Month: January 2023

On teens drawn to a smartphone-free life:

For the first time, she experienced life in the city as a teenager without an iPhone. She borrowed novels from the library and read them alone in the park. She started admiring graffiti when she rode the subway, then fell in with some teens who taught her how to spray-paint in a freight train yard in Queens. And she began waking up without an alarm clock at 7 a.m., no longer falling asleep to the glow of her phone at midnight. Once, as she later wrote in a text titled the “Luddite Manifesto,” she fantasized about tossing her iPhone into the Gowanus Canal.

– ‘Luddite’ Teens Don’t Want Your Likes, New York Times.

It’s true beyond doubt that our phones, particularly social media on those phones, have deprived us of experiencing the world around us, hour by hour, day to day.

Most of us feel a sense of existential malaise. It’s reality malnutrition, a deficiency of nourishment of the everyday.

But the answer to the ills of junk food is not to avoid eating altogether, it’s to switch to a healthy diet. Likewise, swapping our iPhones or Galaxys for a flip phone isn’t sustainable. We’re going to have to build a healthy relationship with information – and this is perhaps the most significant societal challenge of this decade.

Related: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

you could be intellectually stuck right at this very moment, with the evidence right in front of your face and you just can’t see it.

This problem is not easy to fix, but it’s not impossible either. I’ve mostly fixed it for myself. The direction for improvement is clear: seek detail you would not normally notice about the world.

When you go for a walk, notice the unexpected detail in a flower or what the seams in the road imply about how the road was built.

When you talk to someone who is smart but just seems so wrong, figure out what details seem important to them and why.

In your work, notice how that meeting actually wouldn’t have accomplished much if Sarah hadn’t pointed out that one thing.

As you learn, notice which details actually change how you think.

Personal stories on personal blogs are historical documents when you think about it. They are primary sources in the annals of history, and when people look back to see what happened during this time in our lives, do you want The New York Times or Washington Post telling your story, or do you want the story told in your own words?

– "Bring back personal blogging", The Verge.

The archives of long-running blogs are a window into the past in a way that the archives of newspapers and institutional publications aren’t – they’re personal. See for example Jason Kottke, Andrew Sullivan, the one-time blog Sambhar Mafia, even this blog (see a page from July 2007).

We very likely have more people blogging now than at any point in the age before social media – we haven’t lost as much as we think we have. It’s just that it’s gotten really hard to locate independent writers.

Twenty years ago these were most of the web, and made up most of the results of web searches.

Today between social media, search engine optimised websites, and search engines like Google prioritising their own products in results, that is no longer the case. Not by a long chalk.

But those websites still exist. Newsletters too.

Just like we’re not in traffic as much as are traffic itself, we can either resent the dominance of social media while posting there, or we can start blogging on our own site. Use it like you would Twitter or Facebook – post the same thing to social media if you like.

Ten, five, even just one year from now, revisiting posts will be looking through a window back into your life – and times, on your own terms.

WordPress.com and Tumblr (both owned by Automattic) are good places to start. Google is a good place to buy your domain name.

In this blog post about the art and act of reflection, this interesting idea:

A key mental move here is pre-hindsight: It’s much easier to explain a past event with hindsight, than it is to predict something in the future, or notice something unexpected – the past is concrete and easy to reason about, the future is abstract and harder.

But this is just a state of mind!

For example, when I am writing an email, I often realise a mistake or missed detail just after I click send. Absolutely nothing has actually changed, but the email goes from a future thing to a past thing.

And often this mental shift can happen deliberately – take something vague and fuzzy that my mind wants to flinch away from, and make it concrete.

For example, I find it hard to notice mistakes when I make them, but easy to answer “what was the biggest mistake I made this week?” – the key is to make not answering not an option, and to implicitly assume there was a mistake.

– "On Reflection", Neel Nanda.

I avoid being with my own thoughts for large stretches of time because there are unresolved background issues I haven’t tackled yet. And my mindfulness practice is long enough for tactical daily equanimity but too short to either work through those unconfortablenesses or to consider the past, whether immediate or long term.

As a result, while I can plan any given work day well and set goals over a quarter or year, life in the medium term – in weeks – slips through the cracks.

I think the act of reflection, especially structured reflection, may help me be deliberate about this medium term. Perhaps I’ll try it this year.

Physical filters work by removing that which doesn’t make it through the filter, whether it’s the manuscripts that get sent to publishers or journals that never see the light of day, or books that don’t make it into the library, or coffee grinds.

Digital filters don’t remove anything; they only reduce the number of clicks that it takes to get to something.

In the digital age we filter forward instead of filtering out. As a result, all that material is still available to us and to others to filter in their own ways, and to bring forward in other contexts.

That is a very significant difference. You may filter those 10 articles, but all the other ones will still show up in a search, or tomorrow you may get them in an email from a friend or Google+ recommending that particular link.

– "Are we on information overload?", Salon (2012).

I think the interviewee overstates the difference between the physical-world act of filtering out and the digital age’s filtering in. After all, one implies the other.

But this led me to think about an imbalance in the way we design online experiences.

Websites and apps make it easy to filter content when we seek something: Twitter surfaces top hashtags. When you tap on one of them, you’re implicitly filtering (in) all posts that contain it. Likewise, e-commerce websites use filters as a central part of the buying experience. Sections on online newspapers are also filters.

It’s much harder on those same websites and apps to filter content in order to keep things out of our attention. Search, Topics, Hashtags are all top-level features on Twitter, but Mute and Block accounts are less easy to access. Muting keywords is harder still. I’m not sure it’s even possible to block keywords and sellers on most e-commerce websites.

In general, online publications and services are biased towards indulging distraction over preserving attention. And this is especially interesting because most of them rely on revenue from ads – for which a less stressed, more focused visitor ought to be more valuable.

The beauty of fixing an object and keeping it around in your life… is that the object becomes very sentimental. “That’s one thing that I just know from being in this business… These mixers really become part of the family, especially when they’re handed down from grandmother to mother. I’ve worked on third- and fourth-generation mixers that have been handed down from great-grandma to grandma to mom to daughter.”

– "Your stuff is actually worse now", Vox.

Thinking of oneself as a custodian of everyday items lends unexpected meaning to life: a sense of family, a sense of one’s own mortality and the preciousness of life, a sense of pride and guardianship, a sense of connection and familiarity with the object in question and its workings.

Related: "Everything Must Be Paid for Twice", Raptitude.

There’s the first price, usually paid in dollars, just to gain possession of the desired thing, whatever it is: a book, a budgeting app, a unicycle, a bundle of kale.

But then, in order to make use of the thing, you must also pay a second price. This is the effort and initiative required to gain its benefits, and it can be much higher than the first price.