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.

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