• dogslayeggs@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        4 months ago

        I meant communicate by phone. The person I was replying to said they needed their cell phone to talk to those friends who moved away, so I was asking if the person couldn’t communicate by cell phone after school and on weekends.

          • dogslayeggs@lemmy.worldEnglish
            7·
            4 months ago

            It’s not a bad faith question, and I’m not older than 60. I am older than 40, though.

            Seriously, though. The person said they needed a cell phone IN SCHOOL to get through high school because all of their friends moved away and they didn’t like anyone at school. I get needing to connect with friends who aren’t nearby, because I moved around a lot when I was a kid. I also get not being friends with people at your school, because that happened to me in high school as well. But even in the days before cell phones at all I was able to stay connected to my friends at other schools who lived farther away than I could ride my bike to. And I’ll go ahead and throw out my old man bias and agree that cell phones are amazingly better at helping us stay connected to people far away, but you don’t need to connect to friends during school. You can do that after school and on weekends.

            I’ll go ahead and be an old man here and say maybe one of the reasons the person had a hard time connecting to other people at school is because all the people were on their phones with friends the whole time. Nobody is looking for new friends when they are constantly “surrounded” by old friends. That said, before the internet was a thing there were also people with no friends at their school, so I’m not saying everyone would make friends if they just got off their phones.

          • otp@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            5·
            4 months ago

            There’s time during school hours too to communicate with friends, yeah. I think their idea was that students shouldn’t be messaging those friends during their classes, which I don’t think is an outrageously ask.