why i'm not letter-writing this year, part 2: the sad tale of the lost comments

In my previous post, I mentioned that I'm not participating in Write for Rights this year, for the first time in more than 15 years. This decision propelled me to introduce Write for Rights as a library program, which spreads the word, generates lots of letters, and helps me justify (to myself) not writing.

The real reason behind this decision: I have three consecutive days off from work, and I had slated them for restoring The Lost Comments. And once again, my plans for The Lost Comments have come to naught.

* * * *

The lost comments

In 2020, a series of unfortunate events led to the disappearance of thousands of comments from this blog. 

Allan believes (insists) that this is his fault. He is definitely not responsible, as the trouble began with a very stupid, careless error on my part. But really, despite whatever errors we both made, the whole mess exists because Blogger's backup and restore system is a piece of crap. In fact, it is not really a backup system at all.

I won't recount the steps that led to this disaster. Suffice to say that in February 2020, all the comments on wmtc from July 2006 to February 2020 disappeared. These dates include peak wmtc, when -- in the golden age of the blogosphere -- a community of up to 50 or more commenters regularly posted their thoughts on this blog. Lively, fun, and interesting discussions often took place in comment threads. 

The May 2019 file

I have a Blogger export (.xml) file from May 2019, that, if properly restored, would reduce the comment gap from more than 13 years to nine months -- nine months when comments weren't even that active.

However, the May 2019 Blogger .xml file is corrupted and will not upload. I've created various test blogs, and can import other .xml files, but not that one. And -- an important note -- none of the .xml files have ever imported comments. None. Ever.

An additional issue

After the February 2020 disaster, Allan was able to restore all the deleted posts, but their URLs had changed. This means internal links no longer work, except for posts on the "greatest hits" page, which I manually fixed. It also means that The Lost Comments now had no associated post to be attached to. The text of those posts still exists -- but the posts themselves, with their unique URLs, no longer exist. So the comments couldn't be restored to their original posts, regardless of Blogger's backup capabilities.

No help

Blogger's Help Community has been useless. Several people made some semblance of trying to help, but their answers made it clear that they hadn't read my post and weren't willing to engage on any but the most superficial level. I realize that the problem may not be fixable -- but no one came anywhere close to even trying.

My obsession

Since the comments disappeared in February 2020, I've been periodically obsessed with trying to restore them. I have a post in drafts titled "the lost comments of wmtc: making peace with blogger". There is only that title. I never wrote the post because I never made peace with it.

I now export/backup wmtc more regularly than I used to, and I periodically try to import the May 2019 .xml. I know that's supposed to be the definition of insanity, but it is also the definition of hope.

The plan

Earlier this year, I decided I would copy/paste the comments from the May 2019 file into the appropriate posts. I created a gmail account for this purpose, and I identified December 25-27 as The Comment Project. I don't celebrate Christmas, and three consecutive days off seemed like the perfect opportunity -- perfect enough that I gave up this year's W4R.

My plan was to copy all the comments on a post, open a new comment, paste in the original comments as one long comment, and submit. This seemed totally doable.

Until I opened the .xml file.

I had assumed that comments would appear after each post -- post, comments, post, comments, and so on. Bzzzt. The .xml file contains, in this order: the blog template, all the posts, all the comments.

Comments are not identified according to the post they were associated with, nor with the date of that post, but by the dates of the comments themselves. So if people were coming back to a thread and posting over several days, which is very typical, those comments would be spread out over several dates, and have no identifier to show which post they belonged with.

This may seem obvious to people who regularly work with .xml files, but it was news to me. Very, very unwelcome news.

I tried anyway

Call it tenacity, or stubbornness, or compulsion, it doesn't much matter. I have trouble giving up. 

Allan and I copied the entire .xml file into a Word file: 17,490 pages.

Allan then deleted the template and the posts, shrinking the file to just over 7,500 pages. (Allan had to do this, as my computer would have frozen and crashed.)

He then did some fancy find-and-replacing to make the blocks of comments easier to see.

But here's the thing. 

When this was a simple copy/paste job, I was willing to slog through it. But now there is decision-making involved. Reading, thinking, and decision-making. I simply do not have the bandwidth. The spoons. The energy.

Like most people who work full-time, my time outside work is limited, and I always feel that I don't have enough time to do the things I want to do. In addition, I have chronic illness that demands I manage my rest and energy levels. Do I want to use hours, days, weeks of my precious free time trying to determine what comments go where and pasting them in? No. I do not.

Still, I can't let go

Despite the realization that I don't want to devote the necessary time to it, I still mourn the loss of those comments, and I'm still considering chipping away at this project.

another insidious bit of the digital divide: access to customer service for smartphones only

We need another word for it.

The digital divide -- the gap between those with access to modern information and communication technologies and those without -- has been recognized since at least the 1990s. Attempts to narrow this gap are usually publicly funded, always operating from scarcity, or small concessions eked out of corporations. Either way, the bridges are tiny, flimsy, and often temporary. Untold numbers of people have been left behind.

Over time the digital divide has widened and deepened. The words digital divide are grossly inadequate, almost quaint. Digital canyon? Digital chasm? Right now it feels like a digital abyss.

Better living through apps -- or not

I recently stumbled on a bit of this gaping divide. I knew about this vaguely, in some abstract way, but now understand it more clearly: improved access to customer service for smartphone users. Sometimes, access to customer service only for people with smartphones.

I wasn't an early adopter of the smartphone. I like to add technology as I need it, not simply because it exists. I prefer not to fork over any more of my income to mega-corporations unless there's a demonstrable benefit in doing so. New technology should save me time or effort, or bring me joy, or why should I bother? So I do use a smartphone, but I apply this to the use of apps as well.

There are apps that simplify processes, so they're worth using. There are apps that make our lives easier. But many apps appear to be more for a company's access to me, rather than the reverse. For example, when I shop online, I prefer sitting at a computer, using full websites. It's easier to see products, read reviews, compare one company's offerings against another. Which of course is why companies want to drive us to their apps: once we're there, we're captive.

Customer service of privilege

Which brings me to what I recently learned. Perhaps I'm the last person on the haves side of the digital divide to discover this, but I've been astonished to learn what improved customer service I receive through apps.

I had a problem with a credit card, and needed to speak with someone. I called the phone number on the card and on the website. I navigated my way through the menu, went down the wrong path, and was cut off -- more than once. 

When I finally found the correct pathway, I was on hold for 50 minutes. Of course I had the call on speaker, and was doing other things while I waited, but still, I had to listen to the hold "music," and I was limited in what else I could do. 

When at last I spoke with a human, it turned out I would need another phone call to a different department. I asked the customer service rep for a more direct number, and was told: call through the app, you'll get through immediately. Now that is a reason to download and use an app. So I did. I called the bank through the app, and was speaking with a human in less than five minutes.

Some months later, I had a question about Aeroplan miles, which means calling Air Canada. Air Canada is renowned for poor customer service. The company has shred their workforce to the bone, so getting anyone to help you with anything is a nightmare. 

I tried finding the answer to my question online. Fruitless. 

Dreading the next step, I called the Aeroplan number and was on hold for two hours and never got through. I am not exaggerating: I am looking at my call history as I type this: 1 hour, 58 minutes. I gave up.

I then downloaded the Aeroplan app and had my answer in under five minutes. I didn't have to speak with anyone: the information I needed was available through the app, but not through the website.

This is terrible customer service. But beyond that, it's customer service as privilege. What happens to customers who don't have smartphones, who can't afford them, who don't know how to download an app? One would think that companies would still want those people's money, but apparently the savings in labour force outweighs the benefits of reaching potential customers.

It's disgusting. It's wrong. And it's only going to get worse. 

re-setting expectations: let's all stop apologizing for not being instantly available all the time

Long ago, when emailing first became widely used, I had several long-distance friendships that were conducted entirely by email. I noticed that almost every email began the same way: "Sorry I haven't written in so long..." or "Sorry I've been out of touch..." or something similar. That's when I instituted The Rule.

The Rule states: We write when we can, and we never apologize for how long it's been. Over the years and decades, I've shared The Rule with many friends. I use it still.

We need The Rule now more than ever. But we need to expand it, and tailor it to fit all aspects of our lives -- work, personal, and everything in between.

I'm not writing this because over-apologizing is a pet peeve (although it is). I'm writing this because immediacy is an issue of health and well-being.

Whatever happened to asynchronicity?

Email is asynchronous. Unlike a phone or video call, where all parties must be present at the same time, you write an email when you're available, and the recipient reads and replies when they're available. That's the beauty of email, and the best reason to use it.

It seems that most people have lost touch with this concept.

Depending on the content of any given email, an appropriate time to reply may be later the same day, or the following day, or several days or even weeks away. If the sender needs an answer immediately, they should call, or perhaps put "urgent" or "reply requested asap" in the subject line. Other than that, there should be no pressure to reply in the moment or the hour.

Yet my work inbox is filled with emails in which the sender apologizes for a "delay" of a day or two, or sometimes hours!

Of course, sometimes an apology is called for. Sometimes we've overlooked a deadline, or lost track of an email, inconveniencing someone or causing confusion, and we want to acknowledge that. So sure, occasionally apologies may be fitting. 

But most of the time, when someone apologizes for a delay, there is no delay. And every time we do this, every time we apologize for replying the following day or a few days later, we imply -- and we perpetuate the notion -- that we should all reply to email immediately.

These apologies create an expectation. They create urgency that usually doesn't exist.

Let's take personal responsibility for being less responsible

Our current world places huge demands on our lives. 

Work, family, friends, social media, activism or volunteering, news stories that are updated in real time. Many people have more than one job. Many people work in industries where they are expected to be always available. And far too many fields have drifted to the must-be-always-available model when that kind of urgency is actually not necessary. 

And there are so many channels of communication! Sometimes I know I need to respond to someone and can't remember where I saw their message. Work email? Teams chat? Text on work phone? Text on personal phone? Personal email? Facebook message (from someone who doesn't know or remember that I don't use Messenger)? Chat in a Zoom or Teams meeting? Or was that project that's using Slack, or is it Basecamp? I'm guessing I'm not the only person this happens to. 

There are always multiple demands pulling us in multiple directions. And the more we make ourselves always available, the more we feed expectations that we must be always available. Without even being fully aware of it, we may assume that if everyone else is always available, and we're not, we may appear absent, or uncaring -- or left behind. Maybe it will reflect on us poorly at work. Maybe it's FOMO. How many of our friends answer a group email or text an hour later, and apologize for being "late to the party"? 

Many of us struggle with focus and live with a constant nagging feeling of being always "behind". And being always available means we are constantly interrupting ourselves. 

We're working on project A, then we answer a text from person B, an email from projects C and D, then back to A, then more interruptions from projects S, T, and V, back to A, then a text reply from B. Person G sends a video, and we click. We scroll Facebook for a while, thinking we're taking a mental break, when in reality, we're just further fracturing our focus. What happened to project A, where was I? We feel frazzled, harried. We answer emails without fully reading and digesting them. We apologize to everyone. And on it goes. 

At the end of the day, we know we were busy, but wonder if we actually accomplished anything.

Helpful hints

There's no shortage of articles online about this, from empty clickbait to thoughtful books such as Cal Newport's Deep Work. (I wrote about Newport's book Digital Minimalism here.) All the writers analyze the same phenomenon and offer practical advice to slow and ultimately stop this runaway treadmill. But in the end, we are the only ones who can stop it in our own lives.

I have little scripts, prepackaged lines I can use to undermine the expectations of immediacy.

While "no is a complete sentence" can be very useful, in most work environments, we are expected to flesh that out a bit. Here are some responses I employ on a regular basis.

"This interests me, but my plate is full right now. Could I touch base with you in September?"

"What's your timeline for this? I can work on it towards the end of next week. If you need it sooner, I will have to pass."

"I can help you with that. Is it urgent? If not, can we talk tomorrow morning?"

"My plate is completely full right now. If this is a priority, I'll need some direction on what to put aside."

"I'd love to, but I'm afraid I don't have time / mental space / bandwidth right now."

Unless there is actual urgency, I use these replies no sooner than the day after I receive an email.

This doesn't mean I work solidly for hours without interruption! Far from it. A big part of my job is supporting staff, so I am constantly being interrupted. When colleagues call (as opposed to emailing) there is usually a good reason, and I must answer. Those are necessary interruptions, and they are frequent. That's why cutting down on the unnecessary interruptions is so important.

Is it urgent? Pick up the phone. If it's emailed, take some time.

The most important thing we can do in many situations is not respond immediately. 

Leave the email in your inbox. Let it sit there for a day, or two days, or a week, depending on the context. 

If, realistically, it may be a long time before you can deal with a particular email you can always use something like this.

Thanks for your email. Just wanted to let you know I've received your message, and will reply when I can.

Then continue doing what you were doing. And continue doing that as the next email comes in, and the next, and the next. 

If you can find a way to work without seeing email notifications, that's the best method of all, then you can set a daily time to go through your emails. Or three daily times. Or whatever works for you. But stop answering immediately and stop apologizing when you don't.

Fuck Inbox Zero

"Inbox Zero" -- keeping your inbox empty or almost empty every day -- is (a) a myth, (b) incredibly inefficient, and (c) totally unnecessary. If I answered every email as it arrived, I would spend my entire day answering emails and never get anything else done. Even Merlin Mann, the person credited with coining the expression "inbox zero", admits that it's no longer viable.

The "productivity experts" at Superhuman advise that every email can be dealt with in one of four ways -- delete, delegate, defer, or do. Hey, doesn't defer mean letting it wait? But even that triage takes time, and to what end? Perhaps there's a reason this "advice" (translation: product marketing) comes from something called Superhuman. We are human. We don't have to be super human.

Signature lines may help 

A number of people I know now include expectation re-setting in their signature lines. They have added things like:

I will answer your email in 24-48 hours. If your matter is urgent, please call.

Please note I work part-time and it may take some time to respond. Thank you for your patience.

I've seen people including compassionate responses to other people's self-expectations. These are all about returning to asynchronicity.

If you have received an email from me outside of your normal business hours, please feel no pressure to read or respond until you are working.

I work flexibly and may send emails outside normal working hours. Your immediate response is not expected. Please do not feel any pressure to respond outside of your own work schedule.

Signature blocks may be like signs: no one reads them. But it's worth a try.

I blame texting

I think the shift from email to texting (and other forms of instant messaging) is partly to blame for this perceived urgency. This drift from one technology to another is something I've yielded to out of necessity. But I really, really dislike it.

For one thing, I am a very fast keyboard typist, and using all my ergonomic equipment, I find typing on a keyboard infinitely easier than onscreen typing.

But beyond that, the reason I prefer email is the perceived immediacy of texting. When we receive text messages, we feel compelled to interrupt whatever we're doing to respond. We might decline a phone call and let an email sit, but a text seems to get answered immediately or not at all.

I get it. Email is work-related, news from organizations, customer service replies, and other business-y things. Text is more personal. And for quick questions, brief hellos, and "I'm running late," immediacy is important. But the immediacy of texting has amped up the sense of immediacy for everything else in our lives.

Be the change

We can each do our part in re-setting the expectation of immediacy. Two simple rules could go a long way.

1. Don't reply immediately. Let the email sit in your inbox, at least for one day.

2. When you do reply, don't apologize.

so many left behind: the ever-widening digital divide

Last year, while attempting to get a parking pass during our vacation -- without a phone, my phone having been fried by an update -- I got caught in circuitous and frustrating encounter with information and technology gaps.

About a year later, navigating the brave new world of do-it-yourself airport screening, I used quite a few resources -- skills, devices, time, and patience -- to find, navigate, and complete the covid requirements for both US and Canada cross-border travel.

I deal with technology every day, and I'm about as confident a tech user as you will find. Yet each of these experiences was complicated, time-consuming, and frustrating.

The digital divide is an abyss

How do people without digital skills get by? What happens to folks who can't navigate these mazes?

There are some analog workarounds, required by accessibility laws, but can you find them? How do you find them if you aren't online?

There are people you can hire to expedite these steps for you. But if you're not digitally literate, you probably can't find them and you almost certainly can't afford them.

There may be someone in your life who can ask for help. But what if everyone in your life is from a similar background and social standing, and also lack these skills?

If you're lucky, someone will suggest you go to the public library. You can try that, and hope that resources haven't been slashed to such an extent that no one has the time and focus to help you. (Remember the scene in "I, Daniel Blake", where other library users help Daniel get online?)

These not-really-options don't factor in the shame and embarrassment that, for so many people, comes with asking for help, and they certainly don't factor in anxiety, mental confusion, and the exhaustion of poverty.

The digital divide is not about age

In library school, we talked a lot about the "digital divide" -- the gap between those who have access to technology and those who don't. As time goes on, this gap has become a canyon, and it's getting wider and deeper all the time.

There's a mistaken impression that the digital divide is one of age, with seniors on the have-not side. This is an ageist assumption that should have been retired a long time ago. Baby boomers are in their late 60s and 70s now!

Research (in a US context) shows the percentage of tech users over 65 is still slightly lower than that of other age groups, but the gap is shrinking all the time. In Canada, the percentage of people over the age of 65 using the internet doubled between 2007 and 2016. Stats Can notes (emphasis mine):

The findings suggest that age is a primary determinant of Internet use among seniors, but that differences in educational attainment and other demographic characteristics are also important. . . .

Among young seniors with more advantaged characteristics, Internet use is presently at near-saturation levels and is comparatively high among their counterparts in older age groups as well. Among disadvantaged seniors, Internet use is far lower among younger seniors and sharply declines among older groups.

There's also an assumption that "young people" are somehow born knowing how to use technology. This assumption is even less valid than the one about seniors. Ask anyone who teaches in a low-income area.

Knowing how to use a smartphone and check Facebook does not constitute digital literacy.

None of us are born with skills. If you grow up in a home without internet access and computers -- or you don't even have a home to grow up in -- how would you become digitally literate?

The American Library Association defines digital literacy as "the ability to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, create, and communicate information, requiring both cognitive and technical skills." This includes:

How to type on a keyboard

How to use a basic word-processing program

How to save a document and how to find it later

How to search the internet – not Facebook. Indeed, understanding the difference between the internet and Facebook requires digital literacy. Facebook has capitalized on the general lack of digital skills by creating an environment that requires skills to leave

It's all the same divide

The digital divide is the same divide that plagues all aspects of our capitalist society. It all comes down to money.

For a time I worked in a library in one of the lowest-income areas of Ontario. Families would rush to the library after work -- because the children's homework was only available online.

Every day, I would watch in horror and frustration as children and teens would lose their work because they didn't know how to save a document, or didn't remember that their work wouldn't be saved on a public computer. Of course library staff tried to help, but there are many customers, not many staff.

Analog shouldn't be dead, but it is

Obviously, services of every kind have moved online. This has many positive impacts, as the internet has expanded our reach in ways unimaginable only decades earlier. But at the same time, analog options have disappeared, and this trend continues to accelerate and expand. Some more recent developments include:

Two-step verification, requiring internet access and a mobile phone. These are both expensive propositions, out of reach of many.

Needing an email address to open an email account. What do first-time emailers do? Librarians have collected some solutions, but most people don't have that information.

In Canada, printed tax forms are no longer available publicly. They are available by special request only.

To enter Canada from another country (including if you are Canadian), you must use an app. Not can use an app; you must use it. Using the app requires a truckload of embedded competencies: you have to scan your passport and upload your covid passport, among other things. Like most apps, there are recursive pieces, opaque bits, decisions to be made -- and frustration, including for the most adept users.

The analog tax: making a flight reservation or booking a rental car by phone costs more than booking it yourself online.

Pay-for-tech-help. Have you bought a TV lately? You can't just plug it in and watch TV. You need an app, an account, and -- if you're not careful and savvy -- you are giving a tech giant access to all your data. Without digital skills, chances are you can't even navigate the landing page, and think you have access only through the tech company's portal.

And of course, covid. As public schools went online, what happened to students without home internet access? Mostly, they disappeared.

This is a safety issue, as people without digital skills are infinitely more vulnerable to phishing and other fraud.

This is a poverty issue, as children from less advantaged families will fall ever-farther behind, until the gap is simply insurmountable to all but the extremely gifted. This is the creation of a new kind of underclass.

This is a labour issue, as companies find ever more ways to hire fewer people and force consumers to do unpaid work. You may be so accustomed to this that you don't even realize it's happened.

People used to answer the phone and ask "How may I direct your call?".

Self-checkout would have been unthinkable. Who wants to work as an unpaid cashier?

But more than anything, this is an issue of social exclusion. Those without digital skills are increasingly confined to a smaller range of options, and that sphere only continues to shrink.

I am not anti technology. I'm anti exclusion and anti poverty.

Those of us who use computers as part of our jobs, and are privileged to have leisure time, have picked up our digital skills over time, often barely registering that it was happening.

People who don't encounter computer skills on a regular basis, and whose use is limited to time in a public library -- or not all -- don't get the sustained, daily repetition that builds solid competencies. These may be tradespeople, people who work outdoors, or people who grew up in homes where parents did not use technology.

In a society that valued all people equally, it would not be difficult to change this. It would be complex and multifaceted, but we could significantly shrink the gap.

We would need:

Public-utility internet access. In 2016, the United Nations declared that access to the internet is a human right. In North America, this could be more closely achieved if internet access was a public utility, rather than a for-profit commercial concern.

Double or triple or quadruple funding for the public library, and use most of it for high-speed internet and public-use computers.

Require governments and companies to always retain analog options, and provide disincentives to do otherwise.

Require businesses to maintain minimum staffing levels at touchpoints that currently assume that everyone is DIY.

As a librarian, I am aware of many programs, funded by sources such as the United Way or directly from the province, that address these issues. They are excellent and important programs, but they are short-term, and very limited in scope and reach. They are a tiny drop in an ocean of need.

what i'm reading: digital minimalism: choosing a focused life in a noisy world

Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World is an essential book for our time. Newport argues -- quite persuasively -- that smartphones and their constant connection to social media are degrading our quality of life. He offers ample proof of this, and offers a plan that readers can use to break their smartphone and social media addictions.

Newport is not anti-technology. He's a professor of computer science and is not suggesting a return to pre-modern life. He acknowledges and enjoys the convenience that mobile phones and mobile computing have brought us.

His issue is strictly with the smartphone, which is purposely designed to foster dependence or addiction, and which now enables us to be connected to the chatter of social media at every waking moment.

Newport calls for us to be more intentional about how we use technology, to ensure we are cultivating rich lives offline, rather than let our digital lives swamp us. He simply wants us to make our own choices, instead of letting app designers make them for us. He writes:

One of the first things that became clear during this exploration is that our culture's relationship with these tools is complicated by the fact that they mix harm with benefits. Smartphones, ubiquitous wireless internet, digital platforms that connect billions of people—these are triumphant innovations! Few serious commentators think we'd be better off retreating to an earlier technological age. But at the same time, people are tired of feeling like they've become a slave to their devices. This reality creates a jumbled emotional landscape where you can simultaneously cherish your ability to discover inspiring photos on Instagram while fretting about this app's ability to invade the evening hours you used to spend talking with friends or reading.

We didn't sign up for this

Much of Newport's argument is framed around the issue of autonomy. Most of us didn't see the vast technological change of the digital age until it was upon us.

These changes crept up on us and happened fast, before we had a chance to step back and ask what we really wanted out of the rapid advances of the past decade. We added new technologies to the periphery of our experience for minor reasons, then woke one morning to discover that they had colonized the core of our daily life. We didn't, in other words, sign up for the digital world in which we're currently entrenched; we seem to have stumbled backward into it. 

This nuance is often missed in our cultural conversation surrounding these tools. In my experience, when concerns about new technologies are publicly discussed, techno-apologists are quick to push back by turning the discussion to utility—providing case studies, for example, of a struggling artist finding an audience through social media, or WhatsApp connecting a deployed soldier with her family back home. They then conclude that it's incorrect to dismiss these technologies on the grounds that they're useless, a tactic that is usually sufficient to end the debate.

The techno-apologists are right in their claims, but they're also missing the point. The perceived utility of these tools is not the ground on which our growing wariness builds. If you ask the average social media user, for example, why they use Facebook, or Instagram, or Twitter, they can provide you with reasonable answers.

Each one of these services probably offers them something useful that would be hard to find elsewhere: the ability, for example, to keep up with baby pictures of a sibling's child, or to use a hashtag to monitor a grassroots movement.

The source of our unease is not evident in these thin-sliced case studies, but instead becomes visible only when confronting the thicker reality of how these technologies as a whole have managed to expand beyond the minor roles for which we initially adopted them. Increasingly, they dictate how we behave and how we feel, and somehow coerce us to use them more than we think is healthy, often at the expense of other activities we find more valuable. What's making us uncomfortable, in other words, is this feeling of losing control—a feeling that instantiates itself in a dozen different ways each day, such as when we tune out with our phone during our child's bath time, or lose our ability to enjoy a nice moment without a frantic urge to document it for a virtual audience.

We all know people who can't hold a face-to-face conversation without checking their phones, who interrupt conversations to answer texts or read out items from their feed, who seemingly cannot enjoy a moment without putting it on Facebook or Instagram. Most of us know people who are online almost every waking moment. Many people -- more than will ever admit it -- disappear into social media for large parts of their days. We also spend more time on social media than we realize.

NYU professor Adam Alter, whom I introduced earlier in this book, details a typical story of such underestimation in [his book] Irresistible. While researching his book, Alter decided to measure his own smartphone use. To do so, he downloaded an app called Moment, which tracks how often and how long you look at your screen each day. Before activating the app, Alter estimated that he probably checks his phone around ten times a day for a total of about an hour of screen time.

A month later, Moment provided Alter the truth: on average, he was picking up his phone forty times per day and spending around a total of three hours looking at his screen. Surprised, Alter contacted Kevin Holesh, the app developer behind Moment. As Holesh revealed, Alter is not an outlier. In fact, he's remarkably typical: the average Moment user spends right around three hours a day looking at their smart-phone screen, with only 12 percent spending less than an hour. The average Moment user picks up their phone thirty-nine times a day.

As Holesh reminds Alter, these numbers probably skew low, as the people who download an app like Moment are people who are already careful about their phone use. "There are millions of smartphone users who are oblivious or just don't care enough to track their usage," Alter concludes. "There's a reasonable chance they're spending even more than three hours on their phone each day."

We all have reasons that we use social media. Newport argues that although our reasons may be valid, and we do derive some value from social media use, the quality of our social media interactions is very low and adds little to our lives. When you drastically cut down your social media use, once you get accustomed to new habits, you may notice that you don't miss it. Whether you spend 20 minutes on Facebook or Instagram, or 40 minutes, or 60 minutes, you come away with the same low value. And for many people, those shallow, low-value interactions have gradually come to replace more meaningful interactions.

In a section about "solitude deprivation" -- the name describes the problem -- Newport writes:

A good way to investigate a behavior's effect is to study a population that pushes the behavior to an extreme. When it comes to constant connectivity, these extremes are readily apparent among young people born after 1995—the first group to enter their preteen years with access to smartphones, tablets, and persistent internet connectivity. As most parents or educators of this generation will attest, their device use is constant. (The term constant is not hyperbole: a 2015 study by Common Sense Media found that teenagers were consuming media—including text messaging and social networks—nine hours per day on average.) This group, therefore, can play the role of a cognitive canary in the coal mine. If persistent solitude deprivation causes problems, we should see them show up here first.

And this is exactly what we find.

My first indication that this hyper-connected generation was suffering came a few years before I started writing this book. I was chatting with the head of mental health services at a well-known university where I had been invited to speak. This administrator told me that she had begun seeing major shifts in student mental health. Until recently, the mental health center on campus had seen the same mix of teenage issues that have been common for decades: homesickness, eating disorders, some depression, and the occasional case of OCD. Then everything changed. Seemingly overnight the number of students seeking mental health counseling massively expanded, and the standard mix of teenage issues was dominated by something that used to be relatively rare: anxiety.

She told me that everyone seemed to suddenly be suffering from anxiety or anxiety-related disorders. When I asked her what she thought caused the change, she answered without hesitation that it probably had something to do with smartphones. The sudden rise in anxiety-related problems coincided with the first incoming classes of students that were raised on smartphones and social media. She noticed that these new students were constantly and frantically processing and sending messages. It seemed clear that the persistent communication was somehow messing with the students' brain chemistry.

Of course, there may or may not be a connection between the sharp rise of anxiety in young people and smartphone use: a correlation does not indicate a causal relationship. But a correlation does mean it's worth thinking about and exploring. Because really, can spending nine hours a day connected to social media be healthy?

A potential solution: a values-based philosophy

In Newport's views, a few "life hacks" and a little willpower are inadequate tools to address this issue. He offers a program -- first, a foundation of values, then a set of principles derived from those values, then a collection of practices that rest on those principles, and finally, a three-step process to put the system into place. This is one thing I like and admire about Newport's work: it is values-based. I've come to learn that good leadership, good work -- indeed, a good life -- stems from choices that are grounded in our own values. 

I also like Newport's recognition that a one-size-fits-all plan is impossible. He acknowledges our individuality and our unique needs, writing more from the perspective of "here are some things that are working for some people, which you may want to try," rather than a rigid prescriptivism. This helped me think about the specifics of my own life, and how I might become more intentional in my time use.

One reason I enjoyed this book so much is that Newport's attitude aligns very nicely with my own. I have always been very protective of my time, very intentional about how I use it. As a young adult, I earned my income three different ways, while cultivating my fledgling writing career, being an activist, and having a social life, and a romantic life. I needed to be highly disciplined about how I used my time. Once I developed good practices, I learned to be less strict with myself, but I never stopped being very intentional in how I spend my time.

From the publisher:

Digital minimalists are all around us. They're the calm, happy people who can hold long conversations without furtive glances at their phones. They can get lost in a good book, a woodworking project, or a leisurely morning run. They can have fun with friends and family without the obsessive urge to document the experience. They stay informed about the news of the day, but don't feel overwhelmed by it. They don't experience "fear of missing out" because they already know which activities provide them with meaning and satisfaction.

Now, Newport gives us a name for this quiet movement, and makes a persuasive case for its urgency in our tech-saturated world. Common-sense tips like turning off notifications, or occasional rituals like observing a digital Sabbath, don't go far enough in helping us take back control of our technological lives, and attempts to unplug completely are complicated by the demands of family, friends, and work. What we need instead is a thoughtful method to decide what tools to use, for what purposes, and under what conditions.

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A few years ago, I wrote about The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu. Wu traces the history of the "you are the product" business model, and ends with a impassioned argument against social media. Digital Minimalism is the perfect companion to The Attention Merchants. 

I highly recommend reading them both -- in succession, if possible. Wu's focus is on data mining: the massive corporate profits that are reaped through our personal information, along with our blithe disregard of the impacts of those transaction, the world it has created. Newport's focus is on the personal impacts, and how this trend has eroded and degraded our quality of life. 

 

Together, the two books build an extremely strong case against smartphones and social media.

Digital minimalism, personal edition

I notice that I ended my review of The Attention Merchants with this:

By the time I finished the book, I challenged myself to take a holiday from social media and reclaim my own attention span. Some of you know that because of my health issues, I struggle with low concentration. Perhaps the effects are exaggerated for me... or perhaps not. I want to spend less time with little bits of information scrolling in front of my eyes. When it comes to information, I want quality over quantity. I'm experimenting with it now, but I'm not sure I'll ever go back

Some of the changes I made did turn out be permanent (I said goodbye to Twitter), others did not (I re-installed the Facebook app on my phone). Now I'm assessing my current habits with Newport's advice in mind, and thinking about whether I want to go a few steps further.

My inability to concentrate has been, at times, a serious problem. In my late 30s, when I was first bringing my fibromyalgia under control, I learned that, on some days, it was best to stop trying. I'd go for a swim, make a cup of tea, and watch re-runs of "Xena: Warrior Princess". That was all my brain could handle. I seldom experience that severity any more, but I've learned to work in short bursts with frequent "micro breaks". 

This is why I came to social media relatively late, when most of my friends were already using it. I knew it would be a big time suck, a giant distraction. Believe it or not, when home internet was first introduced, I resisted signing up. I already felt so distracted and pulled in so many different directions -- and now the biggest distraction would be in the very place where I was trying to write. Having an offline place to write, separate from the connected computer, would have gone a long way.

I'm already practicing pieces of this philosophy

About than 10 years ago, I realized I wasn't reading as many books as I wanted, as I had done in the past. I was consuming a lot of information -- news stories, magazine features, blogs -- but I wasn't spending enough time with the purposeful, quiet reading that is a foundation of my enjoyment of life. No longer being able to read at night (because of fibro) had robbed me of my book-reading time, and I had gradually and unintentionally replaced that with reading online.

I wanted to read more books. To that end, I made two changes. I decided to consume less news, and to set aside time to read during the day. 

I immediately felt positive benefits. I felt happier! I felt calmer! I felt more like myself. I have continued that practice ever since. I am less informed on day-to-day happenings, but I don't care. I'm still informed on issues, which is what matters to me, and I am still aware of big stories, although I seldom know many details about them (and don't care). More importantly, I am reading more books. 

This is the perfect example of the kind of practice Newport espouses: reducing a digital habit in order to free up more time for an analog pursuit of greater personal value. 

Next steps

For now, I've decided not to adopt Newport's three-part plan, as I feel I'm already on the right path, but many of his examples of digital minimalist practices sparked ideas for my own life. I am making (and tracking) certain changes. When I assess whether these changes bring me more focus and contentment, I'll know if I want to go further. 

- I'm only using social media at designated times and for a designated duration.

- Since all my friends and family (except my partner) are now long-distance, I'm creating opportunities for more meaningful, quality interactions, rather than only seeing friends through social media or the occasional email thread (although email is an important piece of staying in touch). I've invited friends to have regularly scheduled Zoom calls, whether monthly or every other month.

- I got in a habit of keeping my phone handy while watching movies or series when I'm alone at night (on nights my partner is working). I'm in a few group text threads that are fun and important to me, and I'd end up chatting in the thread during shows. Now I'm trying to keep my phone charging in another room while I watch. This is the same dynamic that led me to give up game-threading, even though I valued and enjoyed our Red Sox community: I wanted to stop multi-tasking, and focus more on the game/movie/show. Multitasking makes me feel busy and scattered, the exact opposite of why I watch shows and baseball.

- We're going to try for one screen-free night each week, alternating between a music night and a board game night.

- I've identified my main analog enjoyments (besides reading) and I will ensure that I spend time with at least one, every week.

To the critics

I'd like to respond to two common criticisms of Digital Minimalism.

In many of Newport's examples, digital technology is used to facilitate some analog activity -- for example, watching YouTube videos to learn how to build something. Many people claim this is ironic and hypocritical. It is neither. 

Again, Newport is not anti-technology. He fully recognizes and enjoys the many ways technology can improve our lives. He merely wants us to use technology intentionally, in ways that improve our lives and strengthen real connection. 

In my own life, reading e-books, writing this blog, spending time with long-distance friends on Zoom or WhatsApp, and taking piano lessons online, are all part of digital minimalism -- the intentional use of technology to support activities that give my life meaning. I'm sure you have many examples in your own life.

The second criticism is that Newport himself does not use social media, and never has. People claim that someone who has never used social media is not qualified to write about it or make judgements. One-word response: research. Newport has done extensive research into how and why people use social media. He probably knows more about why people use social media than most people who use it.

subscribe-by-email is going away. bloggers, what are you going to use instead?

Blogger will soon stop supporting the function that allows readers to subscribe to blogs via email. This is occurring because Google is killing Feedburner. Like the deceased Google Reader, Feedburner is very popular, used by millions, but Google has not been updating it, and is now officially killing it.

There has been some concern that Google might kill Blogger, but over the past several years, they have been answering Blogger-related questions and upgrading some Blogger features. I am still waiting for an update that will allow me to restore 14 years of lost comments! But it does seem like that will happen, and it appears that Blogger will survive.

However, as of July of this year, Feedburner and Subscribe by Email will be no more.

I very much want to offer readers a subscribe-by-email option, and I also want to use that option for several blogs that I read. I've tried many alternatives, but email subscriptions work best for me. 

Things I will not be doing: switching to WordPress, using Twitter instead of blogging, turning my blog into a newsletter. 

I've been researching alternatives to Feedburner, and there are many good ones out there. However, most are paid subscription services. 

I'm not in the camp that expects everything to be free. I subscribe to many paid services: a ridiculous number of streaming platforms, plus software licenses, news sites, and apps that I use frequently and want ad-free. But my blog is not a commercial venture; it is simply my writing outlet. My blog is not monetized, and never will be. So adding a monthly fee so that a few hundred readers can subscribe by email seems wasteful.

I think the simplest solution is IFTTT. IFTTT, which stands for If This Then That (a coding expression), allows you to create applets that link various apps and services, enabling you to do things that neither app alone will do. (This is a good explanation.) I've used IFTTT before, and it has always seemed simple and reliable.

IFTTT lets you create three free applets, This free option allows you to connect an RSS feed to a Blogger blog. 

I'm pretty sure I'm going with this one. But if you blog and you've found a solution that you like, please share! And I hope all the bloggers I read will all provide some kind of email option.

the troll that wouldn't die

He lives.

Those of you who go back a long way with wmtc will remember how this blog was the target of trolls, back in the heyday of the blogosphere, before Twitter and Instagram existed, before so many bloggers moved to Facebook. Social media evolved, attention spans got shorter, and the trolls eventually left wmtc. All but one. You know who I'm talking about. The one and only magnolia_2000, a/k/a Mags.

Mags has disappeared for long stretches of time, but he always returns. Allan says that Mags is addicted to me and will never leave -- that no matter how much time passes, we will always hear from him again. I am his obsession.

Recently he's revived his pathetic attempt at bullying. I can't say I understand it. Can he possibly think I care what some random wacko thinks of my life choices?? It is utterly bizarre.

Here are some recent gems from the boy. He doesn't like Port Hardy. He doesn't like Kai. He doesn't like where we shop. He doesn't like our rugs! Oh noes!

Here's a particularly wacky one from 2017. He's referring to earrings I bought on a trip 10 years earlier! Ten years!!!



I last posted about Mags in 2013; the comments on that thread are quite amusing. My long essay about the Harper government's citizenship guide (reprinted in shorter form on several other sites), plus the death of Henry Morgentaler, brought Mags around. Trolls are nothing if not predictable: Morgentaler is a Canadian hero, and Mags is a viscious anti, misogyny being the sine qua non of trolldom.

Nothing seems to set Mags off more than when we travel. The man follows along on wmtc and complains about our trips. Seriously.

At some point, Mags expressed sympathy when we lost one of our dogs! I find that the most bizarre comment of all. I guess obsessions are complicated.

* * * *

I've enjoyed documenting the trolls over the years. The phenomenon fascinates me, and the comment threads are always interesting.

2013: wmtc trolls are alive and as insane as ever

2013: special update for long-time wmtc readers

2012: a trip down memory lane with wmtc (not Mags)

2009: This was published in shorter form at The Mark as "The Trolls Among Us"

2007: open letter to a reader who hates me (also not Mags)

From 2005 to 2007, there are a lot of posts about troll attacks, tagged "wingnuts". Posts such as i am a fascist pig, i am a coward, the welcoming committee, and begone foul spirit.

how to get your website removed from the wayback machine

During my recent attack by wingnut trolls, I learned something new: how to request that the Internet Archive remove your site from the Wayback Machine.

* * * *

Before I was nominated as an NDP candidate in the recent provincial election, of course my online presence had to be vetted. All potential candidates were asked to deactivate their personal profiles from social media, and in addition I was asked to delete a few random tweets from several years ago. None of this was a big deal to me. The only big deal was wmtc.

Early on, I was asked if I'd consider taking down the site. My first reaction was completely negative. Wmtc is so much a part of my life. Take it down? No way!

It was only weeks before the election would be called -- and I've been blogging for 14 years. That's a lot of words! There was really no way to vet everything. While the NDP was considering the situation from their end, I was also thinking more about being a candidate, and increasingly feeling like it was something I wanted to do. The next time we spoke, I said I was amenable to taking the blog offline for the duration of the campaign. They were happy; I was happy; things proceeded.

This is where someone made a mistake. The NDP research team should have given me instructions for getting wmtc excluded from the Wayback Machine -- but they did not.

The troll that emailed wmtc links to the Toronto Sun columnist might have done it anyway -- that person may have been saving those links for a long time, or may have found them on a message board -- but the columnist would have had no way to verify it.

But that isn't what happened. Only after the columnist got in touch with me, a research person gave me these instructions:

1. Use the email account associated with your blog.

2. Email info@archive.org, identify yourself as the site owner, and request removal of the site from the archives.

Then, supposedly, you will quickly receive an acknowledgement of your email, and in 2-3 days, your site will be excluded from the Wayback Machine.

I sent the email.

I received no reply.

A week went by -- a very stressful and difficult week -- and still I heard nothing. Meanwhile, the trolls and the columnist had dredged up more material to take out of context, selectively quote, and use against the NDP.

The Party's research department got in touch again -- the sight of her number on Caller ID made my stomach turn over -- and we agreed that I'd email them again.

Eight days after my first email, I received this form letter.

Hello,

The Internet Archive can exclude web pages from the Wayback Machine (web.archive.org), but we first respectfully request that you help us verify that you are the site owner or content author by doing any one of the following:

- post your request on the current version of the site (and send us a link).

- send your request from the main email contact listed on the site.

- send a request from the registrant's email (if publicly viewable on WhoIs Lookup) or webmaster’s email listed on the site.

- point us to where your personal information (name, personal contact info, image of self) appears on the site in a way that identifies you as the site owner or author of the content you wish to have excluded - in this instance, we ask to verify your identity via a scan of a valid photo id (sensitive info such as birth date, address, or phone can be blacked out).

- forward to us communication from a hosting company or registrar addressed to you as owner of the domain.

If none of these options are available to you, please let us know in a reply to this email.

We would be grateful if you would help us preserve as much of the archive as possible. Therefore, please let us know if there are only specific URLs or directories about which you are concerned so that we may leave the rest of the archives available.

As you may know, Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library, seeking to maintain via the Wayback Machine a freely accessible historical record of the Internet. The material in the archives are not exploited by Internet Archive for commercial profit.

This was very discouraging. I had waited more than a week, and still I was only at the form-letter stage! I already was emailing from the account associated with the site! Most of the other methods of verification were not available to me. I was a bit panicked and not thinking entirely clearly.

But finally, I logged into the DNS company that hosts my URL, and took a screenshot of the account profile page. I also scanned my driver's license, and sent both DNS screenshot and license pic to the archives' email address.

Three days later, I received the same form-letter reply to my second request.

Two days after that, I received this notice.

Hello,

The sites/URLs referenced in your email below have now been submitted for exclusion from the Wayback Machine at http://www.archive.org.

Please allow up to a day for the automated portions of the process to run their course and for the changes to take effect. If you have any other questions or concerns, please let us know.

By this time, of course, it was way too late.

on poppies, veterans, trolls, and doxing

First of all, I do not apologize.

I have nothing to apologize for. No one should apologize for having an unpopular opinion, or an opinion that the majority finds offensive.

Second, I said nothing disrespectful to veterans. My utter lack of respect -- my undying contempt -- is for rulers whose policies send humans into unnecessary armed conflict. Those rulers pay lip-service to "supporting" troops, while their policies ensure more humans will suffer from the effects of war.

If you're joining us in progress, here's what you missed. 

Before the election, I took all my personal social media offline. We knew that the opposition would dedicate vast resources to digging up or fabricating anything they could use against NDP candidates. For some reason, no one directed me to remove wmtc links from the Wayback Machine (i.e., internet archives). This proved to be a grave error.

A right-wing political hack who masquerades as a journalist received excerpts from some old wmtc posts from a troll source. I know this because Hack forwarded Troll's email to me, with the identifiers scrubbed.

Hack did what hacks do, and trolls did what trolls do. Hack kept this going for way longer than any of us expected, dedicating three columns to me, and mentioning my name in several other columns. Eventually it was reported on by more mainstream media.

The right-wing attack machine moved from candidate to candidate, digging up tiny bits of online fodder, distorting and quoting out of context, in a ludicrous attempt to portray the NDP as a hotbed of wacko radicalism.

Doug Ford and his party waged the worst kind of campaign possible: they obfuscated facts, and relied on lies, sloganeering, and mudslinging.

Andrea Horwath and our party were consistently positive, focused, truthful, and precise.

That the majority of voters in Ontario chose the former over the latter is profoundly disturbing.

Doxing

I thought I knew what it was like to be attacked by trolls, from early wmtc days. I was wrong. The trolls who attacked this blog were annoying gnats who could be easily batted away. The troll attack orchestrated by Hack & Co. was a whirling swarm of angry hornets, the size of a midwest twister.

Their weapons were the most vulgar kind of personal insults, and graphic threats of violence.

I have pretty thick skin and don't tend to take things personally. My union sisters and brothers often describe me as "fearless". But this was a form of violence, and it shook me.

I'm lucky that it didn't affect my outlook, my opinions, or my self-esteem. That's down to the amazing support I had -- from the party, from my union, from friends, and from strangers who agreed with my views and reached out to me. Because of this support, I was shielded from most of the invective. I saw only a small portion of it, yet that was enough to shake me. I felt that my personal safety was threatened. That's not easy to do to me.

It's difficult -- nay, impossible -- for me to understand this kind of behaviour. The whitehot anger, the fervor so easily ignited -- the immediate willingness to attack, the assumed entitlement to say anything to anyone, hiding behind the anonymity of the internet. The seeming inability to respectfully disagree. It is truly beyond my understanding.

What I think about poppies, militarism, and veterans

I wrote the now-infamous post about the poppy symbols at a time when Prime Minister Stephen Harper was flogging the war machine in Afghanistan. I have a deeply held opposition to war, and I wanted Canada out of Afghanistan.

I also link the symbolic poppy to the general militarism that infects our society -- where "support the troops" is code for "support the war". Militarism takes many forms, including recruiting in schools, honouring military members at sporting events, using weapons as entertainment, such as air shows, and for me, the ubiquitous poppy symbol.

Naturally I understand that the majority does not view the poppy symbol this way. Hundreds tried to enlighten me, as if somehow the view of the vast majority hadn't reached my ears. But guess what? I disagree.

I have never written or said anything that disparages veterans. On the contrary, the pages of this blog are replete with disgust for the governments that disrespect veterans by slashing funding for their health and rehabilitation. My "11.11" category is about peace. If wanting peace disrespects veterans, we are living in an Orwellian nightmare.

What supporting veterans should look like

I have no doubt that for some people the poppy is a potent symbol, and that they believe wearing this symbol shows respect and reverence for veterans. I have never suggested that other people shouldn't wear poppies. I simply choose not to wear one. (I don't refuse to wear one, as the memes said. I choose not to.)

To me, if we truly want to support veterans and military servicemembers, we must do two things.

One, create and fully fund a robust array of supports for people who have suffered from war, to support their physical and mental well-being. Our society does not do that.

And two, stop making war. Stop creating veterans. Search for ways to resolve conflicts that do not involve killing people. And never use war as a means to profit.

Until these things are done, you can cover yourself in poppies, and your "support" and "respect" will be as false as the plastic flowers you revere.

A final word about respect

I don't disrespect veterans. But I don't automatically respect someone because they are a veteran.

Many people contribute to our society through their work or their passions. Others harm our society with selfishness, greed, violence, and unkindness. When people are kind and generous, when they act with compassion and integrity, I respect them. When they do the opposite, I do not. This is as true for veterans as it is for teachers, social workers, nurses, or politicians.

People who hurl crude insults at strangers because they cannot abide a difference of opinion, but who claim to love freedom and respect veterans, are ignorant wretches. I don't respect them. I pity them.

in which i contemplate the personal pros and cons of social media

I've been taking a break from social media, and I am feeling the positive effects. But I do miss people. But I feel better...but I miss people...but I feel better. And so on.

This is your brain on fibromyalgia

I struggle with low concentration and intermittent brain fog. I believe it's from fibromyalgia, but whatever the cause, it's a minor disability or a weakness for which I must compensate. I have devised various coping mechanisms, and for the most part, they are integrated into my life, as are all my many coping mechanisms for all the bullshit life throws at me. (Not complaining, merely stating.)

I recently went through a rough patch where my mental state was particularly frustrating. I had a really hard time chairing a small meeting. (When I apologized, people told me they didn't notice anything different. But were they just being kind?) I had to write an email with a lot of names and dates -- numbers are the biggest challenge when I'm mentally impaired -- and despite checking and re-checking, I messed it up, and had to send a correction. My brain felt scrambled.

I sensed that time spent on Facebook was making it worse. I don't know where I place on the continuum from people who shun social media completely, to those who live on it, but over the years, I've gotten my social media use in a good place. Or I thought I did. Like a lot of people, I would jump on Facebook for short periods of time, several times throughout the day and evening. Now I think that may be the problem. Time that should have been free -- not so much down-time as brief spaces in between activities and tasks -- were getting filled with information. It was pushing my brain into overload. I say I think that was happening, because I really don't know.

What do I use and why do I use it?

Facebook. Most of my social media use is Facebook. I use it as an activism tool, and for connecting with an extended network of interesting people. Most of my Facebook contacts are people whose company I enjoy, but who I no longer see (and in many cases, never saw regularly or at all), or else connections to the labour and peace movements.

My union has an active, closed Facebook group that works really well for us. This means that when I take a Facebook break, I have an additional challenge -- how to post only in our union group, then leave.

Facebook also serves as a news aggregator and news filter. And I also get humour and general fun and silly stuff from my feed.

Unlike most people I know, I don't use Facebook to connect with old friends or acquaintances from former schools or jobs. I have zero interest in that. Apparently people find this odd.

Twitter. I used to use Twitter for certain specific news feeds, like Dave Zirin and and Glenn Greenwald. But I found that I rarely, if ever, saw more than the tweets and the headlines, and that was too unsatisfying. I opted for more time without bits of information scrolling in front of my face.

I like using Twitter for customer service, and for sending someone I don't know a link -- for example, sending an author a book review. Our union team used Twitter a lot during our strike, and I still do use it to circulate certain union information.

Instagram. I dislike Instagram and find no use for it at all. I know it's the current "where things are happening now" for young people, but that is obviously not a consideration for me.

Pinterest. I used to use Pinterest to find library programming ideas, until I realized how redundant it was. Pinterest amounts to a series of user-created directories -- and no directory will ever be as efficient and as comprehensive as a Google search.

G+. I used to post links to wmtc posts on Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter. One day I forgot about Google Plus, and that was the end of that.

So at this point, it's down to Facebook.

My problems are my own

People in my Facebook feed regularly announce that they are unfriending Trump supporters or similar pronouncements. That's never been a problem for me. I used to get into arguments with US friends who support the Democrats, but over time I disciplined myself to scroll past that information without comment.

Similarly, I hear about venomous bullying -- what used to be called flame wars -- on Twitter, but I don't see any of it.

So these common complaints about social media are not effecting me.

For me, it's all about my mental state. Since beginning my vacation from social media, I've been reading more, started and completed a jigsaw puzzle, spent more time outdoors, and in general, I'm thinking more clearly.

That is the question

Pros:

1. Brain less scrambled

2. Better focus

3. Reading more

4. Less screen time, which means more print time and (sometimes) more outdoor time

5. More mental calm and quiet

Cons:

1. I miss people

2. Less time with friends, so less support

3. I don't know what's going on in people's lives, so I'm also not there to give support

4. Less humour, less fun

5. Need to make more of an effort to stay informed

I'm not liking these choices.

what i'm reading: the attention merchants by tim wu

Everywhere we look, every available space is filled with advertising. The Toronto skyline is a sea corporate logos. The due-date receipt from my library book features an ad on the back. I once tracked all the ads shown during a major league baseball game -- during play, not between innings -- and the results were startling, even to me. And, of course, our entire experience on the internet -- especially on our personal mobile devices -- is tracked and used by corporations with only our dimmest awareness and nominal consent.

It wasn't always like this. How did we arrive at this current state? The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu answers this question. The answer is fascinating and entertaining, and -- if you dislike the constant and ever-increasing commodification of our lives, as I do -- more than a little frustrating.

In the first part of the book, Wu presents a capsule history of the "attention capture industry" -- what this review in The New York Times adeptly calls "the slow, steady annexation and exploitation of our consciousness". This begins with the first ads to appear in a daily newspaper, moves through snake-oil salesmen, to the first people to recognize the power of radio to sell products, through sponsored television shows, to ads during shows -- which was shocking and provoked outcry in its day! This section is truly fascinating. Wu is a master at finding sparkling details that make the story come alive. For example, I learned that snake oil, now a generic term for worthless products touted as cures for all ills, takes its name from a product that actually involved snakes. The Attention Merchants is packed with these kinds of tasty nuggets of information.

In the history of attention capture, Wu also includes government propaganda. He looks at how during the first World War, the British government, joined later by its American counterpart, used mass-media lies to entice young men to all but certain death in the trenches. This segment also analyzes the first modern total information campaign, and the first to harness electronic media for large-scale propaganda, that of one Adolph Hitler. We've all seen footage of the giant Nazi rallies with huge fascist insignias, but I didn't fully realize that Hitler, along with Third Reich propaganda master Joseph Goebbels, was the first to study and analyze attention capture, and to use it on a grand scale. (Incidentally, if you know anyone who believes the 'Hitler was all right at first, he just went too far' canard, Wu provides ammunition to shoot it down. From his earliest days making speeches in beer halls, Hitler was blaming Germany's woes on Jews.)

Another interesting segment is devoted to what Wu calls "The Celebrity-Industrial Complex". For someone like me who doesn't share the mainstream obsession with celebrity -- indeed, I don't understand it, even a little -- this was both fascinating and affirming. Wu offers an interesting analysis of Oprah Winfrey's attention methods, which he sees as groundbreaking in a not altogether positive way.

The part of The Attention Merchants that has been the focus of most reviews and interviews is about the price we pay for supposedly free services on the internet. Most of us have heard the phrase, "when a service is free, we're not customers, we're the product" or variations thereof. (Various people have made this public statement at various times, dating back to Richard Serra in 1973.) Wu dissects exactly what that means -- for the tremendous potential of the internet, now tremendously debased and squandered, and for ourselves, with our fractured attention spans, short and ever shorter.

In the book's later chapters, the tone and tenor changes from dispassionate historical analysis to passionate and savaging. The rise of "free" social media, where billions of people willingly submit to having their personal habits mined, tracked, and resold for other people's profits, on a scale never before seen in human history, is not a mixed blessing in Wu's worldview. It's a flat-out evil.

By the time I finished the book, I challenged myself to take a holiday from social media and reclaim my own attention span. Some of you know that because of my health issues, I struggle with low concentration. Perhaps the effects are exaggerated for me... or perhaps not. I want to spend less time with little bits of information scrolling in front of my eyes. When it comes to information, I want quality over quantity. I'm experimenting with it now, but I'm not sure I'll ever go back.

Wu also points out a massive public pushback, as evidenced by the millions of people willing to pay a monthly fee to enjoy advertising-free viewing through Netflix, HBO, Showtime, and similar services. The cultural phenomenon known as binge-watching is evidence that we can focus our attention for lengthy periods of time, when what we're watching is good enough to warrant it.

Wu writes:

Ultimately, the problem was as old as the original proposition of seizing our attention and putting it to uses not our own. It is a scheme that has been revised and renewed with every new technology, which always gains admittance into our lives under the expectation it will improve them -- and improve them it does, until it acquires motivations of its own, which can only grow and grow. As Oxford ethicist James Williams puts it, "Your goals are things like 'spend more time with the kids,' 'learn to play the zither,' 'lose twenty pounds by summer,' 'finish my degree,' etc. Your time is scarce, and you know it. Your technologies, on the other hand, are trying to maximize goals like 'Time on Site,' 'Number of Video Views,' 'Number of Pageviews,' and so on. Hence clickbait, hence auto-playing videos, hence avalanches of notifications. Your time is scarce, and your technologies know it."

Wu references William James,

"who, having lived and died before the flowering of the attention industry, held that our life experience would ultimately amount to whatever we had paid attention to. At stake, then, is something akin to how one's life is lived. That, if nothing else, ought to compel a greater scrutiny of the countless bargains to which we routinely submit, and even more important, lead us to consider the necessity, at times, of not dealing at all.

I've added Wu's first book, The Master Switch, to my to-read list.

here's why i love the internet, part 3,482,092 or whatever

For my work with my library workers' union, I schedule a lot of meetings. Various people can or cannot attend various meetings. We all use different calendar/agenda/diary tools, so sending an Outlook appointment, like we do in our workplace, isn't an option.

As meetings approach, I receive emails from team members, telling me they can or cannot attend, often changing from one to the other. I was having a hard time keeping track of who to expect at what meetings.

I knew there had to be an online tool to help with this. I use Doodle all the time for scheduling, but that wasn't quite right. I didn't feel like asking on Facebook, because I wanted to get a sense of what was out there, not just what was popular at the moment.

At first, Googling "online tool for meeting attendance" turned up attendance-management tools like this, or event registration tools like this. But after a few searches, I hit on "online tool to track rsvps", and found exactly what I needed: Whoozin.

I needed something, I knew it had to exist, and I found it.

I used the internet to further my use of the internet to make my life easier.

the sad tale of an oil stain, or how i was misled by the internet

Last week, while enjoying a lovely lunch at a restaurant with my mom and my partner, an oily sauce jumped out of a bowl and splattered on my shirt. All right, it didn't actually jump out, truth is I can be a clumsy eater. But the sauce went on my shirt. Ugh.

This wasn't one little dot, which can be annoying enough. This was an entire collection of splats, re-decorating the front of my shirt. Double ugh.

Because I was busy with family and friends, I wasn't able to immediately soak or stain-treat the shirt. It ended up sitting for a couple of days before I washed it.

When I got home a few days later, I stain-treated and washed the shirt several times. I used my preferred stain-removing spray, OxiClean, and also soaked the shirt in a solution of OxiClean powder, each time putting it in the washing machine on warmer water than I would normally use. The stains did get lighter, but they did not come out.

Next I Googled "how to remove oil stains from clothing". I found answers at: WikiHow, Wise Bread, About.com/Laundry, and a blog called the Northern Belle Diaries. There were other sources, but I judged these four to be most reliable. (Another source that is generally good, eHow, recommended what I had already done.)

One method was common to those four sources: putting 10W-40 or other motor oil on the stain, letting it soak in, rinsing it out in hot water, then laundering in the washing machine again.

It seemed strange and a bit shocking to put motor oil on my shirt. But the shirt was unwearable in its present condition, so I felt I had nothing to lose.

I followed instructions.

The stain did not come out.

Neither did the motor oil.

My shirt now has huge black oil stains all over it.

If the stain had not come out, but the shirt was in no worse shape, I could have tried another method. But now it's too late.

On reflection and hindsight, I might have tried a less drastic method before resorting to the 10W-40. Some sites mentioned baking soda or baby powder. However, I have tried those methods in the past and found them useless.

So what happened?

Is this idea of removing oil with more oil a myth, kind of like using tomato juice to remove skunk odor from a dog's fur? (Trust me, it doesn't work. Use baking soda and hydrogen peroxide.)

Does that mean people publish how-to articles on sites like About.com and WikiHow without actually trying it first?

Are these websites simply repeating what other sites publish, the way people do with Wikipedia, potentially spreading misinformation along with good information?

Does this method actually work, even though it didn't work for me?

I wish I could post before, after, and after-after photos, but, not knowing that my shirt would be ruined, I never thought to take a pic. Just imagine a lovely cobalt-blue, hip-length, gathered-V-neck cotton shirt (similar to this) with motor oil all over it.

Sigh.

Update. Catching up on impudent strumpet, I've learned there's a word for the internet phenomenon I was trying to describe above: citogenesis, courtesy of the inimitable xkcd.