"This image says so much about our future"

It gives me the same creepy feeling as when I see these Manhattan offices where everybody is staring at their computers all day, each one in his own little cubicle. I guess they might not need cubicles anymore. This is "progress".
 
Personally I still find nothing more depressing than the grip the smart phone has on our society ... and the effect it has had on one on one communication.
 
Keith said:
Personally I still find nothing more depressing than the grip the smart phone has on our society ... and the effect it has had on one on one communication.
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What really puts me off are the hands-free types who walk down the street having a loud conversation, apparently with themselves. The fact that non-psychotic people feel no qualms about doing this is one of the more disturbing aspects of what currently passes for modern 'society'
 
True. In a Subway car for example, 60% look at their phone, 10% with a tablet, 5% with a book, the remaining are sleeping or crazy. I am not sure in which bracket I belong since I am looking at them.
 
It's a nice bookend to Apple's "1984" commercial: The omnipresent leader is in the real world and the proles are "in" the screen.

FB is good for lots of things, like gabbing about who slept with whom in high school thirty years ago. Important things. It's just a gossip machine with an atomic core. There is an SF story about VR by, I think Theodore Sturgeon. Some guy nicknamed Hercules renting out pornographic memories to the losers. :) Welcome to 1956!

s-a
 
Lucadomi said:
True. In a Subway car for example, 60% look at their phone, 10% with a tablet, 5% with a book, the remaining are sleeping or crazy.
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And what is wrong with passing the time on the Subway?

And the photo... I think people are over-reacting. It's not like Zuckerberg has abducted these people and is performing a test in his secret lab (because everyone here thinks they are the only one not tricked by perceived societal ills, marketing, etc.). It's a technology event in which the people were, most likely, very happy to be seeing this item.
 
I was looking at it more as a photograph than a document of what happened at a VR convention.

Sadly, it's not a very well-made image. It could have been so much better. It would have been better in monochrome, and some foreground flash would have filled in those shadows a bit. I was actually thinking that a 4-by-5 Speed Graphic with flash would have rendered this rather more interesting, especially if taken more at a knee-level, to give Mr. Zuckerberg some stature above the crowd.

That's the downside of everyone having cell phones cameras, lots of images but few are very good.

~Joe
 
I don't get emotional when I see such an image. Life changes around us. We can often decide not to play along. (I don't like AF). :)
 
Lucadomi said:
However many people seem to become dependent from their electronic toys and cannot stop using them. I do see something troublesome about that.
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I get that... but the subway is just not fun to just sit in and do nothing...especially when you have to do it all of the time. If a friend is with me, I don't pull out my phone at all. But alone on a commute? Yeah, I'll pass the time playing a game and listening to music.
 
Sure. You guys are making me feel so old now.
I am not against technology when it improves everyone's life. I surely use it too. Looking at the picture of the OP I see just increase in passivity and isolation, and detachment from reality. It surely is good business for somebody.
 
jsrockit said:
...And the photo... I think people are over-reacting. It's not like Zuckerberg has abducted these people and is performing a test in his secret lab (because everyone here thinks they are the only one not tricked by perceived societal ills, marketing, etc.). It's a technology event in which the people were, most likely, very happy to be seeing this item.
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Hi,

You've no idea how much I hope this is true...

Regards, David
 
Lucadomi said:
Sure. You guys are making me feel so old now.
I am not against technology when it improves everyone's life. I surely use it too. Looking at the picture of the OP I see just increase in passivity and isolation, and detachment from reality. It surely is good business for somebody.
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Once I watched a document film about the infamous download provider ThePirateBay. When the thepiratebay was sued, the people against them used the term "ILR" (in real life) a lot in their statements on court, while the the pirates used "AFK" (away from keyboard) instead of ILR, because they thought the Internet IS a part of the real life for them, (and for us too).

I thought a lot about it and I think they were right about the definition of reality in this case. I don't have more than 3 people that I can talk about rangefinders around me and I'm happy there are online forums. That will be real isolation if I got nowhere to talk about my hobbies.
 
David Hughes said:
Hi,

You've no idea how much I hope this is true...

Regards, David
Click to expand...

Well David, it is as simple as that and it isn't... right? And I'm not saying I'm right... However, this one event photo most likely means more in symbolism than actuality (I doubt the event was any big deal alone). However, there is a reason why the photo resonates as something more sinister with people and that's based on Zuckerberg's history.
 
“There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it.” - Aldous Huxley

This could as easily apply if "machine" were substituted for "pharmacological"--a painless concentration camp, indeed. The machines have won!
 
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