[HN Gopher] The Great Offline
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The Great Offline
Author : axiomdata316
Score : 93 points
Date : 2021-12-20 22:05 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (reallifemag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (reallifemag.com)
| hwers wrote:
| Look at the scrolling on that site. What a beauty. No intercom
| chat robot popping up, no distracting ads, no pop up asking you
| to fill in your mail for yet another newsletter you won't engage
| with. Wonderful to see.
| mro_name wrote:
| comes with a bit of irony that you need 2 more cloud providers to
| actually get more than a white page. Has a neat offline appeal
| though.
|
| But offline and wilderness strongly resonate with me. Even more
| so, when it comes to children.
|
| It's a bliss to not have to deal with complexity.
| dash2 wrote:
| So here is a particularly unhelpful argument pattern.
|
| > Today's experience of childhood, they wrote, was an "inner,
| solitary" affair, plagued by the proliferation of "obesity, anti-
| social behavior, friendlessness and fear."
|
| where "they" means a bunch of authors who wrote an open letter
| about modern childhood.
|
| Then there follows a large amount of stuff about what these
| metaphors mean, how they relate to previous bits of the history
| ideas, etc. The Noble Savage makes a predictable appearance.
|
| But there is _absolutely zero_ engagement with the authors '
| actual argument! Like, are kids getting fatter or not? Are kids
| suffering more from antisocial behaviour or not? Friendlessness?
| Fear? These are real factual questions, not tropes in some novel.
|
| In other words, this piece engages with vocabulary and metaphors,
| as a substitute for engaging with the argument. Not, in general,
| a good trade.
|
| I see this style of argument a lot in work derived from the
| humanities. I think it very rarely adds light to any debate.
| Perhaps it needs a name, so it can be pointed out, and when
| appropriate, mocked.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| I think you're presuming an argument that's actually not in the
| piece. The author obviously is bemused with the movement to
| unplug, but I don't think the author actually says it's bad -
| just that it's better to search for a healthy relationship with
| civilization and by extension the Internet. The piece is not
| about why you shouldn't unplug, it's an exploration of how we
| people can get the same benefits of unplugging without actually
| unplugging.
|
| If you come at it looking for an argument that has a beginning,
| middle, and an end, you're going to be frustrated but the piece
| is not making an argument, it is talking about a variety of
| ways that people can have a more healthy relationship with the
| Internet.
|
| I know for me the piece crystallized a lot of thoughts about
| how I do and don't choose to unplug. There isn't one single
| answer, it's a thousand little things about when I choose to
| leave the phone on my desk and go for a walk, or sitting on the
| train I leave the phone in my pocket and daydream.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Exploratory thought provoking, or thought-jamming mental
| static? I'd call it the second masquerading as the first;
| perhaps through honest confusion on the author's part; never
| having been exposed to the actual examples of mind opening
| writing.
|
| My cynicism says that bullshit of this quality had to be paid
| for and carefully constructed.
|
| Ya want wilderness? come see my swamp. What the snakes don't do
| the coyotes will finish. I love the place and wouldn't be
| anywhere else.
| drooby wrote:
| I like it. It seems though that you're defining a strawman
| argument. Perhaps though this is slightly different in that the
| opponents argument is completely avoided?
|
| Cloudman argument:
|
| An intentionally avoided proposition that is set up because it
| is easier to defeat than the opponents real argument.
| ssivark wrote:
| Great observation. I personally find such indirection extremely
| frustrating.
|
| I propose "aboutism" as a name -- since such articles end up
| talking "about" things, rather than addressing them directly.
| rambambram wrote:
| I get what you mean. Half way through the piece I couldn't take
| it anymore. So much eloquent words saying essentially nothing.
| A name for this? I'm in! Why? Because this kind of article is
| extra harmful due to it's covert nature. One needs to read it
| before one realizes there's hardly an argument.
|
| That is, if you want to read a piece with a clear argument. On
| the other hand, pieces that just take an (opposite) stand and
| make me think (like this article did) definitely are valuable
| to me.
| mind-blight wrote:
| I'm really frustrated by this article. I spent the first half
| arguing with my screen and getting more and more irritated at
| the condescending critiques of people trying to manage
| unhealthy screen use. And I really liked the second half,
| which made me even more irritated with the first.
|
| Her main argument is that focusing on individuals undermines
| our ability to change the systemic problems out current
| technology creates. Leaving social media may help your mental
| health, but we still live in a world where social media
| negatively impacts many of the people around us. We're still
| impacted by that system even if we're disconnected from our
| screen.
|
| The second half argues that we have to look for communal and
| systemic change to make the systems better, which I agree
| with. I just disagree that that can't coincide with
| individuals also choosing to change what they can about their
| immediate environment
| meiji163 wrote:
| This article is a great example of what I'd call "mindless
| problematization" From what I've seen, this is you're trained
| to do in modern humanities departments. Take any seemingly
| obvious claim and "problematize" it.
|
| It's telling that they do not say "nuance" it, rather it has to
| be made a _problem_. e.g. if you think "wilderness" is a thing
| you subscribe to a racist idea for "white male elites", if you
| think social media is affecting childhood development you're
| just caught up in the religious fervor of "scientized version
| of the biblical story of the Fall".
|
| A whole lot of BS gets written this way, because these
| arguments have the superficial air of being subversive and
| contrarian.
| ad-astra wrote:
| In some cases it reminds me of my fundamentalist religious
| upbringing where everything was "of the world" and even
| trivial things like Pokemon, Christmas Trees, and Teletubbies
| were viewed as problematic and sinister
| alexpotato wrote:
| In Mary Roach's book "Packing for Mars" [0], in the section
| where they talk about the psychological impact of going into
| space, there is an interesting anecdote about the history of
| trains. As trains began to become more commonplace, there
| were concerns in England that the speed at which trains
| traveled would cause passengers to panic given that humans
| had never experienced both the speed and the motion parallax.
|
| This of course, all turned out be for nought and was best
| summarized by a Russian cosmonaut in the book "This is
| problem only concern for psychologists".
|
| 0 - https://amzn.to/3yMBtVb
| ghostbrainalpha wrote:
| 'the superficial air of being subversive and contrarian.'
|
| I like this idea, its a great filter for BS.
| LeftHandPath wrote:
| Spot on. "Meretricious" is the ten-dollar word for this.
| pgcj_poster wrote:
| The author is not arguing that online life is better for
| kids/people than offline life. She's arguing that it's
| unhelpful to frame the problems of modern life as a result of a
| departure from an Edenic "offline" or "wilderness" -- that just
| as white explorers in North America were not really entering an
| uninhabited wilderness, people who grew up with live TV and
| landlone phones were not really disconnected -- that the
| solution is not to temporarily "return" to an unspoiled
| wilderness that never really existed, but to bring ordinary
| life into alignment with the natural world -- not to go on an
| occasional digital detox that many of us can't afford, but to
| build an online life that doesn't hurt our self-esteem,
| attention spans, etc. She's tracing the history of the concepts
| of "wilderness" and "offline" so that she can deconstruct them
| as categories.
|
| In general, very few important disagreements are actually about
| facts. More often, they're about the framing of the issue
| itself. Is spending on social services "Big Government," or is
| it a "social safety net"? Are trans women as unfortunate women
| trapped in male bodies or weird men who enjoy pretending to be
| women? Is restricting immigration more like redlining a
| neighborhood or asking an unwanted guest to leave your home?
| These questions are about attitudes and interpretations, not
| facts. If you try to change someone's mind on such questions by
| presenting then with data, you're likely to fail. People who
| work with words and narratives intuitively understand this;
| people who work with data and numbers do not.
| dash2 wrote:
| > In general, very few important disagreements are actually
| about facts.
|
| I disagree. In fact, behind each of your examples are real
| empirical questions. This form of thinking just hides them.
| There are real questions about what makes people want to
| change sex; about the effects of immigration; and about the
| effects of social spending.
|
| It's perfectly true that people's minds are hard to change,
| and that they can be swayed by the manipulative techniques of
| advertising and PR. The jump from that to accepting it as a
| valid, or the only possible, form of argument harms public
| debate and democracy, and we end up in the cynical, post-
| truth world of Peter Pomerantsev - or Trump - where all there
| is is competing narratives.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| I've always used the term "sophist" for this, although the
| dictionary definition of the term seems to have drifted
| slightly from the meaning it held in classical antiquity. Per
| Wikipedia,
|
| _" In the second half of the 5th century BC, particularly in
| Athens, "sophist" came to denote a class of mostly itinerant
| intellectuals who taught courses in various subjects,
| speculated about the nature of language and culture, and
| employed rhetoric to achieve their purposes, generally to
| persuade or convince others. "Sophists did, however, have one
| important thing in common: whatever else they did or did not
| claim to know, they characteristically had a great
| understanding of what words would entertain or impress or
| persuade an audience." Sophists went to Athens to teach because
| the city was flourishing at the time. It was good employment
| for those good at debate, which was a speciality of the first
| sophists, and they received the fame and fortune they were
| seeking."_
|
| from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophist
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| For the noJS and text-mode crowd:
|
| https://archive.md/bH0bn
| hidden-spyder wrote:
| It's no-JS but gives me a Google Captcha?
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Thanks for the heads-up, I didn't know that was a thing at
| archive.md :(
| have_faith wrote:
| That was very difficult to read for some reason. The author
| quotes a lot of other peoples definitions of wilderness, online,
| offline, digit escapism, etc, but I'm struggling to understand
| the authors intentions. Does she recommend that I not view
| excessive time spent online as negative or escaping to spaces
| that remove it as positive? Should I view my own preferences for
| the outdoors as an extension of my white-male-ness instead of a
| pursuit of individual happiness?
| the_optimist wrote:
| This is the high art of "phd word salad." Painted with precious
| oils, yet each topic is given a casual canvas slap. The result
| is not a diagram.
| sulam wrote:
| The article is saying that offline/online is like
| wilderness/civilization -- a classification that stratifies
| experiences and the their availability along moral lines as
| opposed to pragmatic choices. She also makes the point that it
| divides along individualistic vs communal lines of thinking,
| where being alone is equated with being 'pure'.
|
| For instance, the comment about not wanting to have to choose
| between being connected to social media and feeling bad vs not
| being connected but feeling better is a clear reference to the
| influence of apps like Facebook and Instagram, where research
| has shown that people tend to feel worse after using them (I'm
| probably over-simplifying here). If you think in terms of
| online as "spoiled" and offline as "unspoiled", it makes you
| less likely to imagine that online experiences can be improved.
|
| I'll also give a personal example. I love to go backpacking and
| I have been able to take my children with me on my last few
| trips. My oldest wanted to bring a Kindle, which I was fine
| with. Some people gave me grief about it because I was letting
| them bring a "screen" on a backpacking trip. This seems weird
| to me - within a backpacking context a Kindle is lighter and
| more useful than a book in almost every way (can't be used as
| tinder in an emergency but that's about the only disadvantage).
| If you're not willing to bring technology into backpacking
| because it somehow "spoils" things, then I would like to draw
| your attention to all those high priced synthetic fiber
| clothing, dehydrated foods, and the plastic, aluminum and
| carbon fiber structural components that people happily use to
| improve their trip. My Garmin InReach does not spoil the trip
| for me because I can communicate with my wife, it makes it
| safer and more pleasant for my kids.
| stevesearer wrote:
| I preemptively mourn that at some point people will be able
| to text, stream shows, and have video calls from even the
| deepest wilderness areas.
|
| It is great that there are official wilderness areas that are
| off limits to technology such are drones and even bicycles. I
| kind of wish there was a way to digitally fence those areas
| off to some degree as well though as a fellow inReach user I
| know how useful some tech can be.
| mind-blight wrote:
| I think this lament gets to the heart of the article's
| argument. The problem isn't that we'll eventually be able
| to connect everywhere. It's that being online is harmful or
| intrusive enough to need an escape.
|
| The call to action is too work towards a future of
| technology where we don't need to escape to improve our
| mental health and experience of nature.
| stevesearer wrote:
| When I leave my house to go to the grocery store I have
| to make an active concerted effort to not compulsively
| check my phone.
|
| When I head out to the wilderness it does not take the
| same level of active effort to not compulsively use my
| phone.
| mind-blight wrote:
| Same, and that gets to the heart of it. Out phones have
| been engineered to encourage constant novelty and
| engagement. That's a systemic issue. Leaving a phone
| behind is a individual solution. This article argues
| (eventually) for a systemic solution.
|
| The article fails by being condescending towards
| individual solutions instead of acknowledging them as a
| helpful stopgap
| rubylark wrote:
| Preventing wireless communication, even in wilderness areas
| seems like a bad idea. I remember a Reddit post many years
| ago (back when the concept of a internet post from the
| middle of nowhere was novel) from a bush pilot in Alaska.
| His plane had some sort of failure (not a crash) that left
| him stuck in the wilderness. But he had satellite internet
| that not only let him call for rescue, it let him pass the
| time by posting about the experience on Facebook and
| Reddit.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| > can't be used as tinder in an emergency but that's about
| the only disadvantage
|
| If the battery's charged, it's better than tinder! Although
| you'd only get one try.
| csbartus wrote:
| What a great design!! We need more! That would make the web a
| better place.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Mostly just a blank page for me before using archive.is,
| doesn't seem so great.
| LamdbaMamba wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand the point or argument of this article
| at all. It reminds me of the sort of essays I would write in
| English class, pouring words on a page hoping that it would sound
| profound enough to impress my teacher.
|
| Besides, it's not like I have a responsibility to act in a way
| that's best for society at large. Sure, by 'logging off' and
| trying to spend some time offline perhaps I am distracting myself
| from a broad social goal of trying to find a way to make the
| 'online' world one that makes us happier as opposed to periods of
| binge and detox.
|
| But I know that spending time offline makes me much happier, and
| it's a way I can learn how to manage my personal online
| experiences in a way that will make me happier still. That's not
| wrong, the same way living in a city but spending some time
| hiking in the 'wilderness' is not wrong.
| disadvantage wrote:
| > Now, it is a remedy to the abstract category of technology --
| screen light and digital noise
|
| Well, I have a blue light filter screen protector, wear blue
| light filtering glasses, and have the blue light filter turned on
| in iOS & Android.
|
| As for 'digital noise', I train my feeds to be high signal, and
| rarely do mindless scrolling, but prefer _mindful_ scrolling
| instead.
| dwabyick wrote:
| I wish this article acknowledged the problems with connection
| earlier on. Clearly the author can focus and reflect online, but
| many (often) cannot. I like the idea of improving how we spend
| our online time, but the reality is disconnection is also really
| beneficial. Time in nature is beneficial. Real-world contact is
| beneficial, and that is becoming more difficult for many to
| achieve.
| Veen wrote:
| Somewhat interestingly, this publication is sponsored by Snap,
| Inc. (The company behind Snapchat).
| natestemen wrote:
| Just to clarify, from their about page
| (https://reallifemag.com/about-real-life/) they have the
| following
|
| > Three years ago, Snapchat offered to support the work I do as
| a sociologist, primarily applying social theory to social
| media. In these past three years, the company has also paid for
| the venue for a conference I co-founded and chair called
| Theorizing the Web, without asking for any editorial input or
| control. Snapchat is now funding Real Life, and we have
| editorial independence as well. The support means we can focus
| on writers and writing rather than clicks and shares. At the
| same time, there are inherent complexities attached to being
| funded by a company in the field of what we're publishing
| about, sometimes critically. But the content will have to speak
| for itself. We believe in this project, and we're doing this
| because we think and care about the things you'll see discussed
| on the site: identity, power, privacy, surveillance,
| relationships, beauty, to name a few.
| waylandsmithers wrote:
| > "Screen-Free Week," for example -- which invites participants
| to put down "entertainment screens" for seven days in May -- was
| formerly called "TV Turnoff Week," and was initially championed
| by an organization called TV-Free America.
|
| I had to miss the second to last ever episode of Seinfeld because
| my school participated in this and I'm still furious about it
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| _In early 2015, Twitter discovered that the Oxford Junior
| Dictionary had culled dozens of words associated with the natural
| environment. The new edition of the dictionary -- which cut terms
| like "acorn,""buttercup," and "kingfisher" in favor of adding
| "21st-century" terms like "broadband," "voicemail," "blog," and
| "cut and paste"_
|
| Why the fuck would a dictionary remove those?? This makes no
| sense.
| pm215 wrote:
| Because, as with all dictionaries except the absolutely massive
| complete editions, you can only put in so many words (this
| particular volume has 6,000 entries and is aimed at 7-8 year
| olds). In a related Guardian article somebody from the OUP says
| the selection criteria are: "acknowledging the current
| frequency of words in daily language of children of that age;
| corpus analysis; acknowledging commonly misspelled or misused
| words; and taking curriculum requirements into account". That
| is, times change and the things children are writing and
| reading about also change; dictionaries tend to follow, not
| lead.
| jaqalopes wrote:
| I'm a person who's very interested in "offline" and so was biased
| against this at the start, finding the main analysis that the
| concepts of wilderness and offline are "enmeshed" very undergrad.
| However I think the author brings it around to an interesting
| place, eg: True disconnection, like true
| wilderness, is an empty goal. Whether we have shunned social
| media or not, the internet does not cease to exist as a driving
| force in the world, any more than ecological systems cease to
| shape our lives the minute we reach the end of the forest trail
| and hop back in the car.
|
| I appreciate what the author is trying to do here and I agree
| that the idea of getting "all the way" offline is kind of silly,
| as though if I stopped reading books that would put an end to
| literature.
|
| However I think there is still something quite useful about the
| concepts of both wilderness and offline that the author
| downplays, namely that wild-ness and online-ness are spectrums.
| Wilderness isn't just a place with fewer people, it's a place
| that instead contains more of the things you can't get in, say,
| Manhattan, like bears and woodpeckers and natural springs and
| exceptionally fresh air. Just so, there is something about
| offline that isn't just the absence of electronics, but the
| feeling of quiet and human solitude that online necessarily
| destroys.
|
| Personally, I see no reason why the argument "most people are
| online and the world economy is inextricably digital" means that
| I can't personally log off. To the contrary, I think I appreciate
| being offline _more_ now that I 've spent years living online.
| Just so, I think I appreciate the beauty of nature and the
| ecosystems that ultimately sustain us _more_ after having lived
| most of my live in giant cities.
| unkulunkulu wrote:
| Offline is different than online, or maybe they're the same. I
| like having different experiences anyway so I don't care. I
| cannot change the world I can only choose.
|
| Nice words but why?
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(page generated 2021-12-21 23:01 UTC)