Totally. People would debate facts in arguments because you couldn’t just Google it. Okay, I know you might say it’s the same today with MAGA or whatever. But I mean like silly things like which car is faster, which country is bigger etc, who sang a certain song or played a certain character in a movie.
Ready access to the facts is a huge loss. These conversations used to drive a lot of social interactions that no longer exist.
Realistically is it more important that we know who played a certain character in a movie or that we had a a group of friends spending time together discussing it?
And even better now that it’s written down and we have a moment to think before responding, our witty repartee can include complaints about grammar, typing and autocorrect, etc. we can hound someone mercilessly with ridicule and follow them online, where in real life they could have just left
We also get to assume whoever we’re enaging with is the dumbest or most vile human being that ever wasted oxygen, and dump all the frustrations of our lives onto them, which they richly deserve for making that typo or misusing that semicolon!
One thing that’s missing is the sense of wondering about something. “I’ve always wondered…” is kind of an anachronism, now that it’s trivial to look up almost anything we wonder about. “I’ve always wondered” has become, “For some reason I’ve never asked this extra brain I carry around all the time.”
Totally. People would debate facts in arguments because you couldn’t just Google it. Okay, I know you might say it’s the same today with MAGA or whatever. But I mean like silly things like which car is faster, which country is bigger etc, who sang a certain song or played a certain character in a movie.
Ready access to the facts is a huge loss. These conversations used to drive a lot of social interactions that no longer exist.
Realistically is it more important that we know who played a certain character in a movie or that we had a a group of friends spending time together discussing it?
Instead of conversation we now have contentious arguments about whatever randomly scrolls in front of us.
And even better now that it’s written down and we have a moment to think before responding, our witty repartee can include complaints about grammar, typing and autocorrect, etc. we can hound someone mercilessly with ridicule and follow them online, where in real life they could have just left
We also get to assume whoever we’re enaging with is the dumbest or most vile human being that ever wasted oxygen, and dump all the frustrations of our lives onto them, which they richly deserve for making that typo or misusing that semicolon!
One thing that’s missing is the sense of wondering about something. “I’ve always wondered…” is kind of an anachronism, now that it’s trivial to look up almost anything we wonder about. “I’ve always wondered” has become, “For some reason I’ve never asked this extra brain I carry around all the time.”