Category: Technology

The Point of Unplugging: It’s Not About the Technology

Casey N. Cep’s article, “The Pointlessness of Unplugging,” published a few months ago over at the New Yorker, is well worth a read for those of us who make an effort to occasionally disengage from what I call the Great and Powerful Hive Mind. From her conclusion:

That is why, I think, the Day of Unplugging is such a strange thing. Those who unplug have every intention of plugging back in. This sort of stunt presents an experiment, with its results determined beforehand; one finds exactly what one expects to find: never more, often less …If it takes unplugging to learn how better to live plugged in, so be it. But let’s not mistake such experiments in asceticism for a sustainable way of life. For most of us, the modern world is full of gadgets and electronics, and we’d do better to reflect on how we can live there than to pretend we can live elsewhere.

I confess I’d never even heard of the “Day of Unplugging” until this article, which either says something about how little known the movement is or how disconnected I am from it.  Maybe both.  Here’s the thing, though: While Cep mades some good points, I think she misses what unplugging, for most of us, is all about. It’s not about the technology.  It’s about disengaging from the hyper-connected information sphere.  It’s the modern equivalent of the introvert just wanting to be by himself— to be alone with his  own thoughts, to take some solace from the silence (even mental silence is a kind of silence), to find some inner peace away from all the digital noise.

For many of us, information overload, especially of the ephemeral “I had a donut this morning” and “I haz cats”  variety, can eventually be toxic.  You are what you eat.  You are also what you put into your mind. I took a two-year break from social media before realizing that I was being silly doing so, that I never really had a problem with social media, and I especially had no problem with technology (which, at its core, is a word that just means tools that make our lives better).  I just needed to find the right balance.  I agree that the person who makes a big show out of unplugging may be a bit of an exhibitionist, just another way to say “Look at me!,” but that’s not why I do it.  I do it because disengaging from everyone else, and the Internet in general, is a way of engaging fully with me.

The struggle for most of us is not whether to unplug.  It’s how. I’ve worked hard to completely unplug from the Internet while in my home, which works for me because of the circumstances of my life, but even that’s been a challenge lately because of how embedded the Internet is in everything I do now.  Do I tell myself it’s okay to look up the weather online, but that I can’t go on Twitter?  Do I avoid reading CNN.com, but allow myself to use Google Maps to get directions?  It’s not as clear cut as it used to be.

What I have found is that if I commit as much as possible to unplugging while in my home, then I tend to have a list of things to do when I permit myself to get back online. But it’s still not easy.  I’m still trying to find the right balance, and I suspect that most people taking part in the “Day of Unplugging” are the same. I just do it daily instead of once a year.

E-Reading Still On the Rise

Via Digital Bookworld, Pew Research finds that E-Reading Is Still On the Rise:

More Americans own a dedicated e-reading device like a Kindle Paperwhite or Kobo Aura HD than ever before, according to new data from the Pew Internet & American Life project.

This despite flat sales growth for e-reader sales in the U.S. overall as more Americans opt for cheap, multipurpose devices like tablet computers instead.

At the same time, the proportion of Americans who have read an e-book last year has increased to 28% from 23% a year ago.

Some nifty charts there, so well worth taking a look.  Most readers are apparently like me, not dedicated to one way of reading, but jumping from printed books to ebooks to audio books depending on the needs of the moment.

Library Journal apparently has a fuller take on the Pew poll.

Ebooks Are to Printed Books as Airplanes Are to Bicycles

“Kevin Kelly is not a dumb guy — far from it actually. As the founding executive editor of Wired and one of the people who helped build The Well, among the earliest online communities, he has done a good job of seeing what is coming next for decades.

But last year, he had what sounded to me like a dumb idea. Mr. Kelly edits and owns Cool Tools, a website that writes about neat stuff and makes small money off referral revenue from Amazon when people proceed to buy some of those things. He decided to edit the thousands of reviews that had accrued over the last 10 years into a self-published print catalog — also called “Cool Tools” — which he would then sell for $39.99 …”  [Read the rest of “Print Settles into Its Niches” at The New York Times.]

The whole article is worth reading, but I’m not sure why it surprises people so much, even considering the book’s subject matter.  The printed book is a pretty remarkable device:  cheap, portable, disposable if need be, and human-powered.  On top of that, they often have great aesthetic value.  Ebooks are great.  I love them.  But they’re just another mode of conveying information.  The Wright Brothers, who made their early mark manufacturing bicycles, may have launched the greatest technology disrupter of all time with the airplane, but bicycles didn’t go away.  Sometimes a bicycle is just a better way to get around.

Not Every Blog Needs a Comment Section. In Fact, Most Might Do Better Without Them

Think the comment sections on YouTube videos are the cesspools of the Internet? You’re not alone. The AP has an interesting article up on the steps some sites, including YouTube, are taking to curb the rampant vile behavior you often find on comment sections across the Internet:

“Mix blatant bigotry with poor spelling. Add a dash of ALL CAPS. Top it off with a violent threat. And there you have it: A recipe for the worst of online comments, scourge of the Internet.

Blame anonymity, blame politicians, blame human nature. But a growing number of websites are reining in the Wild West of online commentary. Companies including Google and the Huffington Post are trying everything from deploying moderators to forcing people to use their real names in order to restore civil discourse. Some sites, such as Popular Science, are banning comments altogether …” [Read the rest.]

As I said to a friend of mine the other day, the fastest way I can find to lower my opinion of humanity is to read the comment sections on major news sites like CNN.com, so I’m glad to see some of them taking steps to curb some of this behavior.  While total anonymity doesn’t bring out the worst in everybody, it certainly brings out the worst in the worst of us, and since only the bored, the passionate, or the enraged tend to comment on the Internet at all, the percentage of people who seem like loons is magnified.

This article got me thinking about whether a blog needs to have a comment section at all to be successful, or whether it’s just a personal choice depending on the inclinations of the person doing the blogging.  A little Googling led me to Mark Hughes, who blogs at Forbes.com, and who had an interesting take on this question in his post “Are Comments the Measure of a Successful Blog?”

“My blog has received a total of only 1,289 comments in a period of about a year and a half. That’s an average of around 71 comments per month, and many of them are from me personally in discussions with readers, so really probably only about 60 or so per month are from readers.

And really, about half of all of the comments I’ve gotten in the last 18 or so months came on just five or so articles/posts. Meaning I really probably only get about 20 comments per month from readers most of the time. Of those, some are from the same people posting multiple comments, so we could safely say the number of unique individuals commenting on my blog per month is around 15 or so.

But despite that low level of commenting, I had a million-and-a-quarter total views last month, with more than 550,000 unique visitors. That was a pretty good month for me, my first topping a million views, but I pretty consistently average in the quarter-million range for unique visitors (sometimes much higher, sometimes closer to 200,000) and have a very healthy repeat viewership percentage as well.”

The rest of the post is well worth reading.  I know that Andrew Sullivan, one of the most popular bloggers on the Internet, has no comment section at all.  It certainly hasn’t hurt his traffic.

Although I haven’t blogged very frequently the past ten years, that’s something I’m planning on changing as the nature of my writing career and my day job at the university have grown closer together, and one of the questions I’ve wrestled with is whether to turn the comment section back on.  Since this blog until now was mostly just news related to my fiction, with the occasional post (three or four times a year if that) about writing or publishing that might be of interest to a wider audience, I didn’t think it needed a comment section.  Now I’m leaning toward keeping it off, because I’d rather channel any energy and time that would go to managing a comment section into posting more frequently.

That said, I certainly think a comment section can be a viable part of a blog, if managed properly.  I even find myself commenting on a few.   But necessary?  I can’t find much evidence to support that conclusion.