The Great Offline

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.

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.

There is a clear argument here, and it is repeated multiple times. I have no idea why its so difficult for anyone to see.. here’s one:

> rather than encouraging us to think about the systems that determine the nature of our engagement with online platforms in the first place. In shifting the emphasis from what one is doing with the screen to how often one looks at it, we also shift the emphasis away from the worlds we are building…

That distinction right there is obvious, important and yet constantly and repeatedly overlooked. For a lot of us, our parents told us that being on the computer was a waste of time and why don’t you go outside? The current approach to deal with “too much technology” as implemented by Screen Time on Apple devices counts all screen time as the same. I see my friends doing some form of digital detox often as well because they don’t understand this distinction.

I don’t know why this turns off so many engineers, but it seems to be predicated on pattern matching off vocabulary. The sentence you quoted is refuted by the argument. No amount of statistics can fundamentally untangle the causation between A. hours spent online and B. obesity, antisocial behavior etc. That is why it’s important to build clear conceptual models before asking the “factual questions” you want. As a thought experiment maybe just consider how exactly you would go about getting factual answers to these questions in a reasonable time and budget without any theory to guide you, only data. I don’t believe its even possible. The replication crisis in psychology should also demonstrate how purely empirical methods can fail.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's no-JS but gives me a Google Captcha?

Mostly just a blank page for me before using archive.is, doesn't seem so great.