Quote: (07-23-2016 03:04 PM)GlobalMan Wrote:
Two Pokemon zombies have run into me while walking, numerous other near misses. People stopping dead in their tracks in middle of sidewalk. I can't wait till this is done. Mindless phone drones everywhere- and that's sayin something these days.
I am not going to bash this game anymore, to each his own. It is odd though to see such a drastic change in behavior come so rapidly.
I remember the first time I saw someone listening to something on their headphones in a group of people, that is, a social situation; it was around 1985, a now antiquated cassette tape walkman, and those of us around her (of course it was a her) were really offended. It was a very antisocial thing to do, like standing up at the dinner table while grandma is talking and walking over and farting in her face.
Then conversation giving way to laptops in cafes in the 90's, then iPods in the early 2000's and now smartphones for everything.
The very first walkmans were nicknamed, derisively, "urban isolators."
I am totally used to people walking around or driving while using their phones, unaware of street signs or other people on the sidewalk, I know what evasive measures to take.
This new wrinkle, though happened faster, less incrementally, and I noticed it before I even knew what the game was. Seeing people hovering in weird places, a solitary girl standing there in an alley near a dumpster, a couple of giggling students running up and down some steps to a building randomly.
At first reality was pretty much shared, and then people opted out for the abstraction of their screens, and now, it seems, the abstract internal reality is being treated like it is more real than the external shared reality, and it isn't so much bad as unsettling, like a 24 hour fantasy scavenger hunt undertaken with a manic glee.
If you are just walking down the street normally, it looks like a scene from a movie about a pandemic where the early symptoms of the plague are only quirky or slightly quixotic, and no one is scared yet.
We are still in the foreshadow phase of Pokemon Go.