Is anyone else a bit of a Luddite when it comes to modern tech (both hardware and social media etc)

[Lorenzo]

[MOD EDIT] In my opinion avoiding tech "just because" just means you're missing out on some things. My dad never learned how to use a TV remote. Guess what happened when TV's stopped having dials or buttons?

They became unrepairable and so you simply toss them when they stop working in a few years.

 

[calmloki]

Socially I'm probably a luddite - have a facebook account but very rarely post, just got walked through signing on to Instagram or some such so I could see a niece's post. The gal is very tech aware and squeezes programs/apps for the last bit of juice. If an app doesn't give me instant gratification and an answer I dump it. Not worth it to me. We do have Alexa controlling most all our lights, smart garage doors, a smart thermostat and temperature sensors in different places.
Nearly bought a tiny Lenovo to replace the refurbished unit I bought her a couple years ago. It was acting up, rebooting shortly after she signed in as herself and got on the internet, staying up a bit longer if she signed on as me. She's been fighting with it for months hunting the problem, using her iPhone or my computer as a workaround. Wanted to get her a pretty direct replacement with Windows 10 Pro, same specs. I'm more mechanical, so thought I'd check again for loose connections or a pinched wire. This time pulled both 16Mb ram cards and switched their locations. Same problem. Left #2 card in the #1 slot, pulled the other card - Eureka! Computer has been up, signed in as her, happily on the web for 24 hours! May get another 16Mb card, may not. We could pony up the $250 or so for a replacement, but setting it up would be lots of unnecessary time used by her to no real advantage.

 

[Trooper]

I am in the process of buying a smart garage door opener.

You'll love it. I thought "I'll never need that" but I am one of those people that always think they left the garage door open about 1/2 mile from the house. Now I can just check my phone and close it if needed. It's also a good way to know if it's been opened whenever we're away.

 

[RetireBy90]

An IT guy from punch cards in 75 to FIRE in 18, but don’t have the desire to stay abreast any more. I do have some tech, iPhone, iPad, and Surface. No FB or other social media except some time here.
I saw the thread subject and immediately went to my current experience replacing a TV. Couldn’t fit the new one (70”) where old one was because old had a pedestal stand on my dresser and new one has 2 legs about 55” apart. Dresser isn’t that wide Then had to figure how to change the input to HDMI on the device and then how to program VZ remote to work with it. Doesn’t seem like a lot but it took my spare time over 2 days
One piece of tech I do really like is the ring doorbell/camera and my internet connected sprinklers. If I don’t want to talk to someone I can turn sprinklers on them - now that is tech I like

 

[motley]

[MOD EDIT]

? No. [mod edit]

In my opinion avoiding tech "just because" just means you're missing out on some things.

In my opinion you should know what you're talking about vs treating such ignorant assumptions as facts. I don't avoid tech "just because." In fact, and as I already pointed out, my entire career has been "tech." Further, it's practically impossible to avoid ALL "tech" (depending on how you define such a vague term) and I have no such interest. I'm just not obsessed with today's widgets and gadgets the way many people are and, as I also said in the OP, never understood it. I think it's rather bizarre, even kind of scary, when taken to extremes, which FYI isn't exactly a new or radical viewpoint. But regardless, that's just my opinion, no more, no less.

 

[Texas Proud]

It is interesting when people talk about appliances.... it is almost impossible to not get 'smart' ones if you get a top of the line appliance...

We now have a smart oven, a smart dishwasher and a smart cloths washer... one good thing about that is that when the electricity goes out it resets the clock!!! But even DW does not see any advantage in using an app for any of these things...

 

[rodi]

This forum *is* social media. Maybe not as big as Facebook, but all forums fall under the social media umbrella. From reddit to this forum.

I rarely go on Facebook... Maybe every two or three weeks. I'm on insta more... It's algorithm has discovered I like cooking videos in Italian. Lol. I hit Instagram at least once a day. I come here several times a day.

I don't do YouTube very often, unless I'm searching up recipes or how to fix one of our aging cars

Older laptop used for finances. Phone for everything else.

No smart devices. Even our TV is dumb.

 

[MarieIG]

Mod Hat On: Differing opinions a welcome. Insults aimed at other members are not. Mod Hat Off.

 

[ArmchairMillionaire]

I can and do go whole days without looking at my phone, which I was upset at having to spend a whopping $100 on (but now realize was a good deal). I have some apps that came with and never use. I added exactly one (Mapquest for GPS purposes). I occasionally use the phone to call someone (remember that?), occasionally a text, that's it. I never look at it when in a social situation like out with friends and frankly find it rude when others do.

My laptop is rather modest, maybe even low end by today's standards, and I don't care because it's enough.

I don't have an i-anything.

I spend very little time on Facebook, mostly to see if anyone posted anything interesting like pics etc. I almost never post. I don't have accounts for any other social media unless you count LinkedIn for career purposes, which I will totally ignore when I retire (and mostly do now). I do browse the net at night sometimes (like this site, a few others like news or sports).

I am not subscribed to any streaming service.

And my career has been in I.T.

Anyone else? Humbug I say. To each their own but I never got the obsessions, esp with checking one's cell phone 100 times a day.

I will admit to owning two iPods. I got them as gifts 25 and 15 years ago, or so. Being able to have 25,000+ songs on one of them and all my playlists on the other one makes it easier to listen to music I like wherever I go.
Other than that, no smart-phones, no apps.
No streaming services. (other than Amazon Prime for their free six-day shipping)
No texting.
I try to stay away from You-Tube, unless I absolutely have to for training or if I cannot find any written articles about how to assemble or fix something.
10-year-old laptop.

Also never been on Farcebook or other social sites. This site is probably the closest I get to being "social" online.

Our phones are made out of Bakelite. The oldest one is from 1964 and the newest one is from 1983. All have rotary dials, except for one newer push-button cordless phone (with an answering system for the times we have to press one for English or whatever)

How's that for being a luddite?

Do I feel I'm missing out on anything? Nope.
I just enjoy a more simple life.

 

[Lorenzo]

Our phones are made out of Bakelite. The oldest one is from 1964 and the newest one is from 1983. All have rotary dials, except for one newer push-button cordless phone (with an answering system for the times we have to press one for English or whatever)

I’d say I’d love to see pictures of these, but if you don’t have a smartphone and probably don’t have a digital camera, I suppose that would be asking a lot.

 

[motley]

I confess I'd like to have a rotary phone just for the nostalgia of it. Ditto for an old 286 or 386 PC with DOS and maybe Windows 3.1 at most.

 

[ArmchairMillionaire]

I’d say I’d love to see pictures of these, but if you don’t have a smartphone and probably don’t have a digital camera, I suppose that would be asking a lot.

I do have a digital camera. Got it as a gift 15+ years ago. I use it almost every week. DW has one too. She uses it at home and in her classroom at school.

As far as the phones go, we have a black wall-mounted rotary dial in our kitchen. Our house was built in 1910 and there was already a wall bracket and a line in the kitchen when we bought the place. We also have a black desktop model on a shelf in the basement. Then there's the red desktop one in our office. I had to run an extra line upstairs so we could use our turquoise one in the bedroom.

Our house is one of the few houses in town that still use copper phone lines. A couple of years back, our Internet provider upgraded our connection to fiber. The technician asked if we wanted our phone lines upgraded for free to fiber as well so we could use camera phones or something like that. I showed him our kitchen phone and asked if we could keep the copper lines.

A few things I forgot to add in my original response was that since our house is over 100 years old, we've also retrofitted most of the light fixtures in our home to metal or porcelain bases with vintage schoolhouse pendants to compliment our 9-foot wooden beadboard ceilings. There's also a perfectly functional cool green Seth-Thomas flip clock next to the bed upstairs. The only digital clocks in the house are on the stove and the microwave. No smart appliances at all. Our only TV is a 32" non-smart flat-screen in the living room. We still have a VCR/DVD player connected to it, along with a used (we got it 3rd or 4th hand) first-gen Nintendo Wii which we use for playing Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! games. I still occasionally buy music on CDs. We decorate for Halloween and Christmas with vintage blow-molds and other vintage decorations. Plus, my daily driver pickup has hand-crank windows, key-lock doors, and a clutch pedal.

 

[brett]

I can and do go whole days without looking at my phone, which I was upset at having to spend a whopping $100 on (but now realize was a good deal). I have some apps that came with and never use. I added exactly one (Mapquest for GPS purposes). I occasionally use the phone to call someone (remember that?), occasionally a text, that's it. I never look at it when in a social situation like out with friends and frankly find it rude when others do.

My laptop is rather modest, maybe even low end by today's standards, and I don't care because it's enough.

I don't have an i-anything.

I spend very little time on Facebook, mostly to see if anyone posted anything interesting like pics etc. I almost never post. I don't have accounts for any other social media unless you count LinkedIn for career purposes, which I will totally ignore when I retire (and mostly do now). I do browse the net at night sometimes (like this site, a few others like news or sports).

I am not subscribed to any streaming service.

And my career has been in I.T.

Anyone else? Humbug I say. To each their own but I never got the obsessions, esp with checking one's cell phone 100 times a day.

Ditto. Spent most of my career in IT. 1980-2012.

My desktop is 14 years old. Just fine. Cell phone but never have had data. Only use it infrequently for calls. Seldom on facebook, no i anything either. Gave up a landline years ago.

I travel with an IPAD. Other than a printer and in inexpensive used cell phone, it is the only tech I have purchased in years.

It is not that I do not appreciate it. We use the usual on line banking, bill payment, trip reservation functions.

 

[motley]

Yeah all of my bill pay, financial statements and transactions etc are online and I get irked when a company says "we'll send you a check." Seriously?

 

[6miths]

I was a techy guy back in the day. Early adopter. Still relatively current but diminishing returns. DS just bought a car and it reinforces my opinion that there are places tech has been a negative. Touchsceens in vehicles are a great savings for manufacturers but most consumers would rather have buttons/knobs for critical functions and studies show that people are being killed and injured because of this ‘advance’. Don’t get me started on effects on kids and in schools.

 

[motley]

Exactly, thank you. The scary part is how many people don't get it, esp the younger generations.

My previous car dashboard was almost all knobs; my current car has computerized buttons...it might "look cool," but it's way more inefficient and was a step backward.

The cell phone obsession (and I see it everywhere with people of all ages) is just plain bizarre to me.

 

[ArmchairMillionaire]

The cell phone obsession (and I see it everywhere with people of all ages) is just plain bizarre to me.

I concur. The other day I had to brake (and clutch) while driving to avoid a kid of about 10 who swerved into traffic while trying to work his phone screen while riding his bicycle on a town street. I've also recently had a 70+ year-old woman push her shopping cart into my leg while trying to walk and be texting (or something involving her thumbs) on her phone at the grocery store. She didn't even apologize. She just went around me and kept staring at her phone.
My DW says the personal cell phone is what started the downfall of manners and etiquette in this country. I tend to agree with her.

 

[Lorenzo]

My DW says the personal cell phone is what started the downfall of manners and etiquette in this country. I tend to agree with her.

I would say not cellphones but the Internet. We realized we could say things to or about others that we would never say to their faces. The real downfall came when wireless broadband technology brought the Internet to cellphones.

 

[ArmchairMillionaire]

I would say not cellphones but the Internet. We realized we could say things to or about others that we would never say to their faces. The real downfall came when wireless broadband technology brought the Internet to cellphones.

To some extent I can agree, but I also can recall numerous occasions before phones had Internet when I used to travel every week for my j*b and I would be heading out or heading home at an airport gate waiting for a flight trying to read a book (I used to read 2 books a week back in those days) and it never failed that someone, man or woman, would take the seat next to me and proceed to have a loud conversation on his/her phone, making it next to impossible to focus on my reading so I would have to get up, gather all my belongings, and try to move to a different seat - maybe at an empty gate if there was one.

So I would also say that just having the ability to talk to anyone from anywhere helped make people feel more important than they really were and lowered their respect for their fellow travelers. I also believe that the Golden Rule, "Do onto others as you would have them do unto you" really started to fall by the wayside once people got phones in their pockets.

And it's so common nowadays to see a couple at a restaurant (or a mother/father and their child) where one of the people spends almost the entire meal looking at their phone. I end up feeling bad for the person being ignored.

I just don't understand it either...

 

[motley]

I concur. The other day I had to brake (and clutch) while driving to avoid a kid of about 10 who swerved into traffic while trying to work his phone screen while riding his bicycle on a town street. I've also recently had a 70+ year-old woman push her shopping cart into my leg while trying to walk and be texting (or something involving her thumbs) on her phone at the grocery store. She didn't even apologize. She just went around me and kept staring at her phone.

I think I would have returned the favor (which she wouldn't mind of course, since she clearly has no problem with people hitting other people with their carts).

 

[martyp]

I'm not a Luddite but I may be behind the times. I have an Apple suite of iPhone, iPad, and MacBook. I'm on Facebook quite a bit and YouTube and a little bit of X and Quora. All my reading is digital. One online newspaper subscription, a Science magazine subscription (online), and the rest free sources. I read quite a bit and all of it is on my Kindle app. I listen to podcasts while driving.

Nothing particularly techie about the house except my digital door lock. I love being able to unlock with my thumbprint.

I use Google maps to get everywhere, on my phone or Apple Car Play.

 

[DayDreaming]

... But there are a lot of things that people said they didn't need or didn't want and now are standard "must have" items. I'm thinking about dishwashers, garbage disposals, garage door openers just for starters. There are a lot of things you say you don't need until you get them...

I've never had a dishwasher, garbage disposal, or garage door opener. So I'm a Luddite with some of the basics, but I love my Alexa devices, music streaming in the house and in my Tesla, 'smart' lights, I talk to Alexa quite a bit every day . I carry my smartphone almost everywhere, but honestly, it's in airplane mode much of the time - always when I'm out hiking where I do enjoy being cut off from the world.

 

[ShokWaveRider]

I was always at the forefront of technology prior to reaching 65, even through my early retirement years, but my mindset seem to change after 65. Always had the latest gadgets and computer toys. I was in that business, so it was easy to keep up. Although I have never been a major adopter of Social Media and all the other variations. I do use them to keep in contact with childhood friends but do not get drawn into any of the hype of the continuous barrage of disinformation that is pervasive with such systems and I certainly do not get my news from them. I do use YouTube for helpful things that I selectively search for. But even YouTube has followed the rest with the seemingly unlimited amount of uncontrolled rampant disinformation that seems to be the norm for these platforms. I still have my wits about me and can easily spot the rubbish and simply ignore it, I know of others that seem to lap it up, the rubbish and disinformation that is.

Now I simply use tech for my own comfort and convenience. Having been in the business for so long, I resist a lot of the Wifi gadgets that are available, as they are so easily hacked or disabled. For example all my security cameras are hard wired to a secure server in my AV closet as are my main computers. We only use Wifi for our tablets and phones. We have NO financial information or apps on our phones as they are too very easily hacked. I did ask my bank's technical folk how secure they were, they said very, but they cannot say anything else. However, with a little probing I found out from them that almost all the breaches and account issues are from customers using the Apps or debit cards ...... go figure.

 

[ArmchairMillionaire]

Yes, a smart coffee maker seems a bit too much. While it might be cool to say "Alexa, make a pot of coffee", someone has to physically put the grounds and the water into the machine ahead of time.

But there are a lot of things that people said they didn't need or didn't want and now are standard "must have" items. I'm thinking about dishwashers, garbage disposals, garage door openers just for starters. There are a lot of things you say you don't need until you get them. I didn't need no stinkin' smart thermostat until I got one. Now I can't imagine not having it. Just the ability to stealthily change the temperature from the basement without the wife knowing it is gratifying. I never had a heated steering wheel before, now I'll never get another vehicle without it.

There are a lot of Luddites on this site. I'll never understand the animosity to smart phones that many have here. It's a tool. It can be a real timesaver. The GPS function alone would make it worthwhile to likely most of the people that drive, (well those that drive more than 10 miles from their home.)

With the addition of AI to smartphones (oh, yes!) I bet a lot of the holdouts will want to climb on board the smart phone train.

I forgot to mention in my original post that I do not own a smart thermostat, dishwasher, garbage disposal, or a garage door opener, either.

As far as GPS goes, we do have a Garmin 5 GPS with lifetime map updates. It works most of the time if we need to find a specific place. Otherwise, we use a map or if the GPS gets us close, we figure out the last mile on our own. If there's construction, or a crash, we just go with the flow...

Heated steering wheel? Nah - I just wear gloves during the winter. AI on phones? No, Thanks.

For us, life's just better when it's simpler.

 

[athena53]

I've been an enthusiastic user of tech with a few exceptions. I'm still avoiding Alexa and her ilk in my house and I don't need to upgrade to the latest and greatest every time something new comes out. No plans to replace my iPhone 8 at present!

OTOH, I've traveled a lot (and still do) and well remember exorbitant hotel charges for phone calls, especially international, paper maps, paperback language dictionaries, guide books and phrase books, no on-line info to research destinations and services, etc. What improvements! I also love my Apple watch- it monitors a lot of health-related stats but is also fun to use.

Social media: I use FaceBook but disconnect from people who mainly post extreme political views (from either side). I also like LinkedIn because I'm still on cordial terms with many people I knew from my career. No Instagram, X or anything else- they're time sumps.

I do worry about losing my abilities with tech someday; it happened with my late husband, who was 15 years older, and my Dad in his last years, even though both were very computer-literate before. I travel with a tour group that attracts people 60 and over and some aren't sure what to do with their phones other than make calls and get e-mail. It was a merry shuffle when we checked into a hotel in Belize using WhatsApp (even though the guide communicated with us on WhatsApp so they were set up)-there was no other way to check in. Two older guys in my group in Copenhagen needed to borrow phones because they didn't have one and needed to download an app to use public transportation in Copenhagen. More and more, you're in deep trouble if you don't have a smartphone and some faciity with using it.