[samsamsam]

This is a YouTube video by a guy, who I think may have either had too much coffee or forgot to take his meds. If I am understanding correctly, this generation is so obsessed about images that it knows the present will pass but when they re-visit that moment through images, they want to shape how it will look to them when they see it again. So rather than take the pic, look back and remember that moment, now they take the pic in anticipation of the day they re-visit that pic. I may not be articulating it perfectly, the video is about two minutes. Maybe someone else can recap it better.

And I want to punch the guy not because of what he is saying, just because of who he is, he seems like a total self obsessed beta douche, that is trying too hard to be amazing.

What he says at 2:06, makes me want to...

[teh_skeeze]

I only see chicks doing this. I think it's more attention whoring. They want to show just how awesome their lives are. When you take that many pictures, they are bound to get lost in the memory hole. Personally, I hate pictures, and hate having pictures taken of me. I prefer to keep the shit I do under wraps. The better stories rise to the top naturally. For the lesser ones, there are people in the social circle that remember things you forgot.

[Basil Ransom]

I hadn't seen that article by Kahneman, but I would agree with him.

Unlike the man in the video, I say it's a bad thing. Everything becomes a substrate for artifice and chicanery. Everyone must be pretending to have the time of their life, and they are too busy pretending to have fun to actually let go and enjoy themselves. The girl about to bang you is taking a selfie of herself instead of nuzzling up to you (this happened to me recently, prebang, and I did bang her).

[dads]

I think I can recap it better... "Gay"

[trian1]

This is Jason Silva. He also hosts National Geographic's "Brain Games," including this one on attraction:
http://youtu.be/eRxlFmgyFnI

But his 1:23 assessment of that topic is pretty damn red pill

[polymath]

I like instagram. It's fun and lets me keep in touch with friends in other cities/countries. I like how my travel map has slowly but surely been populating itself with photos taken around the world.

I think his commentary is all bullshit.

People have been taking pictures to look at them later for a few generations now...

Plus, instagram is only one aspect of what defines this generation.

[bojangles]

I've used instagram to get lays abroad, I may write a post about it.

[Texas_Tryhard]

This guy seems legit, but holy fuck is he annoying. He seems like he's drunkenly talking the whole time.

[iop890]

I have a couple of Thai celebrities that like and comment on my instagram, used that a couple of times to convince girls I'm somehow connected with them. Probably got a few bangs because of that.

[Lizard King]

Everything about his words and the presentation of the video is shaped towards the short attention span, uncritically thinking mind of today.

Garbage.

[TheFinalEpic]

He's an idiot because he suggests the "present is gone". you are always living in the present, and if you take this guys advice and waste the present by taking photos of it to brag to your "friends", you will have no future.

[iknowexactly]

(09-15-2014 02:03 PM)Trev Wrote:  

Everything about his words and the presentation of the video is shaped towards the short attention span, uncritically thinking mind of today.

Garbage.

+1 rep for good incisive criticism of bizarre disconnect from the present, the imagining that one could make the present better by trying to pickle it as you live it, essentially.

Most of the time I don't like getting older, but when I see this kind of thing I am really happy I lived at a time when most people didn't even have answering machines on their land line ( the only kind at the time in the 60s).

You were either with someone or not. You either got them on the phone or left a message with another person you interacted with in real time or not.
You could take a photo of someone, but most people didn't have cameras with timers and selfies were to my knowledge almost completely unknown.
You had to wait for the pictures except for Polaroids which cost about one dollar each, it was seen as a pointless extravagance in most cases. One-Day photos were a great stimulus to photography, you could bring your results almost into the near present.

Communication was real, in-person and you actually KNEW people. Like , physically experienced them in your presence.

Then with the me generation of the 80s, what was inside the TV became more real than what was in real life.

Then the "digital revolution" , and what is preserved in the computer is more real than what is in real life.

The phrase "real life" itself now sounds somewhat quaint and sardonic, like we in the "in crowd" actually are hip to the fact that "virtuality" is now the new reality.

I don't think it is. It's a cheap (literally, inexpensive) substitute that can be centrally controlled and re-sold back to you.

Time to go pay for my iCloud fees to preserve my memories.

PS In writing about Steve Jobs, it was suggested he didn't let his kids use iPads etc during the week. At dinner there were no screens around. Serious discussions instead.

[Bad Hussar]

(09-14-2014 10:55 PM)Basil Ransom Wrote:  

...

Everyone must be pretending to have the time of their life, and they are too busy pretending to have fun to actually let go and enjoy themselves. The girl about to bang you is taking a selfie of herself instead of nuzzling up to you (this happened to me recently, prebang, and I did bang her).

Ain't that the truth. Even before the whole snapchat/instagram craze I always got annoyed when on holiday and the people I was with always wanted to take pictures. People who take a lot of pictures are never living in the present moment. They are always living through either their future selves looking at the pictures as memories, or even worse through other people who they show the pictures to in the future.

That's probably an idea, ironically, for an app or blog post. How to go on a trip but take no pictures or make inane Facebook updates. Could be very liberating for the "instagram generation".

[The Lizard of Oz]

IKE, the smartphone/Instagram/etc obsession is extremely annoying and worse, but it is, in my opinion, an inevitable stage in the immersion period that characterizes the way the human being integrates a new technology into its life. It does so by immersing itself in the technology and trying to figure out how it can be assimilated and humanized. This process invariably involves excesses and overuse of the technology because it has to be used in every possible way and from every angle until its appropriate role and place in life is understood and it is properly integrated and becomes something taken-for-granted and unobtrusive.

It is analogous to learning a new foreign language by immersing oneself in it. This is experienced at first as something incredibly artificial, awkward and limiting. The new expressions that one learns to use lack all charm, depth and familiarity; they appear to be -- just as you characterized "virtual" experiences -- cheap simulacra of the good old native words and expressions that have taken on such a wealth of meaning, memory, association, and comfort through many years of use since earliest childhood. In fact, the deeper a person's relation to one's native language, the more impoverished and evacuating their experience of the new language will be during this immersion period. In the same way, it is the more sensitive and deeper men who are most revolted by the smartphone immersion that the culture at large is undergoing right now.

However, just as immersion is, in the end, the most efficient way of learning a new language, the immersive use of a new technology is the most efficient and fastest route to integrating and humanizing it -- and in any case, it is the route that the human being takes willy nilly, like a child that cannot stop playing with a new toy until it understands all the ways in which the toy can or cannot be used. It is not always a happy process for those who experience it, especially for those who are at an age in which the new language can never become native; and it can and does have many unfortunate and lamentable side effects all round. But it is necessary for the human being to keep expanding its capacities and to keep integrating these new technologies into its life, and this process has always gone on in one way or another.

50 years from now the smartphone will no longer exist in its present physical form (in fact, it will cease to exist much sooner, but I'm being conservative) and its uses will be understood and integrated and will no longer be experienced as anything but the most self-evident part of the flow of life, no different from wearing clothes rather than going naked or cooking food rather than eating it raw; but there will be another extension of the technology that will be in the midst of a disruptive and in many ways unhappy process of immersive assimilation. And so it goes -- excelsior.