The Useless Agony of Going Offline | Hacker News Reader

The Useless Agony of Going Offline

newyorker.com

23 pointsaf160909 comments

I was overwhelmed just reading the initial description of the author's device/media usage. My personality doesn't allow me to be fully engaged with that much external input at the same time - it just shuts me down.

Couldn't agree more. Made me wince to imagine it.

I'd be curious if the OP really is "better informed" or just imagines he is. What value does knowing what year an obscure book was published provide for his life in general?

Or is it another method of entertainment, as ephemeral as the football game on the TV?

> What value does knowing what year an obscure book was published provide for his life in general?

Agreed in general. In this specific case I should point out, however, that Things Fall Apart (1958) may be the most widely read piece of African literature. It's regularly assigned in college literature courses and is selling better on Amazon than either War and Peace or Neal Stephenson's Seveneves (to pick two that people here may have heard of.)

I learn something new every day. Oh, the irony. :D

I think this guy completely missed the point. He mixes distractions from real research work. "Being informed" is a vague phrase. Sometimes information consumption is like eating junk food - it can be too much. In case of author, it feels like a solid case. Unless he uses social networks for real work - I cannot see how reading Facebook can be productive or relevant to work.

In the end, this article felt like self defence, or even more like rationalization on the topic. But I must admit that it forced me to think about this topic a little.

I think my experience would line up with the author's fairly well if I tried something similar. Honestly I know I spend too much time on social media and whatnot, but even before the Internet I spent a lot of time on my computers so if I were to unplug from everything completely I'd just be bored and miserable.

Maybe I'm not the most enlightened individual ever but I don't see how spending your free time idle or reading books instead of screens is somehow intrinsically better than using technology how you feel it benefits you the most.

To be blunt the whole concept to me reeks of "back in my day..."

I think the best take-home from the article is simply that your screen time is a problem only if it's distracting you from the things you'd rather be doing.

If you're spending the majority of your Internet time researching a specific topic, or interacting with others online about that topic, or something you're specifically interested in, then there's not really a problem. As you say, the alternative is spending time offline focused on something else, and neither online nor offline is inherently bad.

It's only bad if you're online and you want to be e.g. watching a Coursera video or having a language lesson over Skype, etc., and the incoming Facebook chat messages, tweets and Slack notifications are constantly pulling away from your intended purpose.

my biggest gripe is that social media makes human interaction shallow and mechanized. always reminds me South Park episode where Steve Jobs is unsuccessfully trying to teach his humancentipad to actually read.

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