Last week I was in London as a tourist visitor, and being able to pull up the local public transit planner (https://tfl.gov.uk) and OpenStreetMap were just conveniences that a mobile computer seems particularly well suited for.
Effectively it's a pull-only smartphone. Nothing is being pushed to me, so nothing takes me out of the moment.
Slack has this annoying habit on my work computer to not make an audible noise when I get a message even though that setting is turned on and I never check my Mac's dock when I'm working on something so I had to unhide the dock so I could see the notification come in.
Then again at one point in time I had alarms set on my phone telling me it was time to eat or time to go to bed because I will focus in on something so much that everything else disappears for hours at a time. Notifications help break me out of that to get back to the real world.
The problem I see (and have yet to get a good answer for) with all of these extreme productivity tactics like shutting off all internet access is that carry a value judgment that older > newer, for all values of information absorption. It reminds me of how some of the financial advice for people in debt is to eschew all forms of credit and live on cash only. Which is fine until you need to buy a house...
If the problem is being distracted from the real world, and that's truly a negative, rather than filling dead time that couldn't really be used for anything else (waiting in line, etc), being absorbed in a book is functionally no different from being absorbed in a newsreader app. With that in mind, where and why is this value judgment coming from?
I see a poster upthread mentioning we've "forgotten how to be bored".
I don't know about people here, but I saw boredom as an awful state of mind even before the proliferation of smartphones. Could someone help me understand what the bigger picture here is?
Books, meanwhile, are of a form to encourage deeper immersion in a single input. Generally speaking, the obvious mode of interaction is to read a single book from start to finish, taking at least hours during which you remain focused on that topic. This kind of long-term focus is required to actually accomplish anything; therefore, a mode of information absorption that trains long-term focus is more effective of personal cultivation than one which encourages mayfly attention-hopping.
Nothing about this necessarily disparages the Internet; it's quite possible to focus on long-form pieces that are Internet-published, or to hop from topic to topic using offline media. But because friction costs encourage longer-term focus when offline, going offline is one effective way to incentivize it.
Most individual links on HN and FB don't have a few hundred pages long of organized material delving into a topic, and most collections of links won't have the same cohesive nature that a good book does. Some do, but it's atypical. If you put any belief into the idea that other senses contribute to learning, then a book covers more senses than an electronic reference does. And it's easier to go sit in a corner with, without worrying about how much you're draining the battery in some device, or being distracted by other things on the internet. Books don't receive push notifications, and that's a wonderful thing!
> I see a poster upthread mentioning we've "forgotten how to be bored".
> I don't know about people here, but I saw boredom as an awful state of mind even before the proliferation of smartphones.
I see it as a statement that we've forgotten how to drift a bit, contemplate, and allow ourselves to be alone with our thoughts; most people grab for a quick bit of entertainment or information when they've got a few otherwise unoccupied seconds.
> It reminds me of how some of the financial advice for people in debt is to eschew all forms of credit and live on cash only.
Look at it from the perspective of an addict. Sometimes being forced to rent is a smaller negative than crippling piles of credit card debt. And sometimes inaccessibility of your accustomed distractions is a smaller negative than being able to focus on something important for as long as it takes to get it done.
While I do understand the point you're trying to make, I think it's a bit unfair to insinuate that their only advantage is as a way to pass the time.
I use a smartphone without a mobile data plan. Not because of addictiveness, I just don't think it's worth the cost, but it does avoid that problem. I keep it stocked with ebooks and audiobooks.
But how often does this happen, and how often, instead, does a smartphone distract from better tasks? How often I choose not to pick a book when leaving, because I've got the smartphone "just in case" ? Of course I have ebooks on it, but many times I waste time on facebook/HN/twitter/surfing. It's TOO EASY to get distracted.