Video on open source phones

[undo]

Good points, I think (I'm not going to cancel my Brave Heart order, though)

[vinnie]

I only saw half the video, and then I got bored.
His opinion is acceptable but you have to consider the point of view, that of a person who had an addiction to the media.
I am older than him and I experienced the era of the advent of mobile phones as a choice and not as something that you obviously had.
I can say that people who were born in the era of pervasive technology have a distorted view of information technology.
I had facebook for a while then I took it off, now I have it again but for me it's so boring and annoying (blatant) that I can't use it.
But today it is really necessary to have a smartphone because most of the essential information is conveyed in them (contact with people, internet connection which means access to information and... maybe not much else, that's the point).
So since a phone today is quite necessary, preventing it from doing more things than we need (which precisely "change our attention") is necessary, and answers like that of pinephone are really the answer to avoid being what companies like google or apple pretend from us.
For example, let's talk about tts, it's a technology I like a lot because it allows me to "read" without using my eyes (almost always tired), but I hate the idea that my phone is always listening to what I do because it is supposed that google can help me decide what is best for me ....
But if you have an android phone you have to start to disable all these behaviors by default and hope not to be spied too much anyway.
So I didn't accept this, at first I was doing these deactivations, then I learned to install cyanogenmod (it doesn't exist anymore), then I bought an s2 and I installed replicant (and I can't use wifi, bluetooth, gps, and even video acceleration).
So, to avoid anything that disturbed my attention, I had to give up even things that could be useful to me.
With the pinephone this will not happen because I will decide how to use these possibilities, but this point of view can not be shared by those who are used by the technology instead of using it.

[Dmytro]

I would say this is Mobile phone vs Smart phone. I am smart by myself I don't need Smart phone
But mobile is OK (imho). As for addiction to "click" or "tap", it seems to me to be clearly destructive. Considering huge number of addicted people it is for longer discussion.
Just some hints. It was some what similar with books and machines and TV and computers....
But every time people were able to reflect and use progress to our own good
Have we crossed a threshold how?

[vinnie]

I would say this is Mobile phone vs Smart phone. I am smart by myself I don't need Smart phone
But mobile is OK (imho). As for addiction to "click" or "tap", it seems to me to be clearly destructive. Considering huge number of addicted people it is for longer discussion.
Just some hints. It was some what similar with books and machines and TV and computers....
But every time people were able to reflect and use progress to our own good
Have we crossed a threshold how?

Every time I think that the human brain tends to simplification, this is good because it allows us to live, but sometimes leads to errors of judgment.
It is like for those people who have an addiction to gambling. Is the problem gambling ?, evidently not, the problem is the social system in which the person affected by addiction lives, but that thing is much more difficult to analyze and correct, so we blame the gambling.
Same thing when talking about problems with video games, or more generally with virtual realities.
For me with phones the only real problem to consider is the possible harmfulness of electromagnetic radiation, all the rest of the possible problems are to be transferred in the social field and not in the device itself.

[undo]

I appreciate the nuanced replies, but this is of interest to me:

I only saw half the video, and then I got bored.
His opinion is acceptable but you have to consider the point of view, that of a person who had an addiction to the media.
I am older than him and I experienced the era of the advent of mobile phones as a choice and not as something that you obviously had.
I can say that people who were born in the era of pervasive technology have a distorted view of information technology.

Especially the last line.

So, I was born in a time when the internet was (in practical terms) not there, I was in school when it became a thing that the marginal people (nerds) did. I remember there being a "speed bump" when I was introduced to the internet and how the structure didn't make sense to me and the amount of connectability was "too much". Some years later this became popularized as an idea of "information overload". But at that point I had already adjusted to it.

Now, what happened with social media seems to be another wave of too much, but this time I don't feel like I am able to adjust to it. I can see myself restricting the intake of information with a sort of "brute force" methods, like not going on facebook. Getting the pinephone in a way is a continuation of the same restrictive attitude.

Now, I can see that when tv was at its hayday, there definitely was a feeling that people are just comatosed and receiving their information in a very passive manner, but it seemed to me easier to push back against (although, I still hear some people surprised that I don't own a tv in the traditional sense).

I guess my question is, is it any different now than before? Was it as hard for people "psychicly" to accept tv, or books, or theatre as it is for me to accept social media? Or am I just tied to my generations point of view? You say that the people born with ubiquitous technology have a distorted view, but could this not have been said about tv or books? Are we on the wrong side of a generational divide?

[pinetester]

I appreciate the nuanced replies, but this is of interest to me:

I only saw half the video, and then I got bored.
His opinion is acceptable but you have to consider the point of view, that of a person who had an addiction to the media.
I am older than him and I experienced the era of the advent of mobile phones as a choice and not as something that you obviously had.
I can say that people who were born in the era of pervasive technology have a distorted view of information technology.

Especially the last line.

So, I was born in a time when the internet was (in practical terms) not there, I was in school when it became a thing that the marginal people (nerds) did. I remember there being a "speed bump" when I was introduced to the internet and how the structure didn't make sense to me and the amount of connectability was "too much". Some years later this became popularized as an idea of "information overload". But at that point I had already adjusted to it.

Now, what happened with social media seems to be another wave of too much, but this time I don't feel like I am able to adjust to it. I can see myself restricting the intake of information with a sort of "brute force" methods, like not going on facebook. Getting the pinephone in a way is a continuation of the same restrictive attitude.

Now, I can see that when tv was at its hayday, there definitely was a feeling that people are just comatosed and receiving their information in a very passive manner, but it seemed to me easier to push back against (although, I still hear some people surprised that I don't own a tv in the traditional sense).

I guess my question is, is it any different now than before? Was it as hard for people "psychicly" to accept tv, or books, or theatre as it is for me to accept social media? Or am I just tied to my generations point of view? You say that the people born with ubiquitous technology have a distorted view, but could this not have been said about tv or books? Are we on the wrong side of a generational divide?

I like books but I do know a lot people (generation doesn't really matter) who never read books except studying in school. So for your question the answer is no. Some people never accept books, some people never accept social media. It is perfectly normal. You may even swap "books" with anything and it is still normal. I can't see the reason why social media should be a special case.

[Dmytro]

...
I can't see the reason why social media should be a special case.

Reaction time is much shorter. One doesn't have time to think. For me it seems to be quite important difference. One even can have a filling to know everything just because it is easy to find many things on the Internet. But this feeling is false. I would say it is more false than in case of books. Nevertheless, there was time when written was almost equal to true, the access time was much longer and affected number was much shorter.
The speaker is talking (imho) about the same effect of false feeling of comfort/knowledge/ability. And it relates not only to social media but smart staff in general. And it is bad because it prevents from having real knowledge/ability. It seems to be similar to be able to understand and speak a language (passive vs active knowledge).

[vinnie]

Warning: This discussion is becoming so beautiful that it's impossible for me to follow it without ending up off topic.

@undo: no in my opinion we're not in the wrong generation, what I'm trying to say is that if you're born directly at the end of a process (for example when phones and internet are already established) it's more difficult to make distinctions and grasp what's good and what's better to discard. For example, let's talk about the internet, many people think that it was a revolution because it allowed to interconnect knowledge between people far away from each other, but before the internet there were BBS! and people did the same because they understood that it was really a good thing to be able to exchange information so simpy.
What has changed? In my opinion nothing, we have more tools and more noise to manage.

The example of the books you've done seems very intelligent to me.
Usually we associate books with a good habit, as Dmytro says, the time to use a book is so slow and requires so much patience that it is difficult to associate this action with something stupid.
Because enjoying a book requires skill and training, any kind of reading can be considered a good thing, but reading can also be stupid! think about gossip, scandal magazines, erotic romance novels!
And let's talk about television, I don't own a television anymore either, maybe since more than 15 years (that's because I decided that I preferred to use the same time with a pc) but television itself is not a stupid thing! people understand and learn things through all their senses, the more senses are involved and the better they memorize things. The problem with television is that being a one-way medium, where only one entity transmits and decides and all the others passively receive, for thi reason the quality of the content has soon dropped down, so television has become a medium that is better avoided, which did not happen with books where the fruition of the medium is already difficult enough so that its users generally prefer not to waste time with stupid content.

Facebook, whatsapp and so on, are not different from irc, they are more powerful tools but they involve the same adverse interests that characterize television, and is a personal responsibility to know how to distinguish things and not get caught by the likes disease.

But from all this we can understand one thing, the more an instrument allows us to choose the more it does not compromise our freedom to decide what is best for us.
If tomorrow samsung would start building an open source phone, would it be better than Pine64? I don't think so, the hardware would be better, the availability would be better, but the lack of a self-determined community would make people lack the ability to decide for themselves and to be independent.

[dukla2000]

Not sure I got to 1 minute before I switched off: no idea what his general output is but not willing to waste 11 minutes of my life listening to some loud fellow talking about a subject he admits he knows nothing about (Librem 5)!

Absolutely agree with all the flow above: I am of a generation who thought the telex machine was awesome office automation. For sure much of our technological progress over any era has been to speed up communications. And yes, figure the millennial addiction to anti-social media is not a positive step, indeed watched the rise of email in my working life to the point where responses had to be in seconds rather than hours! (And the content of your mail was irrelevant, it was who you copied that really gave it "substance"!)

So yup, I now head my own "Grumpy Old Git" club - I look forward to using my PinePhone to interact with the world on my terms. I enjoy my life. And I pity the stressed millennials addicted to their IOS/Alphabet/Twitter/... feeds. I am in no doubt it is not reality (last week's UK election result was fun where the actual outcome bore no resemblance to the loud mouth opinion on Twitter). I am in no doubt it makes many of them very unhappy (I happen to see many medical records in my port-retirement consulting role!) But it is their world now, I wish them well with it! (And recognise that many years ago there was a previous Grumpy Old Git who said pretty much the same thing about my generation   )

[vinnie]

Not sure I got to 1 minute before I switched off: no idea what his general output is but not willing to waste 11 minutes of my life listening to some loud fellow talking about a subject he admits he knows nothing about (Librem 5)!

Okay, I resisted a bit more, but my feeling was the same.
Who knows why some people feel so much the need to talk about something they don't know, it will always be the usual millennial addiction? , he search for approval based on visualizations?
The impression he gave me is that of a person perfectly confortable with the media that he despises

As for me, even if I instinctively feel some aversion for this new professional figure called "youtuber", I think that youtube is still better than television since anyone can talk, even people who have something interesting to say