to me.
My point was that we didn't replace address books with just smartphones. As address books disappeared from our desks, computers showed up. Emails showed up. It was a strange comparison between a single phone and a whole ecosystem of doing business.
"I'll send/email/fax all the information to you in a second." largely replaced "I'm going to read this to you from this piece of paper." especially in a business setting. More efficient, formal, traceable methods have been invented and adopted.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_play_(telecommunication...
That is for broadband, cable, fibre. Mobile is an additional thing, not standalone.
Besides that you can always opt for VOIP via some SIP-service
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session_Initiation_Protocol
register that number whereever you want to,
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIP_provider
and pipe that into a
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VoIP_phone
by whichever means. (second mobile/cell for instance)
I use an iPhone 12 mini, but I'm not a heavy user of a phone. As a Xennial, I lived through and was cognizant the last 20 years of the analog age, roughly capping off with the Blackberry at the end of the millennium (and took a few years to take off).
The smart devices haven't really helped anything. Laptops and desktops have. Smart devices really were just tethers for you to your work/life/consumer distractions. It has its uses, and that's why I carry mine, but primarily just basic communication is why I keep it. I can live without the secure Wake On Lan to my desktop, internet banking and whatever relatively useless features it has.
Pencil, paper, laptop. Still can't beat it, smart devices are largely just pieces of trash or new ball and chain at worst.
Same here. I have built many cellular networks from the ground up in the early 90's, then I worked in R&D for cellular devices and today I do various cloud things. When I am not at work, I seldom carry a phone, nor even mess around with technology. (Other than the random hobbyist project I'll mess around with on the weekends every now and then).
I find it fascinating when I am out and about, only to watch people living 18 inches in front of their nose, while there is a great big world of activity all around them, and they are not even aware.
I could just as well not have any phone functionality if it has internet.
At this point I even don't pick up calls from numbers that I don't recognize or weren't scheduled beforehand.
It's now rude to just call someone on the phone without asking permission first.
It's the equivalent of dropping unannounced at their place.
Which used to be a normal thing - at least where I live and especially if you were young. At the same time, politely telling someone you’re busy, it’s not a good time, etc was also acceptable and normal.
Most people that I know only use calls for time sensitive/urgent needs. Most other things, aside from chatting with family etc, are really best handled with a text. For whatever reason the culture around phones has shifted to "don't force people to drop whatever they're doing and respond to a call unless it is actually necessary".
Seems to work out well and fairly straightforward, I'd imagine I'm not the only one that follows this flow.
If you call me, I'll probably hear the phone ring, and can either answer it or check for a message, whereas if you send me a text, there's a decent chance I won't even notice its existence for some hours. Better hope that "urgent communication need" isn't too urgent...
Anyone feel like businesses small and large aren’t getting this? If I need a plumber or want to apply for a mortgage the first step is always a phone call. I don’t get it.
I’ve tried texting local businesses but it only occasionally works.
At first it was only small businesses like the nearby cafeteria sending the lunch menu, then it was fast food deliveries, some banks. Last year some state institutions made the switch.
I'm not sure about a mortgage, since that requires more paperwork. But most of a car insurance, car loan, personal loan, new internet phone line, can be done via WhatsApp.
The local digital signature law still doesn't work though, so at certain point of the process, the company sends an official or someone from a private post company to get the real signatures on paper and confirm that the ID card matches the application.
The issue is imposing yourself on somebody else's attention.
I really wish we could rewind the time for this one. It was so amazing to call people spontaneously.
But it does sometimes feel like something bigger has changed.
When I was a kid, the house phone was almost _always_ in use at night and on the weekends. Various family members and friends called just to chat and catch up and BS about whatever was on the news. Birthday calls were placed and gratefully received. The teenagers in the house got in trouble for tying up the line all evening to talk with their friends even after having spent all day with them at school. Today that's all been replaced with texts and tweets and facebook likes and it makes me sad.
They still do this, it's just over FaceTime/Discord/Zoom/etc. Also I don't see the voice->text move as something really that terrible. I have a discord with my close friends and we've essentially left FB groups for this instead. We can all share stuff and consume it on our own timetables instead of having to drop everything and engage at the exact moment someone wants to share. We can always drop into voice/video/screen-share if needed, it's really ideal for me and my friends.
Analog life is quite the thing. The funny thing is my dad used to complain how phones have ruined physical interaction. He used to have friends just literally show up at the house and see if he is available to hang. He thought phones ended that lifestyle and now he is glued to FB. God help us all...
Slack added huddles recently to cut the friction to call someone. Phone lines before cell phones used to be like that - just call! Instant voice communication. So much better than text.
I feel like I am showing my age now :-)
Personally, I'd prefer a call to at least 50% of slack messages - any time a back and forth is required that could be addressed in a 30 second call but instead takes a slack chat spanning 10 min where you can't really do anything else because of the distraction.
I've tried to encourage people to phone me, including leaving my phone number is my slack status and asking people to consider phoning, but it wasnt really successful
I started to feel the same way once texting and messaging became common. Having someone call you unexpectedly feels like the equivalent of someone saying "I don't care what it is that you're doing, talk to me right now." I know that's not actually what's going through people's minds, but it feels that way. It's like when someone asks you something over IM instead of over email, even though it isn't time sensitive.
I actually get a surge of anxiety because of this lol.
I absolutely love the transcription service for voicemails on iPhone because it means I can easily scan the contents of the messages of people who don't just text after a failed call.
No, it isn't. I'm also Polish and I'll be pissed at you if you call unexpectedly. Like all the other commenters said, a call is a huge interruption, completely uncalled for when there are IMs or even SMS available. Almost everyone I know in my circle understands it and doesn't call unless it's important.
> most of the time I do care more about them than whatever I was doing, because I can just resume what I was doing a few minutes later. Most stuff can be interrupted and resumed without a problem.
You're lucky to have that kind of work. In my case, most of what I'm doing can't be interrupted and restarted like that. And I'm already getting enough interruptions from my wife, kid, family and co-workers, who always have something urgent happening to them every day. I can't handle any more interrupts.
> If this was really important and more important than the thing my friend calls to me with I politely refuse to talk and offer a callback later.
I have a whole set of "quick response" SMS templates available on the incoming call screen, so I can tell you to go away in more or less polite terms, depending on who you are and how I feel.
That's an interesting perspective. I think that explains some people's behavior. I tend to think of IM as in please reply in the next day or so, and email as in please reply in the next week or two.
I'm always telling people to not say hi in an IM and then wait for me to reply, because if I'm busy I'm not going to reply until later, but then you might not be there, and if you had asked whatever you needed in the first message I could be answering it now
So, for a number of years now texting, Slack, or Messenger was the way to be clearer about the intention of only taking a moment of someone's time, which makes it more likely that they'll pay attention. I've been dismayed, as recently as this week, to see on shared screens a red Slack badge that has numbers in the hundreds.
What we really need is much, much better prioritization systems.
I've literally never heard of this. So much of my day-to-day work and personal communication would pretty much never happen if I had to ask for permission every time before I called someone. Is it a millennial thing?
Phones (telephones, that is) and phone numbers are exactly for spontaneous voice communication. If someone doesn't want to be called out of the blue, they can choose to not give their number out to people. Or for texting say, hey, here's my number but I'm so busy that texting is usually better for me. And with today's smartphones that tell you who is calling (or at least, whether or not it's someone you know), it's _way_ easier to decide whether or not to answer a call than it was two or three decades ago where the phone just rang and that was all you got.
99% of the time it could be handled better via a text or email, which allows both parties to answer when they can.
It is infuriating when I have to spend 30 minutes of my day trying to phone people back and getting voice mail so that they can tell me something that was best put in a simple text.
>> 99% of the time it could be handled better via a text or email, which allows both parties to answer when they can.
I think it depends very much on your relationship with the person with whom you are communicating and the conversation itself.
The "bandwidth" of communication of a voice call is much higher than a text or email because of voice inflection, voice tone, and other audible factors.
For example, you might be able to immediately tell that the person you called is sick and adjust your plans or request, but a text or email would not tell you that.
A voice call also allows for quick clarifications that could take several rounds of texts or emails. This means that a 30 second phone call could be faster than several rounds of texts or emails spaced over several hours.
A voice call is also better for more sensitive or urgent communication. Urgent or sensitive news conveyed over text or email can feel impersonal or even uncaring.
For asynchronous one-way messages, I agree that texts or emails are better since they do not interfere and allow each side to handle responses asynchronously.
>> It is infuriating when I have to spend 30 minutes of my day trying to phone people back and getting voice mail so that they can tell me something that was best put in a simple text.
I completely agree. I HATE voice mail and have actually turned it off. People who know me and need a voice call can call back or try reaching me by text or email.
Yeah... You're the kind of person people wish would just text us.
Would you prefer to receive bad news by voice call or by text message?
Personally, I would prefer to receive bad news by voice call, but I am curious about what others prefer and why.
I don't see the 99%, more frequently it's meetings that can be replaced by emails. Some of my customers are fine sending an email or creating a ticket, and are able to tell me in writing what they want. Others, I'd say around half, can't clearly tell me what they want. Maybe they don't know, or they don't fully understand the problem
Either you send a few emails back and forth for a few days, trying to figure out what people want, wasting hours. Instead you can call the same people, and in less than 30 minutes have the job clearly defined. Then you still need to follow up via an email, so you have the clients OK in writing.
It's not a generational thing, it's down to how different people best communicate, and what situation you're currently facing. The clean and clear dismissal of phone call as a means of communication isn't productive. My dismissal of texts in professional settings might also not be super productive, but that's would mean that I have to give out my cellphone number to clients, and that's not really happening.
I don't think the argument is that voice communication is not useful. The only issue is unsolicited calls.
It may be more of a millennial thing but I've heard this from both younger (Gen Z) and older (Gen X) people as well. It does depend on the type of call. If I run a business then I'm not expecting my vendors/clients to pre-schedule a call but if a friend calls I assume it's an emergency or extremely time-sensitive. I regularly send and receive "Are you free to talk?" SMS/iMessage/Discord/etc messages and only initiate calls without first asking if it's something that just can't wait (or in the case where we are about to meet up, like calling to say I'm almost there or calling to find someone at an event we are both attending). The only exception to this "rule" is my parents who regularly call me out of the blue (I get a text ~20% of the time max to ask if I'm free).
I assure you, I did not give my number (or email) to the spammers who contact me multiple times a day.
I'm sure they got it from some combination of public databases and data breaches. Like a fingerprint, I can't easily change my contact info, so here we are.
I want the smartphone without the phone. Signal audio is often better quality anyway.
Aside: I want callers who aren't explicitly in my phone's contacts to solve an audio CAPTCHA before my phone accepts their text/call/voicemail. This would not affect family or friends, would provide a path for important calls like medical, financial, or government calls, and would significantly increase the cost of spam.
"Elder millennial" here. Didn't have a cell phone until college, and then it was a dumb phone.
Phone calls are my least favorite form of communication. Oddly enough, I'm fine with them in a business context, but personal? Don't call me unless someone's dying or I'm expecting a call from you. I will be annoyed otherwise. Either the person you're calling is ignoring all calls (phone silent and out of sight), or you're about to set off a blaring DEAL WITH THIS RIGHT THIS SECOND, DROP WHAT YOU'RE DOING alarm for them (even if it's on vibrate, still, that's what it is). It's like yelling "I need your attention this second!". So it should be important enough to warrant abruptly interrupting someone who may be in the middle of who-knows-what.
I felt very differently about this before cell phones. Yay! Someone called me! Now it's like, damnit, why are you being such a jerk by calling me when there's not something super-important and urgent going on? I think part of it's that home phones couldn't interrupt you everywhere at all times. Mostly just indoors, in your house.
I agree with you completely.
Circa early 2000s we used to call them PDAs. I remember with fond memories my pocketPCs well before the iPhone was even a thing.
A few months later: Stop calling me! And make sure to slip a note in my mailbox before you even think about texting me!
I REALLY do not like this isolationist culture we're slowly building up to, at least in the U.S. Calling someone is the equivalent of showing up unannounced? I find that notion absurd on its face. Maybe there are some parallels but it stops pretty short.
Is it? I think that norm varies a lot with different sections of culture. If it was universally rude, then it'd be damn silly that phones are all set up to be able to receive calls unsolicited, by default.
"Do not disturb" could be the default.
But normies don't work like that. To normies, a device is defined by the role it fills in your life. In this view, a computer is a device used for work: preparing documents, emails, spreadsheets, and presentations. Maybe programming or data analysis for scientific, engineering, or BI purposes. A phone is a social link: it connects you to the people you care about most. This has been true since before smartphones or even cellphones became commonplace: teenagers in the 80s craved their own landlines and their own phones, and even ordered custom phones like the ones with transparent cases, etc.
So inasmuch as smartphones serve the primary social function they continue to serve, which is to connect you with your social circles and facilitate communication with them, they will continue to be marketed as phones, not computers and not anything else -- even if they completely lose PSTN connectivity.
I created a tiny website to give out to people asking why - https://no.phone.wtf
For everyone else, it's normal.
Know why phone calls don't need emojis? Because most of the time, it's much easier to communicate verbally.
Even at work using slack... sure, we communicate with text a lot of the time, but when shit needs to get done, someone starts a call.
There is a difficulty (at least in the states) of finding decent flip phones with the exact level of dumbness that you need. And they are all quite expensive too, due to the nicheness of the product. I eventually found one reasonably priced on eBay secondhand, which seems to be a common story with a lot of dumb phone users.
The fact that abuse of standards and customer lock-in is ubiquitous doesn't make it any less abusive.
The problem OP is alluding to is that some people avoid talking with people who don’t have iMessage, because SMS costs money. So there is a bit of peer pressure to use it, and a lot of people are stuck in iOS because of that.
It’s not that different from Signal/Telegram/WhatsApp, those apps are also closed and rely on network effects. But they are free and work on other OSs, while iMessage requires a relatively expensive phone.
This is doubly true if they have ever used an Apple PC to receive iMessages; in that case it will almost certainly never reach the new phone via SMS.
I don't believe there is a fix to this; sometimes you can repair it on the other party's phone by munging the contact, but most messages will just be blackholed.
Two solutions. The first requires an iPhone (to disable iMessages on your account with) and the other does not. This has been around for years now.
I really miss the days of when I could load all my accounts into Pidgin (Gaim!) and have almost everything centralized. Now I have a teams window (which doesn't bother me too much since it's a work app), a tab for slack, a tab for the umpteenth iteration of whatever Google has decided to call their chat platform, a tab to get SMS messages through google messenger (a welcome change), a window for signal on the desktop, and tabs for Facebook and LinkedIn (both or which I try to never visit, but would like to know if someone contacts my on, and I refuse to load on my phone). I just realized I've apparently abandoned my ICQ/AIM accounts to the past.
That's the desktop. I have almost all those as separate apps on my phone, with separate ways to use them, separate notification preferences, etc.
The instant messaging ecosystem has gone to complete shit, and I doubt anyone that used it seriously before this happened will disagree. And what we got in exchange for every company walling off their own IM system? Honestly, I'm not sure anything that couldn't be recreated fairly easily in a client with a couple months work if someone had extended their protocol to do more.
Me too! I'm very much hoping that matrix - the protocol - continues its steady climb (both popularity and adoption), because that is what i see as the future for that kind of experience where if not everything at least lots/most of my comms interactions will be managed on my side by a single "interface". I'm an admitted fanboy of the matrix protocol (as well as matrix apps like Element, FluffyChat, Quaternion, etc.)...so maybe i'm biased, but have you tried playing around with matrix, and its associated apps, to see if it gets you closer to that older Pidgin/Gaim/Adium-like experience?
(I'm not affiliated with the matrix org. nor any app/client builder, as noted i'm just a fanboy.)
In any other case, it's just the XKCD standards meme[1] all over again, in that it might be better in many ways, but I doubt it will actually help market fragmentation.
1: https://xkcd.com/927/ which actually specifically mentions instant messaging.
Maybe 8110 4G & GerdaOS is a good choice, but I'll ignore KaiOS in general.
There is also community dedicated to replacing the factory OS (KaiOS, a fork of Firefox OS) with a more free one.
No productive office has replaced all those rolodexes and notebooks with just a phone; most have had them replaced for the past 20 years with a desktop computer which has long satisfied the "components operated simultaneously and independently of the phone" requirement.
There's few things more quietly annoying than having something (internet-reliant) that I was doing be interrupted by a non-VoIP call, especially when it's someone I wasn't expecting a call from.
My Pixel 3 can do simultaneous voice and data, because it’s in Australia connecting to GSM based networks.
If it were connecting through CDMA, it could not. CDMA has always been the minority worldwide[0], and is phasing out completely with 4G.
If you’re on a CDMA-using carrier (Eg Verizon) but usually have 4G coverage, you should be able to get simultaneous voice+data by enabling ‘advanced calling’ in the phone’s mobile network settings.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mobile_phone_s...
- Phone-to-head maps poorly to using-phone-as-reference (addresses, maps, calendar, notes)
- Even with speaker, headphones, earbuds, earpiece, etc., toggling between various apps is fraught.
- The mapping of functionality between digital and paper formats ... varies. Digital most definitely does some things far better (search most especially). Others ... not so much. Arguing that digital is an unambiguous advance ... is simply false.
. The device OS may decide it wants to kill specific applications at any time, without notice, or apparent consideration as to significance.
- My office desk phone never stole my contacts, or personal diary, from my rolodex / paper notebook, either while I was on a call or when it was left unattended. (I'm rather surprised nobody's picked up on this particular element of the piece and discussion.)
- Paper gives working area. A desktop is 30 or so times the size of a sheet of A4. My 9" tablet is larger than even today's "phablet" phones ... but has only the display area of two 4x6 index cards. Paper stacks, shuffles, and turns right-angles (e.g., cross-stack sheets portrait then landscape to create divisions) in ways that digital docs don't. If I sort paper in a given order, it doesn't periodically go off and decide it would rather be sorted differently. Yes, the total data density is low. But the real access, input, output, and processing bottleneck isn't the paper, it's the human interacting with it.
I may have heard of headphones at some point. I'm checking my notes.
And I think many of us have probably hung up calls with our faces at least once.
Also, I really like to use this minimalist launcher from time to time: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.jkuester.unlauncher/
I have a lot of the features tweaked or disabled. The way it is configured, it basically acts as a static list of a few apps I use most, with a search bar to access anything else.
I find this setup to be more straightforward than the normal icons+folders type of launcher. I have handed my phone to other people who have never used it, and they have no problem finding things because you can just search.
The 1970s desktop was not portable. But when working away from the office using only a phone, it's quite easy to switch applications while on a call, just connect a headset or switch to speakerphone. Laptop is an easy option for portability as well.
The O'Reilly book UNIX Power Tools gives a number of examples of (mostly terminal-based) tools that could be used for office productivity. I went through a number of grep-based (or similar) phonelist iterations myself.
There's a critical difference between the disconnected, and fully integrated system. The ability to look up a number on your desktop (either directly or as a terminal), and manually enter the number on a phone, is useful. It's not fully automated (so no call-centre automation), but it also means that the phone itself cannot exfiltrate data.
Note that phone numbers themselves are typically short and a relatively dense namespace. The US 10-digit number allows a theoretical maximum of 10 billion numbers ... actually somewhat fewer given technical limitations. That's only about 30x the current population of the US, meaning that if each person has an assigned number randomly dialing digits will connect 1 time in 30. That's a tractable search.
If the phone-number length were doubled, then wardialing would connect only about 1 time in 10 billion. Exhaustive search for active numbers would be infeasible.
But we'd all have to dial 20-digit numbers.
Or you could shorten the sequence by switching to lowercase alphabet (14 characters), alphanumeric (12), or mixed-case alphanumeric (11). If you used an 8,000 word dictionary (roughly the length of EFF's Diceware passphrase generator long wordlist), you'd need five words to provide a similar namespace.
That is: there's a trade-off between the conciseness of the namespace and the ability to abuse it for unsolicited calls.
(This is assuming that all phone spammers dial randomly, which of course isn't the case, but it's the start of one approach to addressing the problem.)
Please not their implementation of split screen brought to the iPhone. Years of working on an iPad Pro, and I still trigger it accidentally when I don't want it, can never trigger it when I do want it or get rid of it, and always wind up having to Google it again.
While personally, this sounds cumbersome to me, some people have very unusual ways of using their Pinephones. To me, that's awesome - we've settled on "how one uses a mobile phone" based on what Google and Apple have designed. Having new, off-the-wall ideas will lead to some people doing slightly insane things, and I say that in the most positive way possible.
Finally, as long as we're straying firmly off-topic: What some people are doing with their mobile Linux devices always reminds me of an Apple ad [0], from when "Think Different" was still the motto of an underdog.
Then an e-book reader. With WiFi but no SIM.
Then a very function-limited dumb-phone, with tethering capability.
"The Case Against Tablets": https://joindiaspora.com/posts/880e5c403edb013918e1002590d8e...
(Most of the meat is in comments to that post.)
I hate that tone and way of arguing.
It is as if the author is accusing everyone of buying a surveillance device and then coming up with other uses than being surveyed.
There's a great deal of frustration and fatigue in that comment.
The expectation isn't that the general public would have been aware of that risk. The general public is not sophisticated, and has been greatly misinformed.
The technical world, the firms offering and provisioning devices, the carriers, the financiers and banks behind this, especially, are.
Technology is the art of balancing desired and undesired effects.
For-profit business is the art of externalising risk.
And the heart of finance itself is risk.
There's a very long record of cautions and warnings. They were ignored, largely because in the short term and with suffient levels of externalisation and arabitrage, those risks were profitable.
JS is not banned.
Sites which present no content without JS (including Diaspora pods) would be inelligible for submission.
It's also appropriate, though possibly not for the reasons you'd chosen it.
Max Allen, Nelson's interviewer, struggled to be able to think far enough forward to comprehend how a tool he thought of as a glorified calculator might possibly be of use to the average person. The problem of course was that he was mis-categorising the tool, and greatly underestimating its capabilities and applications.
The issue I'm seeing in this thread, and amongst communications device and software designers, is a similar failure of comprehension and imagination, of being unable to look back in time and understand how a glorified bit of papyrus and leaky grease tube (pen and paper) could possibly serve the functions modern smartphones do. Again, it's a misunderstanding of the capabilities, workflow, possibilities, and affordances.
Thanks for illustrating the point so clearly!
I think Nelson's point was that the computer is a strict superset of those previous forms of writing. It doesn't need to replace every single instance of pen and paper, or Rolodex, or secretarial staff, but there's no reason why it shouldn't in any case where the cost is low enough.
I think that the argument that the smartphone's UI is more synchronous than those past technologies is true in some ways but it's a weak one: that's easily solved by just having multiple computers, or multiple terminals (or most likely a desktop and a smartphone). If that is not yet cheap enough, that's still fine, because you could simply continue to use the smartphone together with a notepad or secretary until it is cheap enough (as many do today).
If people are choosing to forgo those past technologies in exchange for a more synchronous UI today, I don't think it's because they are not imaginative enough to understand that notepads can still be used. It is simply because they are willing to accept a somewhat more synchronous interface in exchange for a vastly more efficient ability to execute those tasks synchronously. Or, perhaps they simply don't find it to be too synchronous: after all, we only have two ears and two eyes, so there is a limit to the advantage of having multiple channels, and perhaps modern smartphone users are just very effective at maximizing the bandwidth of that interface (considering how many have pointed out here that there are many options for multitasking on smartphones).
I also stand by what I said: it's easy to focus on what you know, and to ignore or discount foreign experiences, whether local or distant, or future or past.
One of Nelson's problems is that he's not an effective communicator when talking to the general public. He has advanced ideas. He certainly feels strongly about them. Some are valid, though I suspect others ... not quite so much.
In particular he falls into one of the classic technologist's fallacies: seeing the potential benefits of a tool, process, or technology, but not its drawbacks. Most especially the emergent drawbacks. If you look at the contemporary litany of complaints about technology (spam, advertising, censorship, propaganda, surveillance, manipulation, clickbait, adware, attention fragmentation, an ever-expanding security attack surface and threat model, platform complexity, an obsolescence treadmill, fragile systems, business-model / monetisation challenges, etc., etc.), I think you'll find that Nelson didn't anticipate them, and even now doesn't much address them. These are inherent to the type and level of technology we've adopted.
By contrast, the limits of paper reduce much of that.
The limits of paper do pose numerous other challenges. This is a trade-off.
But that is my point: to consider the specific affordances and drawbacks of each approach, to look closely at the overall structure and system, and to think critically about which of those aspectare truly valuable, and which constitute blocks too true value (to the end-user, as opposed to value-extraction by a hardware vendor or service provider).
My comment above does have its cheeky aspect. But I'm completely serious about the overall point: that there's a blindness to the unfamiliar, and that it works both ways.
Maybe in another 20--30 years you'll have a better understanding of this.
Whatsapp is not compatible with iPods which I always found annoying. This is because Whatsapp requires a SIM, which iPods don't support.
Skype nagged me to update, which I couldn't since 5th generation iPods are tied to iOS 9.3.5 forever and can't update. The 7th generation iPods however have a later version of iOS and support more apps.
Currently I have two phones. One is a dumbphone for normal calls and SMS (You would be surprised at how much business is conducted with SMS and calls). Then a smartphone which I NEVER use for calls, just use it as a mini 'tablet' for surfing the web and using Maps etc