[Atlanta Man]

Last night I was out in Buckhead after Georgia won, it was awesome! One thing I noticed was a lot of girls were on their phones and Snapchating or Instagraming. I remember the days of MySpace when girls had flip phones and did not have access to MySpace until they were home on their computer so when out they were still engaged socially. Now every girl has a laptop in her pocket and they are on it constantly using social media attention whoring.

If we were in magic land and you could get rid of one what would you pick? No more social media (no Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat , ect) or no more smart phones ( increasing social engagement)? In magic land consider it like it is 2004 with no smart phones-they still have social media ( and dating sites) but no access to it unless they are on their home computer, and social media is as popular as it is today. Conversely in magic land it is like 2017 and there is smart phones with Uber and GPS and significant computing power but it socialy "uncool" to use dating apps (Tinder), or Social Media so no one invented them because the are financial failures-however there are still cameras and text messaging. Take your pick....

[DJ-Matt]

I had a smart phone all the way back in 2004 (blackberry then windows mobile), there just weren't any social media developed yet. So I would vote option 2, social media is the cancer, not the devices.

[Teedub]

Option 2 for sure. If I could destroy facebook, twitter, instagram...and all the dating apps tomorrow, I would. They fuck up both men and women. As long as say, YouTube was still around, red pill ideas would still reach an audience too.

[Haig]

I voted for option 2, no social media etc..But it is a kind of chicken and the egg scenario as the the advancement and also the instant gratification of social media, probably help to create the push for the implementation and development for mobile devices that can support this form of media.

Social media is like crack cocaine to a narcissist but what is also is interesting is the amount of apps/social media that weaponize (some) natural human drives.

[Mr. D]

Social media makes people anti-social.

[Laska]

If you get rid of smartphones, they'll just do the same things at home, but on the other hand, if they have no smartphones, they're forced to engage with other people.

[Dulceácido]

Social Media, hands down.

[The Beast1]

I had a smartphone in the mid 2000s. First a Treo 650, then a few Windows Mobile Phones, and then Blackberries. There was a Facebook app back then for Windows Mobile, but none of this Tinder, Snapchat, Instagram, etc. The best part about the FB app was it's ability to attach profile pictures to everyone's contact. I thought that was cool.

Really, I want to go back to the glory days of flip phones. Text game was easier, "apps" consisted of a really shifty and over priced store, and texting required T9.

Smartphones are innocuous. It's the services on them that are bad.

[TigOlBitties]

I haven't had a smart phone for a few years, and don't miss it. People think I'm poor or a drug dealer but I don't give a shit. I use my phone for calls and texts. I have my laptop for anything else. It's funny seeing everyone's faces buried in their phones when they're out in public. It's like they have no idea how to socialize, or can't sit somewhere peacefully with nothing in their hands. It's ruining people's social skills.

I voted social media though. I can't stand attention whores, and it's a huge reason why everyone is always looking at their phones.

I might get a smartphone again, but no cuckbook, Instagram, or any of that other nonsense.

[MKDAWUSS]

Neither. It's how they're used that's the problem. Social media 2007 was nothing like social media 2017.

[blck]

Smartphone alone are a great idea, useful and all if it wasn't used for SocMed purpose.
SocMed hack your brain(dopamine, validation etc...) like porn and others stupid shit like cow clicker.

NirandFar Wrote:

The question is: Is that someone you? Casinos and drug dealers offer users a good time, but when the addiction takes hold, the fun stops.

In a satirical take on Zynga’s Farmville franchise Ian Bogost created Cow Clicker, a Facebook app where users did nothing but incessantly click on virtual cows to hear a satisfying “moo.” Bogost intended to lampoon Farmville by blatantly implementing the same game mechanics and viral hacks he thought would be laughably obvious to users. But after the app’s usage exploded and some people became frighteningly obsessed with the game, Bogost shut it down, bringing on what he called, “The Cowpocalypse.”

Without a doubt SocMed is the worst shit invented.

[Leonard D Neubache]

I voted 'no social media'. I've often wondered what would happen if some rogue administration simply legislated a blanket ban on social media. You could call it an "enforced privacy" law which banned any software designed for the main purpose of sharing personal details in a non-business setting.

If I were elected Grand Poobah it would quite literally be my first order of business.

(12-03-2017 04:14 PM)MKDAWUSS Wrote:  

Neither. It's how they're used that's the problem. Social media 2007 was nothing like social media 2017.

Actually it was exactly like social media 2017. I remember sites like livejournal when they first popped up. Female narcissism and male white-knighting from behind the shield of the computer screen was an instantaneous effect. Only the scale between now and then differs.

[Laska]

Social media is a female version of pornography. They get their attention, and then don't need a real life man to get it. As a consequence, they want relationships less, and hookups more.

[Transsimian]

Would Trump be President without social media?

[Atlanta Man]

^^^Yes.

[Leonard D Neubache]

Social media giants worked around the clock to stop Trump. It was only the message board warriors that stormed enemy territory who nullified the influence of the lugenpresse and the Zuckerborg.

Your question is complicated. Social media made things so bad that we had to look far outside the box beyond the Teds and the Jebs for a political Hulk capable of smashing all previous constraints.

It's the equivalent of asking "would my immune system ever have been strong if it weren't for all the viruses attacking it?" Well, no. But that doesn't mean I support being constantly infected with viruses.

[Conquerer7]

Went for a walk at the park lake today. Lots of families with kids, couples, elderly on a sunny but cold afternoon enjoying everything on offer with smiles everywhere. Any young girl walking by herself or with friends had her head buried in her phone, oblivious to all the simple but deeply satisfying enjoyment that everyone around was having with their own friends and family. However, I would be pretty certain that every single one of those girls was on a social media site. I also count dating apps as social media. Social media such as Facebook, Twitter along with Snapchat and Instagram in particular combined with Tinder have led to a generation of young girls on a like or swipe dopamine hit that they cannot even enjoy one of the simplest pleasures possible, a walk in the park.

[Geomann180]

SocMed.

IngSoc too.

G

[Rush87]

Smart Phones. Social media loses 90% of it's power without them. Nobodies going to be walking around with a laptop. You can get rid of social media, but so long as smart phones still exist, mass fake news and propaganda remains easily accessible any time any where, and culture will continue to deteriorate.

I've written about it before: I was hitting early 20's when smart phones became mainstream and that was the exact moment the sexual market place [Amongst other things] got messed up. Things were bad before social media. Social media was just a symptom that made things worse. Give a woman a camera phone and twenty dollars credit and she can occupy herself for hours.

Get rid of smart phones and nobody is on FB or Tinder outside the house. But if smart phones still existed, people will be using them all day everyday, always detached from reality. Plus, I'm sure Silicon Valley would have come up with another narcissist app to use to deliver propaganda news. Much harder without a device to put said apps on. I'd love it if nobody was allowed anything more modern than a Nokia 3210. If someone's glued to their phone all day, I'm guessing they love to play snake.

[porscheguy]

Social media. If you didn’t have social media, smartphones wouldn’t be so problematic.

[scorpion]

I had to think about this for a bit. It's sort of a chicken and egg conundrum, but I think smartphones are ultimately worse than social media. Without smartphones social media platforms are massively crippled, since you're basically forced to be tied to a computer to access them. Being tied to a computer is not most peoples' (women's especially) idea of fun, nor is it considered cool. For example, a staple of the attention-whoring playbook these days is the picture women take of their legs as they lounge by the beach/pool. It's effortless for them to get this picture: they simply snap it with their phone, slap on a filter to make it look good, and upload it to social media. The process takes seconds. In a world without smartphones, the attention whore would have to snap the picture of her own legs with a digital camera (an added degree of difficulty in itself), then go home and manually upload the picture to her social media accounts. Young, attractive attention whoring women are fucking lazy and aren't going to bother with doing that 95% of the time. This is why social media in the pre-smartphone era was considerably less disruptive than it is today.

Social media simply loses most of its power when people aren't connected to it 24/7. If you can only access it from your computer then it's not something the "cool kids" are going to be doing all the time, and hence not something that all the wannabe-cool kids will be doing either. Without smartphones, social media would remain what Facebook was in its early days: essentially an online forum made up entirely of your real life friends and acquaintances. It wouldn't become this all-consuming obsession where people feel the need to remain connected 24/7 and basically create an entire pseudo-persona through their various social media profiles. Social media is really bad, yes, but the smartphone is what enables it almost entirely. Plus, we can't ignore that smartphones have other drawbacks besides social media, in that they generally turn people into zombies, reduce attention spans and really just distract that fuck out of people and take them out of their present environment. The greatest practical drawback of not having a smartphone would be losing out on GPS/maps, but a dedicated in-car GPS is a suitable enough replacement that the tradeoff would easily be worth it. (Plus, remember asking people for directions? Yes, that used to be a thing).

Also, social media pre-dates the smartphone by several years, and we didn't used to have so many problems from it. If you consider technologies like email, instant messaging and online forums to be early forms of social media (which they basically are), then the case against smartphones becomes much more clear. For example, I remember when everyone - including young, popular, hot girls - was on AIM in the late 90's and early 2000's. It was huge, mainstream and not considered a nerdy thing at all (like the internet and computers generally were at that time). But it was not an all-consuming lifestyle that people obsessed about 24/7 - it was just a means to communicate that people took advantage of because it was there. People did not sit around IMing all day because that would entail being chained to your desktop computer, which was not cool. So IMing was generally limited to a couple hours during the evening. What is texting on a smartphone? It's just instant messaging - but now you can do it anywhere and everywhere, 24/7. Suddenly it becomes incredibly more pervasive and disruptive. It's the same with social media platforms - what was manageable when it was limited to computers becomes completely out of control when it jumps to the smartphone. It's like the difference between a virus that's bloodborne versus airborne: the former is much easier to contain than the latter.

[Razor Beast]

Get rid of smartphones obviously. Would take us back to how it was 10-15 years ago, which puts guys with game ahead of gameless guys who only get attention with the smartphone because of looks. Social media was never big before smartphones. People used it but it didn't become all consuming until smartphones came along.

Some of you guys voting for social media must be too young to remember what things were like pre-facebook before modern app oriented smartphones were around but social media like myspace existed. Social media would be far less active without smartphones because people would need to access a computer to use it, so they would spend far less time on there instead of all day long like they do on smartphones now.

[Conscious Pirate]

Yeah, well back then I couldn't get mum to pick me up through myspace either.

[The Beast1]

You guys forget what it was like back in 2006 with MySpace. This was a time before smartphones. You still had girls taking duck face pictures with smartphones and playing with crazy layouts.

Worse yet, this was the start of men posting, "I love you" crap on girl's walls. Hot girls had 3000+ friends and the people you put into your, "top friends" was very very important. Don't forget the order is important too!

Social media was definitely kicking before smart phones took over. Girls were still somewhat pleasant because their attention was dulled since they were too stupid to use their phone's Web browser to get onto myspace's mobile site (which sucked hard).

[Disco_Volante]

I think text messaging ruined dating more than either of those. It allowed way less investment than a phone call. I remember Jr high in 2001 you had to call a house phone to talk to a girl, it made everything more genuine. Plus when you made plans to meet up with people it was more important to be punctual since you could lose eachother.