Ian Bogost wrote a pretty controversial viewpoint on the Net Neutrality fight. He asks, What Do We Save When We Save the Internet? In short, he thinks it might be time to blow the whole thing up and start over, because we haven’t been very responsible with it:

Another day’s work lost to the vapors of reloads, updates, clicks, and comments. Realizing that you are hyperemployed by the cloud, that you are its unpaid intern. Wondering what you’d have accomplished if you had done anything else whatsoever. Knowing that tomorrow will be no different.

Harsh words, but worth a read even just to think about how we spend our time online. Perhaps we have grown a little bit entitled about our access to a medium that we’re mostly using for messaging and the weather, as opposed to improving people’s lives?

Jessica Pressler wrote an article called “Let’s, Like, Demolish Laundry”, and it’s a wickedly funny (and, unfortunately, very accurate) look at the tech world’s obsession with solving First World problems:

We are living in a time of Great Change, and also a time of Not-So-Great Change. The tidal wave of innovation that has swept out from Silicon Valley, transforming the way we communicate, read, shop, and travel, has carried along with it an epic shit-ton of digital flotsam. Looking around at the newly minted billionaires behind the enjoyable but wholly unnecessary Facebook and WhatsApp, Uber and Nest, the brightest minds of a generation, the high test-scorers and mathematically inclined, have taken the knowledge acquired at our most august institutions and applied themselves to solving increasingly minor First World problems. The marketplace of ideas has become one long late-night infomercial. Want a blazer embedded with GPS technology? A Bluetooth-controlled necklace? A hair dryer big enough for your entire body? They can be yours! In the rush to disrupt everything we have ever known, not even the humble crostini has been spared.

Or as Mike Monteiro said, slightly more succinctly:

We used to design ways to get to the moon; now we design ways to never have to get out of bed. You have the power to change that.

Related post on Elezea: Legacy

Jason Green writes about The Promise, Progress, And Pain Of Collaboration Software:

Given the explosion of communication, conversations can take place simultaneously over several competing channels, creating confusion and inefficiency by requiring multiple changes in context. In addition, the ability to access prior content easily and seamlessly across all these communication channels becomes more challenging.

Between email, Trello, Slack, and InVision, we’re definitely feeling this pain as well. App Fatigue, indeed.

Jason Kottke in The revenge of the nerds:

On the very public stage of the web, the nerds of the world finally had something to offer the world that was cool and useful and even lucrative. The web has since been overrun by marketers, money, and big business, but for a brief time, the nerds of the world had millions of people gathered around them, boggling at their skill with this seemingly infinite medium.

There’s been a lot of talk about the web we lost in recent months. It’s now gone mainstream with TechCrunch calling the phenomenon The Fourth Internet:

If the first Internet was “Getting information online,” the second was “Getting the information organized” and the third was “Getting everyone connected” the fourth is definitely “Get mine.” Which is a trap.

I certainly understand where everyone is coming from with this. I also go on about the importance of self-publishing on your own domain (or as Jeremy Keith calls it, “selfish publishing”). And I also miss the old Twitter, back when it was about discussions and sharing knowledge, and not about big brands taking over our feeds with promoted photos.

But we also have to remember that the web is always going to be an Eternal September. So many new people are coming online every day, and they don’t know our “rules”, so they make up their own. And as much as we might long for earlier days, that’s how progress happens — through the actions of people who don’t know what they’re supposed to do.

So, sure. Let’s continue to publish on our own sites, and shout loudly about the virtues of doing so. But let’s not make people feel like unwanted newbies when they dream up a different web. We need them as much as they need us.

Paul Ford’s The Great Works of Software is definitely going on my “Best of 2014” list:

The greatest works of software are not just code or programs, but social, expressive, human languages. They give us a shared set of norms and tools for expressing our ideas about words, or images, or software development. Great software gives us tremendous freedom, as long as we work within its boundaries.

Seriously, read the whole thing…

In What If Doctors Could Finally Prescribe Behavior Change? Sean Duffy explains why behavior change is so difficult, particularly in healthcare:

Whether it’s for weight loss, smoking cessation, diabetes, or otherwise, the best research shows that meaningful behavior change outcomes require not just guidance from a trusted health professional, but also positive social support, easy-to-digest insights about their condition, a carefully orchestrated timeline, and a process that follows validated behavioral science protocols. That’s hard to squeeze into a phone call. Or a doctor’s visit, for that matter.

The good news is that this research is resulting in a new field called Digital Therapeutics, and despite quite a bit of snake oil out there, some apps are having success:

Another example is Jenna Tregarthen, a PhD candidate in clinical psychology and eating disorder specialist. She rallied a team of engineers, entrepreneurs, and fellow psychologists to develop Recovery Record, a digital therapy that helps patients gain control over their eating disorder by enabling them to self-monitor for destructive thoughts or actions, follow meal plans, achieve behavior goals, and message a therapist instantly when they need support.

Mat Honan’s Are Touchscreens Melting Your Kid’s Brain?1 set off the latest in what has become a recurring tech theme over the past few years:

I’m perpetually distracted, staring into my hand, ignoring the people around me. Hit Refresh and get a reward, monkey. Feed the media and it will nourish you with @replies and Likes until you’re hungry and bleary and up way too late alone in bed, locked in the feedback loop. What will my daughter’s loop look like? I’m afraid to find out.

This has been a difficult topic for me for a long time. In 2012 I wrote an article for Smashing Magazine called A Dad’s Plea To Developers Of iPad Apps For Children, in which I aired some of my frustrations with apps for kids. That piece brought out a lot of anger, including a comment that I’ll never forget:

Wow really?? great parents here.. having a kid under 7 stare at a screen, really?? come on!! no kid under 7 should use an iPad for what?? play outside, play with your toys, your friends, read. People who have a 2yr old use an ipad/iphone, shouldn’t have kids in the first place! shame on you

I started writing a passionate reply, explaining our reasoning and the rules my wife and I have for screen time, but I ended up just dropping it. No one has ever changed their opinion based on a comment they read on a blog, so why bother.

Anyway, I digress. I tend to agree with Robert McGinley Myers’ response to Mat’s article. In Screens Aren’t Evil (which you should read in its entirety) he says:

But we need to get beyond worrying about whether “screens” are melting our kids’ brains. What we need to be conscious of is encouraging our kids, and ourselves, to engage in activities that enrich us. Sometimes that’s interacting with each other, sometimes that’s a hike in the forest, sometimes thats a great book, and sometimes that’s an incredible video game. It’s not the medium that matters, but what we take from it.

Now that’s a moderate stance I can get behind.

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1. Betteridge’s law alert! ↩

Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit by taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.

— Marshall McLuhan

In other news, Google Glass is on sale today.

Austin Hill wrote what is so far the best critique I’ve seen of apps like Whisper and Secret. Here’s the general point from his essay On your permanent record:

When a participant in iterative prisoners’ dilemma has no identity or feels free from the responsibility of their actions in social interactions communities quickly degenerate into a race to the bottom. This is when trolls, abusers and the worst part of our humanity starts to become a strategic advantage in seeing your actions get more attention by continuing to push the envelope of acceptable behaviour.

And about those apps specifically:

Out of all the problems on our planet that need our skills as entrepreneurs, out of all the incredible opportunities to improve the lives of our customers or fellow human beings — we need to fund & waste engineering talent to build a better TMZ?

I do not doubt that voyeurism and rumour mongering are popular leading to profitability. It’s the reason why every grocery store check-out isle is packed with tabloid magazines and not Popular Science or The Economist. But really?

This point led me to tweet this the other day in response to a question about the VCs who fund these apps:

@flyosity Investing in the worst of human nature is easy money. Investing in meaningful work takes courage & a purpose beyond getting rich.

— Rian van der Merwe (@RianVDM) March 18, 2014

Mark Suster added his voice in another good article called How do I Really Feel About Anonymous Apps Like Secret?:

My general instinct is that most anonymity apps breed car-like behavior. Intolerance. For all the terrible things people have said over the years about me on Hacker News simply because they didn’t agree with my opinion on some topic I feel certain that if most spent an afternoon with me they would feel very differently. It’s like racism or prejudice. It’s very easy to hate a group with whom you never interact and when you live in a big city where there are many ethnicities and sexualities you realize we are all just human. Same wants. Same needs. Same goals. Even VCs.

I’ll leave the final word to Tim Fernholz in When it comes to secrets, Wall Street titans and Silicon Valley VCs see eye-to-eye:

So if you’re an ardent believer in anonymity, be careful: If you reveal something important enough to be legally protected on one of these platforms, your anonymity might not be secure. The only secrets you can safely reveal on these platforms (and even then, only as long as they’re not crimes) are your own.

In the excellent Reading to Have Read Ian Bogost sums up why I’m not a fan of Spritz, a speed-reading app that’s been making the rounds:

In today’s attention economy, reading materials (we call it “content” now) have ceased to be created and disseminated for understanding. Instead, they exist first (and primarily) for mere encounter. This condition doesn’t necessarily signal the degradation of reading; it also arises from the surplus of content we are invited and even expected to read. But it’s a Sisyphean1 task. We can no longer reasonably hope to read all our emails, let alone our friends’ Facebook updates or tweets or blog posts, let alone the hundreds of daily articles and listicles and quizzes and the like. Longreads may offer stories that are best enjoyed away from your desk, but what good are such moments when the #longreads queue is so full? Like books bought to be shelved, articles are saved for a later that never comes.

The core issue with Spritz (and speed-reading in general) as a way of dealing with this kind of overload is this:

But can you really read a novel in 90 minutes with full comprehension? Well, like most things that seem too good to be true, the answer unfortunately is no. The research in the 1970s showed convincingly that although people can read using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) at normal reading rates, comprehension and memory for text falls as RSVP speeds increase, and the problem gets worse for paragraphs compared to single sentences. One of the biggest problems is that there just isn’t enough time to put the meaning together and store it in memory (what psychologists call “consolidation”).

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1. That’s the dude who was punished for chronic deceitfulness by being compelled to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this action forever. ↩