Moderation in All Things Digital (Premium)

As personal technology exerts ever more control over our lives, there’s been a natural push-back. But the opposite extreme is still an extreme. What I’m preaching, what I’ve always preached, is moderation. Moderation in all things digital.

I see this push-back all over. But let me focus on one publication that I’ve been meaning to single out for a long time.

The New York Times is a wellspring of bad information and bad advice, and it has been for at least several years. But we don’t need to do any time traveling to find great examples. In recent days, the newspaper has told us to ditch the devices while on vacation, to choose “dumb” things over “smart” things, and to subscribe to print newspapers instead of reading digitally. Yes, paper newspapers. In 2018. Really.

Spare me.

This type of thinking is so wrong-headed, I don’t even know where to start. But it finds an eager audience of ever-gullible readers, who are either so old that they actually pine for the old days or so young that they believe that some return to a pre-digital age is both possible and desirable.

I have my own kind of advice. And this falls into a broader category that includes such things as parenting, pet ownership, and anything else that just requires a dollop of common sense. Extreme overreactions—and that’s exactly what these are—are just as bad as the problems these folks are pretending to solve. The real answer, the right answer, as always, is moderation.

I have spent the past 25 years writing about personal technology. And yet, one of the things I have struggled with the entire time is a worry that, in doing so, I am in some way convincing people to spend money they may or may not even have on products or services that they do not really need. I take this very seriously, and I always have. I don’t want to waste your time. I don’t want to waste your money. And I absolutely do not want to give you bad advice.

But I also hate to see others giving bad advice. I especially hate it when it’s a publication that routinely provides contradictory advice or information, as the New York Times so often does, sometimes days of each other. You can find a study, a report, or an expert to support any idea, after all. They will latch on to any of them. All of them.

In recent years, I’ve been fascinated and frustrated by what I see as a natural overreaction to the rapid proliferation of technology into our daily lives. Smartphones are a great example because they are so pervasive. There are two sides here, as always. On the one, few would argue that the net benefit of a smartphone far outweighs the negatives. But we also navel-gaze endlessly about the bad effects it is having on our attention spans, our ability to process information, and even on our memories.

This shouldn’t be surprising because it has happened with every technological innovation that has ever occurred in the history of mankind.

The rise of factory manufacturing led to worker abuse and pollution, but it also led to decreases in poverty, improvements in health overall, and, incidentally, to the dominance of the United States on a global scale. (China’s subsequent rise can be tied to the same change.)

Transcontinental trains, cars, planes, and then the Internet allowed previously separated peoples to communicate, trade, and gain access to resources that were once out of reach or entirely unknown. But they have also made it easier for us to wage war on each other. The world has gotten smaller. So, too, have our minds.

I don’t mean to preach, and I know you understand the point. So let’s focus on the present. Let’s focus on personal technology.

One of my personal goals, and this dates back several years, is to reduce my physical imprint on this world, largely through decluttering, which I think of as a removal of as many physical “things” as possible. This is a positive change, I think. But it also requires us to embrace new digital technologies that were not available or viable even a decade ago. This apparently makes some nervous.

In this scheme, paper photos are scanned and uploaded to cloud services, which most people would find reasonable, but then they are destroyed. Which many might find onerous.

Music cassettes and audio CDs are ripped to digit formats, or not, given the rise of subscription music services. Ditto for movies in whatever physical format. And then they, too, are destroyed, or at least sold or given away to others. No more physical media taking up space.

Massive numbers of books, which once adorned multiple bookshelves and had moved back and forth across the country as we moved, are given away or sold, replaced with e-books and a Kindle e-book reader or other digital devices. Paper newspaper and magazine subscriptions are canceled, replaced with digital subscriptions.

This is all obvious, right? And I’m sure many of you have done most of this, or all of this, or even more than this over the years. But every transition, every change, comes with some twinge, perhaps of guilt, loss, or of nostalgia. Of a sense that time is passing, and that things will never be the same. Many won’t change at all for this very reason.

These changes are taking place in other areas of our lives, too, by the way. Mass-produced foods and beverages are slowly giving way, at least partially, to locally produced alternatives in the form of farmer’s markets, craft beer, thrift shops, and the like. (And we’re collectively waking up to the terror of sugar and processed food while doing so.)

And let’s please revisit what The New York Times, that great bastion of bad information, is saying about personal technology. I gotta tell you, I’m getting really tired of how terrible this publication has become. (And their health/nutrition reporting is even worse. They publish contradictory information, based on any study or report, almost every single day. I sometimes see these articles right next to each other.)

I joked on Twitter recently that the definition of a hipster is someone who is nostalgic for an era that they did not experience. That kind of labeling is offensive to some, but then we live in a great age of political correctness that I happen to find offensive too. But cheap labels aside, this issue is not confined to “hipsters,” obviously. The rejection of modernism is generational. It actually happens all the time. (The movie Midnight in Paris explores this phenomenon nicely. I recommend it.)

We need to be able to separate movements that are positive and far-reaching—local food/drink, for example—from those that are just temporary and limited throwbacks, like the “rise” of vinyl records. And by “we” I specifically mean The New York Times.

Does it actually make sense, for example, for most people (not all people, nothing is literal) to go on a vacation of any length and literally leave their phones behind at the hotel each day? Nope. Recording the day in photos and short videos while out in the world provides everyone on that trip with much-loved memory triggers going forward. More important, doing so does not distract the person taking those photos from enjoying the moment; in fact, it makes us more present because we are truly paying attention to what’s important: The people we’re with and the experience we’re having. So here’s an idea: Bring the phone. Take the pictures. Just don’t waste time doing so, don’t wait for perfect shots, and don’t get in other people’s way. You’re not the only one who matters out there in the world.

Does it make sense for most people to buy a mechanical alarm clock and use that instead of a smartphone for a waking alarm? Nope. Smartphones can be far less jarring in the morning, offering a more natural way to come out of sleep. But what we do need to learn is not sit there in the dark staring a glaringly bright screen. Learn to use the device maturely, in moderation. You don’t have to give it up.

Does it make any sense at all for most to subscribe to a print newspaper in 2018? No, it does not. The supposed benefits of reading a newspaper can be had by subscribing digitally too: Just ignore social media and get your news from sources that truly understand what’s happening and do original reporting. And when you subscribe digitally, you save money, you kill fewer trees, and you don’t have to wash your hands when you’re done reading. It’s kind of a no-brainer. Again, for most people.

What each of The New York Times columnists gets wrong is that they live in a modern world and aren’t mature enough to adapt their behaviors to reality. Instead, they propose that the old way of doing things is better. But that’s only true when the new way of doing things is truly bad. It’s true of processed food, for example, which wasn’t originally invented to hurt, but rather to feed more people more efficiently. With personal technology, you should remove or limit the bad—social media, perhaps—and embrace the good. The ability to never be lost. The ability to always know your child is safe. The ability to learn, to better understand the world around you. Don’t throw out the good—and there is so much of it—for the bad.

Look, how you use personal technology is up to you. It’s a choice. You’ll make mistakes, overreach in some areas. It’s OK. If you evaluate what you do and how you do it from time-to-time, you’ll end up in a good space. One that makes sense for you. It’s just common sense, really.