Authored by Bruce Wilds via the Advancing Time Blog,
The smartphone has begun to play a huge role In dumbing down America. Rather than being a source to move us forward, it has become an albatross around the necks of many weak-minded souls that depend on them. People turn to these devices for all kinds of unneeded updates including performing simple math problems so they don’t have to think.
It should be noted this is being written just as the world is on the cusp of being offered a whole new recipe that may lead to more social dysfunction. That comes in the form of “virtual reality” which offers an even stronger form of escapism that may result in damaging the ability of people to relate to each other in the real world. Especially worrisome is the effect it might have on children that experience and embrace it. Their ability to separate this fake virtual world from reality could become impaired.
A great deal of the problems with smartphones are rooted in the idea everyone deserves one. Yes, I said deserves, not needs. Smartphones are now considered by many people as an extension of their being. A government program started years ago has mushroomed in size and transfers a huge amount of wealth down the social ladder. Years ago I wrote an article that outlined a government program supplying free phones to people with low incomes or that have been declared needy. At that time these phones have become known as “Obama Phones.” Below I give some of the details about the program including who qualifies. If you want to be popular with the voters give them free stuff and let them know that they should not bite the hand that feeds them.
The term “Obama phone” is not a myth as an online search rapidly confirms. This popular government program explains why we see so many people that would appear to not have a dime in their pockets walking along or driving down the street talking on a cell phone. What exactly is the free Obama phone? It is a program that is meant to help the financially unstable who cannot afford access to a cell phone. It seems that communication should not be limited to people based on what they can afford. The Lifeline program started decades ago to help low-income families have access to landlines has been expanded. Over the years the cost of cell phones and cellular service has decreased and the program has been extended to cover cell phones.
So who qualifies? It appears little has changed over the years, it seems that if you or members of your household are, receiving the following benefits you automatically qualify for the Lifeline program. The best way to know if you qualify is by filling out an application for a Lifeline provider in your state. Those interested in the program must have an income of less than 135% of the Federal Poverty Guidelines or about $22,350 per year for a family of four.
- Food Stamps or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)
- Medicaid
- Supplemental Security Income – commonly known as SSI
- Health Benefit Coverage under Child Health Insurance Plan (CHIP)
- The National School Lunch Program’s Free Lunch Program.
- Low-Income Energy Assistance Program – LIHEAP
- Federal Public Housing Assistance ( Section 8 )
- If you are a low-income Eligible Resident of Tribal Lands
- Temporary Assistance to Needy Families – TANF
Lifeline is a government-sponsored program, but who is paying for it? Some people claim that the government is using taxpayers’ money to run this program, however, the claim is false. The clever clowns we have sent to Washington found a backhanded under-the-table sort of way to make it appear it is not taxpayer money. Universal Service Fund (USF) which is administered by the Federal Communication Commission along with the Universal Service Administration Company (USAC), pays for the Lifeline phone assistance program. The Universal Service Fund (USF) was created back in 1997 by Federal Communication Commission to achieve the goals set by Congress under the Telecommunication Act of 1996. According to the Act, service providers are obliged to contribute a portion of their interstate and international telecommunications revenues. In short, paying phone customers are paying for it.
It is written that if you are one of those people who have lost their jobs due to the recession, then probably you’re having a hard time with your daily expenses. On top of that, paying telephone bills is just another pressure. You can get rid of this burden by applying to the “Lifeline Assistance Program” run by the government. To get a phone contact the provider of this service. The government has approved many companies at the national and regional levels to provide this service to eligible people.
Just how much might one of these free government cell phones change your life?
- An employer can more easily reach you with a job offer if you have a free government cell phone.
- You can stay in touch with your doctor and other emergency medical professionals more easily with a free government cell phone.
- A free government cell phone can help you keep in touch with family and other loved ones.
And the good news is that while a government-assisted cell phone provides you with up to 250 monthly minutes to go with your free cell phone. While that’s a generous contribution from the government, it’s barely enough airtime to last many people a month. But good news is they can easily buy more minutes for the phone from each of the major Lifeline cell phone companies. You can see this is what has happened when it has gotten to the point where people carry their phone in their hand as they go about their business. Apparently, if you use a promotion code, you can get some very good deals.
Interestingly while many people admit they are addicted to these phones that seem to offer a form of escapism from the real world, some users are moving back to dumbphones. A video by ColdFusion (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02mIRnPJm6g), an Australian-based online media company, looks into this “Anti-Smartphone Revolution.” It points out how the dumbphone or what is sometimes called a brick is far less intrusive in our lives. Surprisingly, it is those users between the age of 25-35 that are leading this charge.
We should never underestimate the role of the smartphone in dumbing down America. We can only hope people will begin to take a closer look at these society-changing devices. When a phone will provide the answer to simple math problems many people no longer feel compelled to learn or memorize the things which give us perspective and help us to understand the world around us. It has become apparent, that smartphones change more than society. They change people, too. Being able to push a few buttons does not necessarily make you smarter.
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i never had a fancyfone and dont ever intend to either. fuck that.
Yeah, f’ that. Just a fancy computer so you can still blog & keep up with headlines, right?
But you leave the computer behind and look at the great blue screen of life above. The phone/portable TV/tracker is even worse.
Huh, funny. When I lived in CO, I noticed everyone was very active outdoors. In shape, healthy, and taking part in nature. AND…everyone had a phone. I know this because many of us used the All Trials app on hikes. Very handy…like a handheld GPS. Not necessary for an enjoyable hike, but a handy invention nonetheless.
Get off your high horse.
I am fairly convinced that the phone is sending signals to people’s brains to stimulate addiction. It’s the only real way to explain why people go to a concert and stand there filming it instead of enjoying it. It’s like a crack pipe, they start jonesing if they put it down.
The tech engineers have admitted to this. That’s why they restrict their own children’s usage. Some of them even take tech sabbaticals for their own well-being .
I walk into a doctors office and everyone in the waiting room is on the phone. Go out to dinner and at every table people are staring at the phone instead of talking to each other. People shopping with bluetooth on detailing their boring life to whoever. Kids sitting in class on the phone instead of paying attention. What is so flipping interesting? What are they looking at? I am positive it is not Einstein’s theories.
I used to read the magazines, but now I can read articles of my choosing from my phone.
Release the “I would never own a Smart Phone” virtue signalers…3, 2, 1
News paper reading wasn’t collecting personal info, and those readers were better dressed too. Change your tee shirt once and a while.
So it’s not Rock’n’Roll, or TV, or Rap, or the Internet anymore?
There’s plenty more examples of dumbed down America…shall I keep going??
They say admitting you have a problem is 1/2 the battle.
If you wanna have some fun hand a millennial an old rotary phone and ask them to make a call. SNORT.
If you wanna have some fun, get a Boomer to figure out how to make the pop-up ads stop showing up here. SNORT.
Not a boomer. Lame try. Butt hurt much?
Well, I’m not a dick, I can tell you that much. 😂
You didn’t laugh at my joke?? Hmmm…must be as Karen…or Ken. Which one is it? Do you know? Kinda gets confusing these days.
I don’t identify as either. Just a random troll. It’s Sunday nite, I’m bored.
Okay.
So well dressed. Change you tee shirt
You could smoke and read the paper…dummy up.
I’ve been hanging around here long enough to feel like the choir even though I do not sing.
The real reason for the “free” phones is for the social credit/digital money tracking system. You can’t have millions of folks not participating because they cannot afford a phone.
This reminded me of when we were homeschooling. Naturally I chose a challenging curriculum, which caused my son to ask, can’t you get anything that’s been dumbed down?
I remember when Email was first introduced into the work place I was sitting at my desk when I received an email from a co-worker; my reaction was WTF??? —Why? Because this guy was sitting no more than 4 or 5 ft away from me and could have spoken to me directly but chose instead to send me an email.
Sounds like heaven for an introvert.
Maybe all this wire-together-fire-together is a devilish conspiracy to corrupt-convert intros into extros (xtro-likes, more xtroesque)?
Cuz, you know, it’s the quiet ones that the smarter Victor McGlagens know they need to worry about.
Damn. I bet you right! Done. Just threw my phone in the pond behind my house.
Unless you’ve got a ‘puter from the past, from before they, the beneficent ones what love us all (& what love info especially, & want to help it to be free), put the power of NASA (fake moon landings, naturalized Nazi rocket scientists, etc) in your piloting palm, then I would prefer, purely selfishly, you didn’t pollute the pond as that action would be an end to your getting messages, posts, across the gulf. That the prison reads all mail is a problem that needs be addressed more perfectly than obliquely, but until then mail is better than no mail. And these personas are all known, having been cataloged from the get.
I have (long since) gotten to the fed up betrayal (of the initializing darpanet marketing pitch … enough was shown early on to make it seem real, that the paradigm of a pair of roosevelt dimes with all the silver stolen out of them was finally getting Kuhn’d* – but no, just more of the same, on steroids) point that I can see myself time-traveling B.C. (before computers).
Town has always been considered S(pecific)M(easurable)A(chievable)R(elevant)T(ime-bound).
But, as I’ve said a time or two, in agreement with a fictional character’s imitation of living, “I’ve been to a town,” & know it to be something approaching the antithesis of smart. Or the apotheosis of “that smarts.” Or essentially overpopulated with Don Adams’s (tho Barbara Feldon was a pleasing offset, for sure … but take away the “d” & the green, green grass of home lyrics resolve to the Shawshank actuality).
Don’t you think?
*assumption is (was, for me) that the motive/s are essentially upright. The integrity of the search for truth & all that jazz. But that’s not what curve fitting is. And curve fitting, & “fitting” the pecu-people, the townies, to the curves, is the motive. **
**today’s day in history, 1820, Daniel Boone died: “Ironically, though, Boone’s fame and his success in opening the Trans-Appalachian West to large-scale settlement later came to haunt him. Having lost his Kentucky land holdings by failing to properly register them, Boone moved even further west in 1799, trying to escape the regions he had been so instrumental in creating.”
Ironic? Biologic. The new math will never not be the old math.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-famous-frontiersman-daniel-boone-dies-in-missouri
Well, I had the shakes last night, sweating, couldn’t sleep, was rocking back & forth…so I broke down and fished my phone out of the pond. What was I thinking?? I’m their slave. First step is admitting you have a problem, right?
I very well understand what is happening. I understand the evils of the Smartphone. Do I really, really want it? No. But, I also understand that it can be a useful tool as well, when stuck in prison.
What I find funny is that most here, who are no longer in the workforce, belittle those who still have to work and make a living. Guess what. Nowadays it is very difficult to make money without a phone. Even if you’ve done everything you can possibly do to remove yourself from the system, even if you work for yourself (as I do), the reality of it is that our world is difficult to navigate with out it.
So, what’s the answer? To be completely off grid? (which I am not able to do 100% at the moment) Most people can’t. I don’t know anyone, in fact, that is completely off the grid 100%. So, we do what we can to minimize prison life to the best of our ability, but it will never be 100%.
And let’s be honest, the dumbing down of America has been happening for a long time now to ALL generations in many different ways. Blaming younger generations for inheriting “progress” that older generations allowed to happen is just stupid and myopic.
And yes, I do think. 🙂
Rough night. Hope that pond water wasn’t too slimy. ☻
Yes. When you’re on customer time, especially if in a competitive environment, if you don’t pick up the call, somebody else will. That’s business. And that’s one thing. When I was done with that is when I was done with the phone. And that wasn’t even smartphone days. When I started carrying it was a Motorola brick.
Yes. Averaging down has been going on a long time – as long as I’ve been alive &, based on what I have read, longer than that.
But I don’t think the floor-it! acceleration of that trend, & the regressing right on through mean, is some generational figment of mind.
It’s not just younger folk that are consumed with diddling phones. Or letting those devices plot a course. People in my cohort are doing it. And I am watching them degrade. Some of them even agree that they are losing (it) by not using (it) – but don’t really seem to mind, & just keep doing it, “letting the phone do it.”
Seems evident to me that some significant Soma drugs have already been “put in the water” & that it is part & parcel of the “you will be happy” Schwab schtick.
“They” began kneading that dough long before displaying it in the shop window, right?
Got turned around recently. Convinced I was driving in the wrong direction, I pulled a U at the first overpass. And then I didn’t recognize the surround even more. But the front range was to my right. I was headed south. So I wasn’t wrong to begin with. I wanted north. Pulled another u.
“The car has a navigation system,” she said. “So do I,” I said. (It used to be a well-worn joke, men not asking for directions. Probably not invoked so much anymore.)
In that short run, there was inefficiency. But there was also learning. I know that stretch now. And in the longer run, the payoff of “using it” is far more profitable than what the spin cost. I don’t want to trade vitality for ease – that’s not a good trade.
Some fondness here for “hard times create … strong men create … good times create … weak men create …” & that’s a bigger picture amalgamation of what happens, or how it works, or often works, at the individual life level, too.
Wonder how much T a simon-sez phone sucks out of a guy?
So the poet wrote “rage, rage against the dying of the light…” I think that “they” have figured out that most will not rage against the killing, of themselves, by the backlight (among other tactics, of course).
Screens, all over the place, in every hand.
And a screen pass is a short pass, say the distance from one’s hand to ones eyes, to a receiver – one’s brain – who is protected (“you will be happy”) by a screen of blockers (“you will have nothing”).
If it, the phone, is used the way so many do, which use pattern surely did not just happen, inadvertently, then it would seem to be a way, or part of the way, to “concuss” brains in a pleasant, contact “sports” bypassing way.
And the lyrics, from well before pocketphones (’69), goes
In the year 2525
If man is still alive
If woman can survive
They may find
In the year 3535
Ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies
Everything you think, do and say
Is in the pill you took today
In the year 4545
Ain’t gonna need your teeth, won’t need your eyes
You won’t find a thing to chew
Nobody’s gonna look at you
In the year 5555
Your arms are hanging limp at your sides
Your legs got nothing to do
Some machine is doing that for you
In the year 6565
Ain’t gonna need no husband, won’t need no wife
You’ll pick your son, pick your daughter too
From the bottom of a long glass tube, whoa
In the year 7510
If God’s a-comin’ he ought to make it by then
Maybe he’ll look around himself and say
Guess it’s time for the Judgement day
In the year 8510
God is gonna shake his mighty head then
He’ll either say I’m pleased where man has been
Or tear it down and start again, woah woah
In the year 9595
I’m kinda wondering if man is gonna be alive
He’s taken everything this old earth can give
And he ain’t put back nothing, woah woah
Now it’s been 10,000 years
Man has cried a billion tears
For what he never knew
Now man’s reign is through
But through eternal night
The twinkling of starlight
So very far away
Maybe it’s only yesterday
In the year 2525
If man is still alive
If woman can survive
They may thrive
In the year 3535
Ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies ~ Zager & Evans
If you’ve got a strong grip on the thing, you’ll be fine. But it is slippery & has – can have – a strong grip of its own. For a lot of people it has ceased to be a tool, much as a syringe becomes heroin’s tool to work addicts with.
Yes. You do think. That’s a good problem to have. Better by far than the alternative problem.
I understand Tin Cup, but what is *wrong* with these pond-divers?
All makes sense. Interesting lyrics from 69. 🙂
If you need proof people are stupid just look at the mile long line of cars waiting to get a “covid” test. Or better yet watch the fat slobs standing on line for 3 hours to get injected with poison then brag on FB. Even better look at the complete retards still wearing masks when biden just declared “covid” is over. IQ’s must have dropped 30 points in the last 20 years.
Just 30?
oh, the world was full of retards 30 years ago as well… how do you think we GOT to where we are now?
smart-tags for muppets
Worst nightmare: When I text you & you immediately call.
Nothing takes the human out of humanity quit like the smartphone. I talked to a young fellow the other day, I’d say he was 18 or 19, he had the gift of gab which is rare in today’s yutes. His ability to converse was impressive, he did not appear to have a cell phone anywhere on his person.
Same day…. my next door neighbor’s grandson (approx. same age ) was walking the dog in front of my house and I witnessed him check his phone 11 times within three minutes or so. He’d put it in his side pocket…. five seconds pass, he’d pull it out and check it. Back in the pocket then within second, check it again and so on. That’s some sort of mental illness.
I wonder if checking your comments often to see if anyone replied is also some sort of mental illness? 🤔
Let me know what you think.
Oh Abby, low blow….you iz bad. 🙂
Wow, 10 minutes & you checked back! Yeah, I see what you mean…mental illness. 🙂
What irks me about cell phones is the gross display of rudeness and conceit
of engaging you in a topic and the the moment you answer they instantly drop their gaze do their phone and act like you aren’t even there. Then when you are done they look up as if they had dozed off and make some unrelated statement.
I agree, Flea. I don’t like that either. When I’m out with someone, I don’t pull it out unless we are looking up something together.
Right. Something like a gps map to locate something.
+1, Sorry, I don’t believe Scabby Gale understands the concept of personal development. Nice thought though.
Peace, L.
Weren’t you the little bitch bowing down to another commenter the other day APOLOGIZING for something you shouldn’t have been apologizing for?? Talk about personal development. 🙄
It’s crack. If you took the phone away for a week he would be up all night with anxiety pacing and thinking about his phone, wouldn’t be able to eat and would have emotional meltdowns just like a drug addict in withdrawal.
CAIR-True, I have seen people freak over not having a cell phone. To address Abby above, there are weeks that I am not on the net at all and truthfully it does not bother me.
Well, well, you’re back AGAIN!
You’re such a dick abby. You need a cat or something.
Why are you obsessed with dick?? Hmmm…
Am I an asshole? Yeah, just like you. So we’re even.
I’m back again AA, now how long was I gone?? I’m trying to read the book Mark recommended but my eyes get tired very quickly these days. Don’t pick on me, I’m old damn it. 🙂
You just can’t stay away. Kinda looking like an addiction to me.
I’m using my Smartphone now to shop for a cat…as so kindly suggested by another valued commenter. Not a cat person though…hope they don’t scratch, or act all snobby like.
HAHA now that’s funny. What will you name him?
Dick
Crabigail
And you never leave.
I’m so anti-social that I don’t bring my TracFone (50 bones) and monthly service plan of 20 bones into stores, the post office, the gym, or a doctor’s office. I like looking at folks in waiting rooms looking slack-jawed at that shiny thing. Sometimes I just leave it at home. Watch list bitch…