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Yeah it’s way worse than when we used a Rolodex to remember phone numbers, kept a map book in the dash, and took 20 minutes to transfer birthdays from last years calendar to this years.
I am about as anti-AI as one can get, but this is a bit silly.
it reminds me of this:
Every newspaper there is also chock full of ads.
Don’t know why people think it’s a new thing. They were pretty intrusive for the time as well.
“Continued on page 9” is code for “people paid a lot of money for the ads on page 8”
Wait, people copied birthdays over each year? We just had one normal yearly calendar and one special birthday calendar that could be used for multiple years. I still use the birthday calendar which has accumulated more names of people I don't speak to anymore or have died than actual living friends and relatives.
Neat.
No don't you dare stop the circlejerk! /s
But seriously phone numbers were broken into chunks of three to four digits to even make them something we could remember. Is it so terrible my brain has more space to remember other things instead of strings of numbers?
There are valid arguments for knowing how to use a paper map. We’re fortunate that GPS was opened up to the world, and we’ve flourished for it, but one very bad solar storm and it’s possible we’ll be back to paper for regional and farther navigation.
And the vast majority of people will have no problem using a road Atlas... Once they find out it exists. It won't be the optimal route but getting from one cross street to another is very intuitive if you ever looked at the screen in Google maps.
Navigating a countryside or understanding topological maps is a lost cause but even back in the 80s like two weirdos knew how to do that.
Topo maps are still very popular in the outdoors communities even today.
Oh. They are incredibly popular and basically anyone who knows the word "mountaineer" brings one.
That said... actually try to watch any of those people use it. They'll pretend they are but really they are relying on trails or were shown the area by an old. And most of the olds are just relying on knowing a few landmarks and how to use a compass rather than actually figuring out their location based on slope steepness and the like.
The old who taught me how to assist SAR/not need to call SAR always loves to give people a compass and ask them how to actually use one to get their bearings (even when it is just "that is The Nose" let alone "what ravine do you think we might be in on this map?"). Nine times out of ten, it is a debacle as they actively ignore everything but the needle and bezel. And this isn't just the newbies. Even a lot of the people who have been in the area for 40 years basically only know how to navigate by landmarks and would be up a creek if they had to, let's say, go overland in the event of an emergency/apocalypse. Once they leave their comfort zone they are as capable of navigating as a proverbial city slicker.
I've actually been taught how to take back bearings, triangulation etc, and would still remember how to do that, but there's definitely some hopeless cases that have no idea how to do that.
Another skill I've noticed is missing is the ability to know where you are on a map based on a known point you've passed, and the time elapsed since then. People tend to overestimate how far they've traveled.
I mean, even that is kind of about treading known ground. Unless it is fairly straight going on very flat terrain, you are going to find your estimates fall apart REAL fast (... unless you are doing a forced military march where people are getting berated/whipped if their strides are too short or not with the rhythm of the cadence). Let alone any winding trails.
Its why, historically, one of the most valuable assets is a local who knows the terrain. Whether that is letting an army know about a really good place for an ambush or just helping to navigate even a bunch of fields in a valley, let alone mountainous terrain.
Outdoors? Where is that?
It's the big blue room with spotty internet access.
That place is scary, I try to avoid it.
Apparently, it’s where the grass is. Or so I’m told.
Well shit. If that's where I can score some grass, I'm in! Or, out? I don't know anymore.
There were rumours that our two local Street Directories had been made Out-Of-Print. (Melway and UBD)
They are both still active, and a great resource for historians, but their distribution has been seriously curtailed.
We also have a collection of Adventure maps called Rooftops which still have great circulation despite the proliferation of Off-Road mapping apps.
Having offline-paper maps are invaluable when in certain conditions. I have been told that Rooftops are generated by one Cartographer who uses a Pushbike as his exclusive surveying vehicle. (Citation needed)
A gps is a paper map on the computer with the feature that shows your location on the map.
There's nothing to learn. The gps voice prompt takes the place of the passenger who's job it was to voice prompt you.
A GPS is updated. A GPS can be zoomed in on. A GPS won’t get distracted and you miss a turn.
Plus people did drive places without maps, and they’d have to remember directions and be able to orient themselves.
A car compass helps, but yeah, a GPS unit is a lot more convenient.
I don’t doubt they would be able to figure it out, but we must at least acknowledge it’s not plug-and-play. If one doesn’t know their way around, paper maps take some planning. The paper map won’t announce the next upcoming turn in 2 miles. It definitely takes some learning to use.
I was curious to see if someone has ever documented this experience and I was rewarded with this video: https://youtu.be/sr9hQ_tDLP0
a gps is an planet covering realtime map pinpointing your location and destination, things a traditional map DOES NOT DO.
fuck mate a map only gives you orientation, you still have to know where north is for it to be any use.
a navigator... SAY THEIR FUCKING NAME, THEY WERE NAVIGATORS, IT WAS AN ENTIRE CAREER LOL
can't tell if this is all satire and I'm overreacting but holy shit I'd love to see this generation do some orienteering.
You looked at a map beforehand and saw what directions to go. The map book has an index in the back to find destinations.
You often wrote a note for yourself beforehand. Rt 40, take exit 17a, take 97 S exit, Rt onto Brookshire,
You didn't need to know north.
I drove for decades before gps. No one taught me how to use a map. You bought one and it was obvious because it was the same as any text book with an index in the back.
You act like kids are stupid.
lol how do you orient the map then?
I act like kids need experience and practice.
Are you confused as to which way to hold a book?
You don't need to know North when reading a road map. It isn't Boy Scouts where you have a terrain map and you are trying to orientate yourself to unlabeled terrain.
You have road intersections labeled in real life and on the map. You only need to know to travel along a road and turn right or left until you get to the next road at which point you again turn right or left until you reach your destination.
My friend's 1990's era Jaguar came with a navigation that worked like that. There was no map. It was a text display that displayed directions as turn by turn directions.
Honestly, I suspect a lot of that kind of mentality is just projecting by people who struggled with something and assume everyone will struggle as well. Or people who just have a need to feel superior to other people by trying to gatekeep something by pretending it's super difficult to learn/do.
They were also semi structured. All my school-friends started with the same first area code and first chunk. I just had to know where they lived and remember the last 4 digits.
Mobile Phone numbers were randomly generated, and unless a social group deliberately got sequential numbers because we all got our phones at the same time, there would be no way to associate numbers.
I mean, if no one has a cell phone almost everyone in your daily life only required 4 digits to remember. The first 6 numbers was the same for the whole town.
"Area codes" were a big deal, even Ludacris made a song about being so famous, he knew women from multiple geographic locations.
Maps were there in case of emergencies, nowadays people gps to the same office they've been driving to for a decade. But that's more about random traffic conditions.
The Rolodex was only for less common phone numbers and most people had 10+ phone numbers memorized
You can use the map as a reference but people didn’t use it for drives around town as it is much harder to constantly being referencing a map compared to a gps. Even when people did use Mapquest they would do things like read 2.8 miles make a right on X St and then make a left in 0.2 miles on Y st and look at their odometer and hold the thought in their head that they are looking for X st
And while people did put birthdays on a calendar it meant that they had a paper calendar that they were regularly checking to see what is happening in the future instead of relying on constantly being told that something is happening which while that may sound trivial is a huge distinction in terms of mental processing.
Memory is a very important thing and as time has progressed we have added more and more crutches which help prevent people from forgetting, help the differently abled, and expand our capacity by orders of magnitude but that comes at the expense of a lack of using one’s memory and critical thinking.
What the long term consequences of that are is still up in the air. some preliminary studies have shown “brain rot” but they have had pretty terrible methods and nothing that I would treat as any sort of fact. I however don’t personally see a scenario where it’s positive in anyway and countless studies with the elderly have shown that having a less active mind leads to mental degradation
You sure?
I remember my folks having written down the 10 most important numbers on a piece of cardboard on the phone.
And if you were out and about and needed to call someone for help would you have been able to call multiple people from a pay phone?
Tough luck. Hope you remembet your top 3 important numbers.
I feel like you’re really grasping at wanting this to be true, but I gotta tell you I lived through all of these things being common and none of what you’re asserting matches my reality.
The number of things that I have to actually remember hasn’t really changed in the last 40 years.
Do you still have a bunch of friends phone numbers from the last few years memorized? Do you have your local delivery place’s number memorized?
When you go on a road trip you still look at a map, route directions yourself, and develop a loose memory of it?
You can say off the top of your head which friends birthdays are on which days for the next 3 months?
It’s not an opinion that modern technology makes us not have to memorize information that’s just objective fact the debate is about whether relying on technology causes brain damage and that’s where research is still being done.
In the past 20 years really the only “new” thing we have to memorize are passwords which we still had before but they are at least more complicated now but even then many people repeat the same few passwords or use a password manager so they aren’t remembering 10 unique passwords
Using technology to remember things for us is literally one of the fundamental purposes of technology going back to the invention of the written word, manufacturable paper, printing press, computers, and now phones so I genuinely don’t see how you can say that since 1985 you don’t think people rely on technology for memory any more
Begging the question on all of these.
I never knew the number for my local pizza place, because I had a Rolodex and a phone book. If I needed to make a call I opened one of those two things. My modern phone contact book is just a better version of the same thing.
I use a gps to navigate routinely, because it gives me real time traffic alerts; after driving to any place a couple of times I can generally get there on my own, regardless of if I used GPS or a paper map to get there the first time.
I have never been able to remember birthdays. That’s why I have always, since I was a kid, had a calendar.
It is, in fact, definitely an opinion that we no longer need to remember anything because “tech”. Facts tend to be far less flexible.
If you didn’t have a bunch of those common phone numbers memorized then that is definitely a you thing. My whole friend group all knew each others phone numbers and it was actually important that you could memorize those phone numbers in case you had to call from someone elses house or a pay phone.
You even acknowledge that you use a gps for routine travel and think that is the same as developing a mental map?
Again literally the act of looking at a calendar to see future dates is more mentally demanding then relying on getting a reminder sent to you
Did you even read what I wrote? Do you have your entire oral history memorized? No because we have the ability to write it down that’s technology. Do you use password manager to autofill passwords? Do you get text message/app/email reminders of appointments? Do you neglect to memorize things because you can google them? You already said that you use gps for routine travel around town.
All of that involves using memory less, we don’t have enough tech to fully replace memory and probably never will. If you don’t believe me go 24 hours without using technology from the past 40 years for anything not explicitly required for work so no gps, no phone reminders, no google, no password managers then try and do normal things like go run a bunch of errands, cook a meal, pay bills, go shopping in person instead of online
Los Angeles Thomas Guide anyone?