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My grandfather was a waterman on the Chesapeake Bay. Didn't graduate high school, didn't go to college. Worked on the water until a few months before he died.

After his death, my family went through his belongings to sort out what people wanted and what should be included in the estate sale.

In the living room, there was the obligatory wall-sized, floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. You probably know the one from your grandparent's house. Filled with the kind of books you'd expect: encyclopedia, book of the month, condensed versions of great books, random novels, et cetera.

Rifling through the first book, I noticed there were notes written in the margins. About every 5-20 pages. Sometimes short, sometimes longer. I smiled and carefully set the book aside.

But the next one had notes too. And the next. And the next. Almost every book in the entire bookshelf.

My grandfather was a quiet man by the time I knew him. Of the ten words over dinner sort. But whenever I find myself reflexively going through Facebook or whatever other quick fix the internet affords me, I imagine him coming in after a long day of physical work, opening a book to his bookmark, and reading and noting a few more pages. Every day.

Then I try to be more like that person.

This is nice story but how is this any different than looking at wikipedia for a bit, reading and making notes on a kindle, etc. Your grandpa sounds like the type to use tools for personal enrichment so shouldn't the tools not matter?

Wikipedia is a mile wide and an inch deep. Most of the world's useful knowledge isn't online (IMO.)

So where do you suggest this most useful knowledge lies?

These days most books have a copy online.

Most misses out on an enormous number (at least half the books on my shelves, and I'm no bibliophile.) Google's got them, even though they can't let us see them.

Check out Library Genesis [1]. Personally, the only thing I've trouble finding online are books written in other languages than English.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis

IMHO, Wikipedia is mile wide and half a mile deep. Apart from knowledge special to a particular thing, it contains pretty much everything. If you ever think it is not the case, it is certainly the place to put your additions to instead of your private bookmark.

I'll grant that Wikipedia has certainly gotten better. (And continues to do so!)

But it still tends to have large blind spots where the source is (a) pre-digital or (b) of interest to a relatively small total number of people.

Try heading to your local library or a used book store (Goodwill works in the US), find a technical or history book older than ~1980, then attempt to find the content in Wikipedia. Especially in history, the hit rate isn't good.

> the place to put your additions to instead of your private bookmark

My private bookmarks won't get deleted by a zealous reviewer five minutes later.

It can be hard to contribute to Wikipedia without enmeshing yourself in the politics of it to protect your contributions from deletionists. This gets covered every few months on HN.

I really value Wikipedia but I have to agree. Also I agree that most of the world's useful knowledge isn't directly accessible online - though most of it may now be said to exist in some digital format, somewhere.

In the late 19th century there was a strong drive in academic history towards the idea of "total history": comprehensive accounts of everything that mattered from the beginning of recorded history to the current day. All these incredibly well educated German historians started outputting 20 volume world histories.

And no-one except a historiographical specialist would read them now.

They drank an ocean and pissed a cup.

It matters when the tool you're using doesn't respect your privacy, yea.

Hyperlinks. You need self-discipline to stay on one page.

Because the interface influences the way your brain processes the information.

Reading a book != reading Wikipedia != watching an educational film

Judging by most of the comments on this article I'd say that people feel like we've lost something in the latter two.

I think that this an overstated case. Back in the "dawn" of online education I worked for a university where one school was swapping to using iPads for all their reading. You sign up you get and iPad with all your textbooks on it.

Initial polling was that students hated it from the get go. They wanted, needed textbooks. At the end of the first semester they did the polls again and, surprise, nobody wanted to go back to dead trees. Books are expensive and text search is amazing.

We switched to laptops for every student when I was in high school. I'd say that, even pre-Facebook, it was a boon to increasing computer knowledge, a decrease to attention span, and about equal on educational outcome.

I loved being able to play ROMs during class, but the difference between looking at information on the screen and in a book? Not fundamentally different.

I'd say where digital information shines is in post-secondary education where you're beginning to perform self-directed research, for the reasons you mentioned. And some students have a modicum of self control by then... ;)

Long time facebook addict. I was the kinda person that would check FB every 10 minutes -- yeah, it was a huge issue for me. I could tell it was effecting my work and job.

6 weeks ago I had my wife change my facebook password and log me out of everything. There was a genuine feeling of loss and withdrawal for the first 2 weeks. I felt very disconnected and felt like I was missing out. I asked my wife to sign me in on Sunday. I had 100+ notifications and a few messages. Only 1 direct message and 1 direct post - both from the same person about the same topic. Everything else was just junk.

It turns out that Facebook was providing nothing of value to me. It wasn't even connecting me to friends in a meaningful way. 2 messages relevant to me in 6 weeks. It is mind blowing how much time I was spending reading status and linked articles and looking at photos. Just wasting time and energy.

I am the same way with HN, Reddit, or news sites. Every day I don't check the site, I feel like I am missing out on some important indispensable news and information.

If I may ask, have you stopped using Facebook / changed how you use it now? Asked your wife to keep you logged out maybe?

I know what you mean with the irrelevant notifications. Lots of tweaking which notifications I get--still more than I'd like but it's an improvement. No games, no groups, no pages.

I've mostly stopped using Facebook. Besides that last check on Sunday, I haven't used it since. I still have an account, but I don't know the password. I could easily reset it myself, but its just enough friction to make it a pain. I also now have someone accountable to (my wife) and that helps a lot as well.

I'm not on FB, and haven't been for years. My problems are Netflix/Prime and news (Google News feed and Hacker News primarily). I'd literally LOVE a smartphone which limited me to maps/navigation, camera, minimal search (for looking up crucial info on the go), email, SMS, and Slack. Oh, and Kindle. I HATE that my damn smartphone makes it so easy to fritter my life away. And that the only alternative seems to be completely dumb phones and carrying around a separate camera and GPS device. Ugh. I don't want a dumb phone, or a feature phone, I just want a dumber smartphone. And hell, I'd pay what I paid for my Pixel (unlocked) for one. I want something which values my time, privacy, and life as much as I objectively do...But am, apparently, too weak to govern myself.

My issues suck because I can't simply have my wife reset my password. I can't remove the Google News feed. And as long as I have a browser I can see Hacker News. Sigh.

I have a love-hate relationship with the crappy smartphone i do have. Like you, i often read HN in dead moments but don't have FB, but find the smartphone useful for directions or quick picture snapping. I'm however still strongly considering going back to a dumb phone (although i've been saying that for about the full 1.5 years i've owned this smartphone) and to hell with the random pictures. Our grandparents seemed perfectly happy and could only capture a 24 roll of family photos every now and then (unless they were journalists or whatever, but you get my drift). I don't know. Part of me does fear i'd miss out on social events or get lost or not be able to take that one picture or...

Probably i should just have more self-control...

Maybe something like FocusMe to dumb your phone down by blocking things? It says the app is free. I haven't used this particular blocker but I've used a different one and it's great. No willpower needed.

https://focusme.com/

> I have two young kids - pre-fb age - and they already have some questionable habits on my wife's iPhone - as soon as it comes out, they wanna look at pictures, go on youtube and fight over it. The second they see it...

This is also 100% true of my dogs. As soon as there's a new dog toy in the house and one shows interest the other will begin to fight over it. There are some deeply-ingrained mammalian social behaviors that have nothing to do with technology, and won't change anytime soon. I'd be wary of blaming a phone ahead of instinct (though blaming businesses for exploiting those instincts is a bit different).

That said, I commend your efforts to try to maintain a happy medium for your family, that's really the best way to address these sorts of issues.

I'd be careful of making any conclusions of behavior if you remove the animals from the natural environment.

I've semi-wild street dogs in that really are not that interested in any new toys that are around the house, but they are clearly following and learning from each other on other things. I'd say this is one of the traits they have in common with us.

What they are mostly concerned is food, sex and fighting over territory with other dogs. When the puppies play the main function of it seems very clear to me (future battles). The dogs belonging to the same pack do not often fight each other since the established hierarchy is rather clear.

a) The biggest instigator by far is a dog we adopted at the age of 3 who was abandoned in the street and then spent another 9 months in the dog shelter. Each dog's mileage will vary.

b) I've worked with kids for years, and many display the exact same behavior, regardless of the particulars of the "shiny object". Fighting does not necessarily mean a physical altercation.

c) I've studied animal behavioral psychology, and have yet to find anything I learned that fails to apply to humans. We vary by degree, not kind.

I've noticed largely the same thing. I tried to purge it by unfollowing / hiding every major news source without blocking friends because MOST of the negative stuff in my feed was attached to links in those news sources.

The algorithm knows how to make you engage though. I'd get lost in really good debates with people over topics that we've discussed a before...and it just struck me about what a time sink it is because no matter how much we discuss things, nothing changes. All I'm doing it generating ad traffic for Facebook because they're keeping me engaged.

It's a lot easier to like a baby picture and walk away than it is to walk away from a topic you like discussing (and there are a lot of political topics that I like discussing). One of my good friends is a teacher and at some point in our discussion I made an observation that I'd never really thought of before (that had some negative implications)...and he did not take it well and got really, really upset with me. I apologized by phone, we cleared it up...

But at that point it really just finally hit the "enough is enough" point where nothing good is coming from this activity anymore...and I was done. And it's been great...except that now I notice how much time other people spend on it a lot more.

Regarding the observation point of contention, we were discussing the limits of current attempts at implementing school choice where schools had to opt in rather than giving people the money to go wherever they wanted. I realized that by including any type of religious name in a school, it basically legalized discrimination against poorer families since government funds wouldn't allow them to attend those schools. Struck me as an angle of the discussion I hadn't considered before and he took it as implying that he endorsed discrimination against those families - which would understandably upset anyone.

Yeah, I stopped using facebook completely, because I suddenly realised I was in the habit of checking it absolutely everywhere, no matter what I was doing. It was a habit, whenever my hands were free I would open my phone and go on facebook, even though it was always the same re-shuffled crap, negative news that were making me feel like shit, I'm normally a very positive and optimistic person, but I realised that absolutely nothing coming out of facebook was positive. Not a single thing. So I just said to myself - show some strong will, and stop using it. And I did. But god, it was hard for the first 2 weeks, then the compulsion started to go away.

And yes, I was exactly same as you - started programming around 12-13 years old, but when you stopped using the computer you would go and do other things. Now it seems to be literally everywhere.

I wonder about what my toddler thinks of my/my wife's smartphone habits, and the extent that we can permanently shape her attitudes toward technology before she reaches school age.

Children learn some things from peers, no matter what their parents do. For example, kids whose peers speak Standard American English will do the same, and will generally not have an accent — even if their parents do. In this case, it is probably a 'good' thing that kids are picking up skills from friends instead of parents.

But consider smartphone usage. Even if I could, by words and actions, impart to my toddler that technology is a tool and not a master to be heeded, does this attitude stand a chance of sticking once she starts school and sees older/richer kids with smartphones? What are effective strategies for inoculating against influences that you know will be coming?