Which is more sociable?

Mudita Products
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Which is more sociable – a smartphone, or the Mudita Pure?

  • Letting a nearly infinite supply of smartphone apps distract you during a call, or listening intently to the other person on the call through high-quality audio on the Pure
  • Letting bright colors on your smartphone screen draw your attention away from others, or using the serene simplicity of the Pure’s black-&-white screen to take care of business and then return your attention to those around you
  • Following others’ lives on your smartphone’s social-media apps, or strengthening relationships through the one-to-one engagement of text messages on the Pure
  • Looking away from others to find and change the availability and notification settings of your smartphone, or sliding a “mode” switch – without even looking! – on the side of the Pure to one of only three positions
  • Using “everything that is just SO important” on your smartphone as an unstated reason not to make eye contact with strangers on sidewalks, in elevators, and elsewhere, or putting away your Pure in those situations because it has nothing to distract you except incoming calls and text messages (and even those you can limit through the Pure’s mode switch)
  • Using your smartphone around others to chase URLs sent in text messages to you, or telling friends and family to email those “SO important” URLs to you so that you can visit them later on your computer or tablet
  • Stepping away from others and into the shade so that you can read your smartphone’s screen, or staying with others while reading the Pure’s screen in bright sunlight
  • Giggling to yourself when you’re around others and someone sends a funny video or photo to your smartphone, or telling friends and family to email those “SO urgent” bits of humor to you for later viewing on a computer or tablet
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very nicely put like the way you think, its exactly how i feel im 2 years smartphone free cant wait to switch from my light phone 2 to my mudita pure.

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I’m going to be a counterpoint here. Personally I’ve found it harder to socialize without access to smartphones and it makes some people uncomfortable. Perhaps it’s my age demographic (20) but I think culture is shifting towards instant digital communication, and it’s not neccessarily a bad thing. There are examples all throughout history of new communication technologies being seen as damaging or “insociable”. I remember there being a quote when reading took off about how it was damaging the masses, yet we sit on this forum in 2021 and debate why it’s better to read a book over social media. Culture has shifted and I have no doubts that when I am old there will be the same debate about why we should stick with instagram over something else. It’s the same when writing physcial letters “texts” became commonplace. There are some days when I feel left out in the library when everyone at my table burts out in laughter because of something funny that was sent over the instant message, there is a sense of bonding that can occur and I miss out on it, or I have to awkwardly ask someone to show me their screen. I will argue that the increases in anxiety, depression and other mental / social issues we are seeing are less because of the expansion of communication through social media and more a product of environmental degregation, anxieties created by the capitalization of everything. The constant need for performance, growth and monetary gain over leasure. My biggest issue with social media is that it has been capitalized; that companies employ tactics to keep you glued to a screen in order to increase the amount of ads you see. That’s why I’m not a part of any mainstream social media (I even got rid of my mountain project account), because I don’t want to consent to being a product. Things would be different if there was less subscription based and ‘free’ (but your the product) material on the internet.

What I’m saying is that I think smartphones have their place. I get anxiety because of the large amount of information contained within them, but many people I know can handle that stream just fine and are happy with it. I wish was that the internet had stayed as it originially intended, a place for people to gather from all around the world. And an egalitarian way to share information- Instead of whatever capitalist machine it has turned into.

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Also, I just checked. My partner’s iphone has a slider function to silence his phone physically. My Punkt you have to scroll through menus to get to the silence function.

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I can hardly wait for my switch from a super-simplified Android-7 phone to the Mudita Pure. I hope that you post something about your experience with your switch, as I considered about a year ago ordering the Light Phone 2 but never ordered it.

Just noticed: Mudita has clever guerrilla marketing related to the Light Phone 2!

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@kirkmahoneyphd Yeah, we’re pretty savage, here in the Marketing Department! Right @Wojciech_Wasiluk?

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@anon59201358

I found enjoyable your dedication in writing your post, and I could not just leave it.

For moments, you made me fly to my early twenties. :slight_smile: I never used My Space, and, as far as I remember, my first social media was Hi5. I agree with most of the points, and allow me to give you my perspective and experience about the need of social media.

I agree that social media is part of the “new” twenties, and you also mentioned the problems associated with it.

We also know that we have lived more inside the home in the last couple of years and far away from when we could sit together with friends and strangers and enjoy the moment.

The result of that social isolation with plenty of access to social media and the virtual world, in general, increased depression and other psychological problems that now we see through several statistics.

That confirms what I’ve been studying for long years about animal behavior (humans included): We are social animals. I don’t believe that social media replaces contact, visual contact, and laughs. It can help some individuals with specific issues, but it will never replace the physical/social part that we, humans, still need.

You are right about the strategies of making people glued to a screen, and perhaps that’s where concepts like mudita have a place. I have social media for my business, not for my personal life. I know that I reach more people on social media, but I’ll not flood them with my needs, and I don’t need a smartphone to manage it. Some people need. I still prefer a good phone call and meet with people that I enjoy being with. I don’t need to take a picture to remember the good moments. I have them safe in my memories.

That said, I believe that in the end is a question of balance. Nature itself doesn’t handle extremes. Everything and everyone needs a balance. Maybe that’s the secret, to reach the balance within ourselves and discover what we need, not what people (Big techs) say we need. :slight_smile:

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All points are sound, but I found the last one especially pertinent.
Disregarding portability, nigh everything a smartphone does is more enjoyable and comfortable on a laptop or PC.
Plus, unless you’re using the crappiest spyware apps beyond what’s even popular, there’s surely a very functional desktop or web version of your “necessary” communication apps (Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. are all perfectly functional on desktop). . Most of my friends use Signal or Element, so I do not lose contact with them at all in terms of video chats, meme exchanges, etc. If I truly have free time for stuff like that, I likely have time to see and enjoy it more with a real computer no problem, anyway. Anything serious has always usually just been over a normal phone call or SMS, so I pretty much lose nothing.

The only problem is inherently poor privacy of SMS and phone calls, but there’s only so much I can do to get my peers to care.
It’s possible for all sorts of technology to go too far, but I (controversially) believe cell phones in particular were especially a net bad for society. I do not think a fairly ethical implementation of a cell phone is possible, due to the very concept having flaws. For example, the detriments towards health cell phones possess in the form of eye fatigue from small backlit screens (a huge, nasty can of worms of PWM flickering, temporal dithering, blue light, and much more discussed on ledstrain.org. It goes without saying that an e-ink screen on the Pure is epic), poor posture from hunching, EMF radiation exposure, etc. is difficult to avoid. In the case of cell towers, privacy invasion, unnecessary tax spending, infrastructure bloat, and, again, EMF radiation exposure, is unavoidable.

I could ramble on forever. Point is, the Pure seems to be the closest thing to a cell phone made for a human being, rather than a lab rat.

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Hey @kirkmahoneyphd! Thanks a lot fo sharing this! It was an obvious mistake during ad setup where someone put the keyword in a place of headline :see_no_evil:. We wouldn’t do it on purpose because we respect our competitors and we can do clever marketing without impersonating other companies :sweat_smile:
Anyway we fixed it already :slight_smile:

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Savage? Maybe :thinking: :sweat_smile: But we certainly don’t strike below the belt :wink:

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Smartphones are cigarettes and alcohol in the way that they democratise social interaction between unequal people. Smoko breaks between the manager and the worker democratised the factory, but now I have the opportunity to tweet Elon Musk or a politician and call them a &$*#! and maybe get a reaction.

But it comes at the expense of directly talking with a friend, a child, or someone who, in another era may have become a lifelong love.

I know what I would prefer.

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