Editing 1802: Phone

When someone asks you if you wanna go for a walk they often expect to have a conversation, while enjoying both the exercise, the fresh air and the company. Thus any disturbance not related to the walk is not welcome. Going for a walk is often seen as a way to relax from all the daily stress, as it takes the walkers away from work and chores.  

[[Cueball]] easily agrees to the walk, but not to all the other expectations. Because his first though is that he has to bring along his phone, hence the title. But he does not describe it as a phone, but rather what he wish to do with it, and calling other people is not on that list.

Instead he describes the phone as his device that gives him a continuous ({{w|24/7 service|24/7}}) stream of information, much of which is often out of context. The stream contains peoples opinions, context free but scary news, and other random stimuli.

The opinions could be from news or bloggers but it could also just be from his friends on social media platforms. News stories that are shared on social media are often scary, which becomes even worse because news outlets is likely to use a title that exaggerates the topic to create a fear reaction, in the hope that more people click though to look at the articles creating more interest around the news page. ({{w|Clickbait}} like that has been a [[:Category:Clickbait|recurring theme]] on xkcd). The random emotional stimuli could be from many things such as text messages/emails and pictures of kittens and babies on social network, and shared internet memes or viral videos. All things that could cause a quick shift in emotions.  

 

 

The title text shows it would be possible to take an action to avoid this feed. In the first bracket a person (could be Cueball or [[Randall]]) ''disables all his social networking accounts''. Most of his news feed will thus disappear. But this leads to the next bracket which states that such a choice would lead to ''increased social isolation'', since he will no longer be in contact with any of his on-line friends. And today many people also get into contact with their "real" local friends through social media. One might thus miss out on events like parties or get-together, plus his friends not sharing a dislike for social media will not understand the decision. And this leads to the final sentence ''Wait, why does this ALSO feel bad?'' So there is not good choice, because it is bad to be off-line, but being on-line all the time is also bad. And it is hard to find the right balance. This problem with finding the right balance between two things seems related to the recent [[1796: Focus Knob]]