Can any of you younger folks tell me what the kids without smartphones do? Surely there are kids that don't own one yet or are too poor to afford one. Generally speaking, are the smartphone-less kids ostracized or is it taken in stride by their classmates?
I'm in 12th grade and without a smartphone, because I feel like I spend enough time on HN and working on side projects already, and a smartphone would only pull me into the digital world even more. I personally don't feel ostracized, but I do feel a little isolated when everyone has their noses in their phones. My friends also get annoyed when I'm not timely in responding to their Facebook messages, although they've gotten used to my delay there.
That's funny, because the group norm of "burying noses in phones" is inherently anti-social behavior, at least to the people in the physical vicinity. But everyone does it so it gets a free pass. In HS, I made sure not to mention that I stayed up late playing games on the Internet; that was behavior that would get me ostracized. Just goes to show you how arbitrary our standards of normal are. :)
Related: I want to start a tumblr consisting of photos of groups of people in public staring at their phones. We take our phones way too seriously at the moment.
