Gee, I wonder how people worked before we had Zoom calls and we were all working in different locations across the country. Either people were really smart before, or we have become really dumb now.
Watch people out in public sometime. Probably over half of them are absorbed in something on their smartphone. We're constantly processing information now. It's a huge change, and I'm not convinced it's for the better.
When we just had dumb-phones, we were "always available", but now we're "always connected".
also it's much harder to read the internet, check your phone or leave your desk during a call when you have video on. People did all of these back during the in-person days, but it took more effort or less caring. Now it seems S.O.P.
Yeah interesting things happen over time in terms of culture. Nextel got bought by Sprint and their ideology vanished.
Knowledge work, for example, found email and hung onto this. All of a sudden, we lost simplicity and are in this bubble of noisy "software interfaces" being the standard.
Perhaps it's just that newer generations don't know how things used to work, and the old people are retired or can't do much about it?
Most people are on phones now, who uses computers if not for work?
But I guess one could argue using phones would be the same, but even then my personal experience is that most people don't know much about phones either.
The vast majority of people back then were working even more boring and less creative jobs.
Still mountains of stuff being invented now. Almost the entire history of smartphones comes from the last 10 years.
If you think this camera in the OP is cool, you should also be impressed that we are putting periscopes and mirrors inside phones to create adjustable zoom that fits in your pocket and costs hardly anything.
In the past, they said the same thing about Google/Wikipedia/The internet in general, that it make us dumbs, etc. But it is not quite true, as we are now able to use our newly free resources (time, mind, etc) for other useful things thanks to the assistance we get from those services.
Hacking in particular, you now have more time to write more tests of your code, as you got things done earlier. you are now have time to add more features, and you are now have more time to learn new technology, language etc.
Same as the human memory is not weaker than it was 15 years ago, although, 15 years ago, every human being was able to dial out tens of numbers without looking in the phone book, while today, we simply type the name or speed dial it from the mobile device. We do remember less phone numbers, yet, those "cells" in the brain are used for other things.
That's interesting coming from someone who is old enough to remember how things used to be before everybody had even (dumb) mobile phones.
Unfortunately, the world has changed and it now assumes everybody has a smartphone: no phone booths, phone books, paper maps available in many places, you are often pointed to URLs for further information on anything...
Imagine you were teleported to today from just 30 years ago, when many of us had been working for quite a long time. Sure. Many aspects of daily life would seem pretty familiar. Cars aren't all that different. In a given city, many of the same shops would even be present. But, almost anything to do with obtaining and using information would be utterly alien.
One thing not taken into account on this rant (and it is just a big rant) is the incredible increase in scale. Nearly everyone has a phone and can make phone calls now and we're almost 8 billion people. The old, understandable, analog system would have never scaled like this. Quality didn't degrade because of greed or degeneracy. It was a trade-off and I say the level of access we have now trumps whatever nostalgia people feel for the past decades.
1. The stuff they predicted using dedicated technologies (video pay phones, etc.) ended up being built on top of general purpose platforms (laptops). The fax-from-the-beach thing is another example, although one would just send an email today.
2. AT&T tended to predict evolutionary change when more profound change actually happened. Payphones, faxes, etc. Perhaps marketers realized that they had to attach the wow factor to something concrete that everybody already understood.
What they didn't predict (or at least tell us about) was that voice would become just another service on a general network (Skype). I guess this has only partially happened, but it's clearly the endgame.
Not far back you could know the tens or hundreds of people within a ten minute walk, and now you know virtually nobody of the thousands of people living in a 15min walk radius.
Also what people were doing was around tangible objects intuitively understandable to you, rather than “services” consisting 90% of the economy whose name or function or hiw they relate you will never know.
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