Can We Unplug our Kids?

Introduction

A new book is out, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by the N.Y.U. professor Jonathan Haidt. Both The New York Times and The New Yorker have reviewed it recently, here and here respectively. The book decries the effect of social media and constant smartphone use—citing their role in widespread anxiety, depression, and other mental-health disorders—among Gen Z. As the Times sums it up, “Mr. Haidt lays out an ambitious set of interventions in his new book, which include: no smartphones before high school, no social media before age 16 and no phones in schools.” With regard to these goals, the New Yorker writer declares, “All of these strike me as not just reasonable but irrefutably necessary. What is less clear is whether there is enough collective and institutional will to accomplish them.”

But what if society cannot make these adaptations? Is the next generation doomed, or can parents reverse this digital tide and create appropriate boundaries for their children? Can iconoclastic families go it alone and not get swept up in this modern miasma? The answer, I can tell you from experience, is yes. That’s what this post is about.

How parents are complicit

As is typical, the New Yorker review wasn’t so much a review of the book but an examination of its overall topic: the mental health crisis faced by Gen Z, and the role of the Internet, social media, and smartphones in it. The New Yorker writer cited the role parents play in this quagmire:

By the time that smartphones and social media were becoming omnipresent, in the late two-thousands and early twenty-tens, children were also spending less and less time engaged in unstructured, largely unsupervised play with their peers. This deprivation owed to their parents’ concerns for their safety—a fretfulness known as “safetyism”—and to a competitive, college-fixated mind-set that prioritized adult-led, résumé-building, and “enrichment” activities. Unaccompanied kids doing normal kid things like walking home from school or visiting a playground became conspicuous, strange, perhaps even the subject of a 911 call or a C.P.S. investigation.

It’s disconcerting to see how helicopter parenting and Internet technologies have dovetailed such that parents cannot resist not only allowing but expecting their kids to have smartphones. It’s a true codependence. Kids are willing to surrender their autonomy by letting their parents track them; in return, kids get unfettered access to a virtual realm that distracts them from the real world, to say the least. Meanwhile, parents (perhaps succumbing to FOMO) set poor examples by being glued to their own smartphones as well … maybe not engrossed in Instagram and Snapchat, but in their doom-filled “feeds,” which is probably worse.

Well, not me. You may find this annoying, but I shall now explain how I’ve not only eschewed all this, but successfully opted my kids out of it for their entire childhoods. If you still have young children, perhaps you can find some inspiration here.

My Internet & phone policy

Almost eleven years ago, arguably before the Gen Z mental-health crisis was widely acknowledged, I blogged about my concern that smartphones, with their steady stream of engrossing social traffic and bite-sized entertainment content, were teaching our kids impatience. I proposed three ways parents could combat this: 1) set the right example; 2) work deliberately to teach patience; and 3) don’t let your teens have cellphones or social media accounts. I wrote that post when my older daughter was twelve; I hope a few readers at that time chuckled at my pledge and assumed I’d fall short of actually enforcing it. Here’s how it actually went.

As I explained in a later post, I think every family should have an Internet acceptable use policy, just like corporations do, and here is the one my wife and I laid out from Day One:

• No social media as long as you’re under our roof
• No video gaming (the exception being, briefly, an arithmetic game assigned for school)
• Limits on video entertainment
• No Internet after 9:00 p.m.
• No cellphone until high school
• No smartphone until college

This wasn’t just aspirational; we stuck to our guns. On our home WiFi network, I blocked all social media for all users, other than allowing LinkedIn for myself. (I use it as a digital Rolodex.) I blocked all video gaming as well (the only wrinkle being that my firewall erroneously blocked https://www.aerobie.com/ which isn’t video gaming but for outdoor products like Frisbees; I had to whitelist that one).  Until they were in middle school, my daughters had to log their Internet time on paper, noting when they were online and for what purpose. The idea wasn’t to give me reason to cut them off, per se, but rather to get them thinking about their use vs. letting it be as automatic as a smoker lighting up.

To make video less appealing, I throttled the bandwidth down to 250 kbps, which is a trickle by modern standards—it turned YouTube (etc.) into a pointillist slide show. This wasn’t quite effective enough, so I monitored the usage and blocked specific sites as needed, including gostream, watchcartoonsonline, 123movies, gogomovies, and dailymotion. (I did eventually increase the bandwidth allocation during the COVID-19 pandemic, to support video conferencing.)

I configured my WiFi network to shut off my daughters’ Internet at 9:00 p.m., to start with. My daughters were on separate networks, so later on I changed the older one’s cutoff to 10:00 p.m. When they reached high school and used the Internet for a majority of their class assignments, I allowed them to request an extension on an ad hoc basis if they had a paper to write or something. Eventually, I moved out the shutoff time to 11. So I guess maybe I caved a little on that one.

Meanwhile, as strict as my cellphone policy may seem to you, I really did apply it. I’m not going to lie: my older daughter was not a fan of this aspect of my parenting. She often entreated me to relent. On one occasion, I asked her, “Why is it that you even want a phone? How would that benefit you?” She replied, “Well, it could lead to greater freedom. I could go to more places by myself, and you and Mom wouldn’t have to worry.”  I told her that our merely knowing where she is won’t keep her out of trouble, and added, “Besides, if your parents can reach you whenever they want, that’s not really freedom at all.  Freedom is having enough trust that we don’t need to know where you are.”

Against her protests, I held firm and didn’t get her a cellphone until high school, and even then it was a cheesy feature phone I bought on the cheap from Amazon. I was curious to see how much texting she’d end up doing, and it turned out to be almost none: she basically scrapped the phone entirely. Part of the reason is that it embarrassed her by ringing randomly when she was in class. The ringer volume wasn’t actually adjustable, as far as we could ever figure out, and she struggled to silence it while her classmates laughed. The situation worsened as she struggled to find, in the phone settings, where to turn off the ringer. This phone was so weirdly designed that as you pressed its buttons it would read out the name of each function, as though the user were blind. Some words were pronounced with a British accent; others were in this very annoying, braying female American voice. Our entire family enjoyed mimicking how the phone would sternly yell out, “SETTINGS.” This phone was a complete dud. I only ever received one text from it: “This Is A Message For Dad. Maybe You Can Reply!”

Perhaps with her sister’s experience in mind, my younger daughter never did show any interest in a cellphone. So all through high school, she had nothing.

The result

So how did this work out? Were my unsupervised daughters abducted and sold into slavery? Did they get lost somewhere, for lack of GPS, and never turn up? Did they become total pariahs, scorned by their peers for not being tech-savvy? Or have they made up for lost time and become utterly enslaved by the technology, having not been inoculated against it during their formative years?

The results were a bit mixed. Only one of my daughters was abducted. Kidding! In seriousness, my younger daughter totally embraced the non-digital life. In fact, I have a very fond memory of something I overheard (from the next room) when she had a bunch of friends over for dinner. They were gathered around the table and my daughter said, “Dammit, P—, put away your phone now!”

My older daughter, other than being embarrassed by her feature phone as described above, didn’t tend to complain unless she happened to overhear me describing my family’s draconian policies to another parent. My smug anti-tech priggishness was as annoying to her then as this blog post surely is to you now. But she made do throughout high school without social media, gaming, or a phone, and when she got a smartphone the summer before leaving for college (so we could have some visibility into her nascent habits), she appreciated the utility without getting totally dragged into the virtual-first life. She’s never glued to her phone, at least in her mom’s and my presence. As far as I know, the only social media she’s on is Instagram, and she says she only posts occasionally. (I’ll take her word for it.)

I will say that I do a lot of texting with my older daughter these days—far more than I’d ever expected. But I still don’t think I’m setting a bad example; for one thing, she knows not to expect an immediate response, and I don’t either. Also, the majority of our texts fall into just a few categories: photos of my cat from me to her; the daily exchange of our Wordle scores & snapshots; the occasional snapshot from a bike ride, hike, etc. That’s really about it. The social media culture of broadcasting a curated version of yourself and hoping for a lot of likes does not enter the equation.

As for my younger daughter, she’s now in college, and she still doesn’t have a smartphone. My wife exhorted her to accept one (we’d even pay the bill), but got nowhere. Our daughter eventually agreed to accept a prepaid feature phone (albeit a decent one that doesn’t yell “SETTINGS”). For roughly 90% of her two years at college, the phone has been lost. (I think she’s on her third one … good thing they’re cheap!) For the remaining 10% of the time, the phone has mostly been powered off. If we propose a phone call over the weekend, and our daughter remembers, she’ll turn it on and call us. I periodically ask her if her offline approach has caused any social friction. She maintains that it hasn’t and doesn’t. During her freshman year, in the dorms, she said, “It’s great—the only way people can reach me is to come knock on my door, so I never have to make plans—I just get whisked away.”

The bonus effect

The Internet/phone policy my wife and I devised was based on a few principles: a) nobody should be glued to a screen; b) virtual life should not take priority over real life; c) nobody should be on a social dopamine drip, craving constant affirmation from a wide but shallow network of quasi-friends; and d) we should all avoid the shrinking of our attention span that is afforded and ultimately created by these technologies. My wife and I have been very satisfied with the outcome as we look at our adult daughters’ online behavior.

We perhaps took for granted how important it also was to eschew the safetyism described earlier in this post: the impulse for parents to monitor their children’s whereabouts and activities through their phones, almost like a digital leash. That safetyism washes both ways, I think: the offspring learn not only to expect but to accept and even welcome their parents’ supervision and assistance. Of course kids can text (etc.) their friends for support, but these friends are a shared resource among a wider group, whereas parents are fully invested in their children and ready to bend over backwards. I’ve talked to several parents who were kind of surprised at how closely their kids kept in touch during college, via texting etc. … even to the point where these parents became a bit concerned about the kids’ lack of autonomy.

I think it’s worse when a parent isn’t worried about a lack of autonomy. A few weeks ago my wife and I enjoyed a getaway with a few other couples at a glorious guest house near the ocean. We were out on this back deck taking in the first really sunny day of spring, nibbling fancy snacks and enjoying a rambling conversation, except for one guest, a friend of a friend. She was on her phone the entire time, which I originally took for shyness (she knew only one person there) but which turned out to be a crisis her son was having that she was trying to mitigate. If it had been a real crisis, of course she should have gone off to a private place and phoned him. But it was just the unfolding drama of the kid believing he’d just flunked a college Statistics midterm. To the kid and his mom this was an absolute disaster that threatened to unravel his entire future. Every twenty minutes we’d get an unsolicited update from the mom. “He needs this class to graduate!” she cried out at one point. I replied, “Maybe he should change his major to Drama.” I realized in saying this that I was burning to the ground any chance of ever getting to know this person better, not just for myself but for all those who burst out laughing. But I don’t regret it.

And that’s an effect of this no-phone policy that I hadn’t expected or consicously intended: that it would make my kids more autonomous and resilient. My wife and I haven’t become these de facto fixers who are just a quick digital poke away. Curious as to how true this assessment truly is, I fact-checked myself by going through all my texts and emails from my daughters, to compile the instances of them reaching out for help. Here’s what I came up with:

Daughter A:

• A request to order her a sketchbook (before I’d given her my Amazon login)
• A photo of some well-cleaned road rash (doesn’t appear I replied), either to ask how she did or just to flex
• A solicitation for money (before we worked out a standard practice of 80% reimbursement for necessities, payable several times a year upon request)
• An email on March 10, 2020 telling my wife and me to suspend our plan to visit over spring break: “There is a very real possibility that there won’t be classes next quarter due to the coronavirus.” (I thought she was crazy … this was about a week before the pandemic asserted its grip on everyone’s lives.)
• A request to review an English paper
• An invitation to an awards ceremony, the day before graduation, for exceptional academic performance
• A request to review a cover letter for a job application

Daughter B:

• The following requests sent via text: “I’d like another pillow and something to microwave tea in”; “Tell freya I said hi”; “whats the water to rice ratio again”; “Could you give me tha grandmas phone number?”
• An email request for some books needed for a class that aren’t available at the bookstore
• A request for my “Southwestern corn goo” recipe
• A request for money (i.e., to settle up, as described above)
• This text: “yo could you send me the link/give me the name to your party megamix and other music collections you’ve made?  I’m looking to expand my list”
• An email asking how to send a camera in for repairs

This isn’t to say my wife and I are totally immune to the impulse toward safetyism. In my case, sometimes I text my younger daughter and when I don’t get a reply (i.e., most of the time), I think, “Dang, I hope she didn’t lose her phone again.” For my wife’s part, she does worry, being a mom after all. She’ll say of our younger daughter, “I haven’t heard from her in like a week and a half. I hope nothing’s happened.” I’m always very supportive, reminding her that in the vast majority of cases, when a college kid doesn’t respond to her parents it’s because she’s been abducted, either by human traffickers or space aliens. I also reminder my wife that this daughter was on the wrestling team: “I pity the fool who messes with her—she’ll go full Hunger Games on they ass.”

Conclusion

If you have young children or teenagers, you don’t need to wait for Jonathan Haidt’s proposed utopia to become reality, such that all of society embraces limits on digital culture. If you have the chutzpah to decry this modern tend toward safetyism, and you have the rapport and authority with your kids to impose limits of your own, you don’t have to wait around and hope that society corrects. You can carve out a family culture, starting right now, that doesn’t put your kids at the mercy of for-profit technocrats. Yes, you’ll have to give up the irresistible prospect of remotely babysitting your teenagers, but after all, you came out okay … right?

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Why Wordle?

Introduction

Let’s get one thing straight: I’m not one for crossword puzzles, Sudokus, etc., and I’m certainly not looking for new ways to spend time with my smartphone. I’d rather create than solve, and as regards the digital realm my typical advice is to log off and do something useful. And yet, here I am, recommending the Wordle as a fun little puzzle and a way to (gasp) connect online.

What is Wordle?

I’ll save you a google search: Wordle is a word game you can play on the New York Times website. Every day they put up a new puzzle (i.e., a new word you have to guess). You can learn how to play in about 30 seconds and don’t need a subscription or login or anything. And because it’s the same word for everyone, you can compete with others.

Why I resisted Wordle

Here’s my introduction to the Wordle. My brain was very tired after a long workday when my phone, annoyingly, bleeped at me. At first I didn’t react. I couldn’t handle it. These stupid phones hector us all day long with all their notifications … such an intrusion. And yet, people seem to welcome this. It’s like those whackos who put ketchup on a hot dog.

After a delay—designed to convince myself I’m not my phone’s bitch—I swiped down to check the notification. Lo and behold, it was actually something good: a text from my daughter Alexa! “You ever try the NYT Wordle?” she’d written. “Seems like it would be right up your alley. We can compete to see who solves it in the fewest moves.” She followed this with a little devil emoticon.

I instantly recoiled. As I said, I don’t like puzzles. My only exception is the Jumble (i.e., anagram) in the newspaper, which I’ll do only because I can generally solve it in like 30 seconds (and if I get stuck on any of the words I just shrug it off and bail). Since the Wordle has similarities to anagrams, my daughter thought I’d like it. But “we can compete” is not necessarily an attractive proposal when coming from her … she’s a born competitor, and when we play cards she usually wins. Sometimes I’ll lose like two or three games in a row and think, what’s the point? Hasn’t it been definitively established that she’s sharper? Is this Wordle thing just another way for her to lose respect for me—to roll her eyes at the terrible toll age is taking on my brain?

I started to text my daughter back but got fed up with the tedious process of typing on my smartphone. “Maybe ugh h hmm if did it to to I’d fffd go to that position,” I texted. I was freestyling, roaming randomly across the keyboard and blindly accepting autosuggestions. I could not go on. I put my phone away for the night.

Upon reflection the next day, I decided I’d been rude, and to make amends I relented and tried the Wordle. Surprisingly, I liked it right away.

What’s cool about Wordle

Here is my first-ever Wordle result:

My first guess was a complete wash: all the letters in my trial word were wrong. At first it seemed like I’d just totally wasted one of my six tries, but actually, I was making progress: I’d ruled out two of the five vowels and two rather common consonants. I have to admit, the minor triumph of gaining useful information, even without the reward of a yellow or green tile, was refreshing given how often these days (in non-gaming scenarios) I feel like I’m just treading water.

With a game like chess, I never know how to proceed, but with Wordle I was able to continue making decent guesses based on a combination of logic and intuition. And, as you can see, I did solve the puzzle. Nowadays, with around thirty Wordles under my belt, I wouldn’t be pleased about needing five guesses, but in the moment I felt satisfied, and I hadn’t had to work very hard.

But the really fun part was comparing notes with Alexa. She took five tries too, and I got to look at her finished card and note her strategy. 

This is one of the other really cool things about Wordle: you “show your work.” It’s not like with a crossword, maze, word search, Bingo, or Sudoku, where all completed puzzles look identical. With Wordle you get a sequential view of how the solution was achieved. For example, Alexa used “MODUS” which is barely a word, in the sense that we kind of stole it from the phrase modus operandi which is not technically English. Obviously lots of words have such origins (e.g., café, alumnae) but really, when’s the last time you heard somebody use “modus”? Probably Alexa wasn’t hoping to solve the puzzle with this guess, but was testing two vowels in one go, which is smart.

The social aspect

As noted in these pages (here, here, and here), I’m not a fan of social media and texting. I didn’t even let my kids have phones until they were like 18, and my younger daughter still doesn’t use one. But it’s nice to have some contact with Alexa, especially since I’m an empty nester now, and the Wordle is a good excuse to check in daily, and a convenient method. A phone call requires both parties to be available concurrently, which is rare.

Try this with your college kid: send a text saying, “Is everything okay? Do you need anything? What’s new? Are you making friends? Getting enough sleep?” My guess is you won’t get much of a response. But the simple message “Wordle in 4” is either throwing down the gauntlet (if you’re first), or inviting your kid to compare her result, which kicks off a nice, easy dialogue. For example, looking at Alexa’s solution to that first Wordle, I noticed something in common with mine: we both tried “DOWDY.” I texted, “Great minds think alike, and so do ours, apparently!” This earned me an LOL, which is arguably the quintessential affirmation of our time. Which brings us to…

The MOULS files

On October 28, I got this Wordle result:

I was surprised by a couple of aspects of Alexa’s strategy with this one:

First off, she didn’t carry forward the E and A from her first guess. This ruined her chances of solving in two tries, but then how good were those chances, anyway? (More on this later.) And then she “guessed” MOULS, which is not a word. I mean, okay, it’s recognized as a valid Scrabble word, and Wordle accepted it, but what the hell? I’ve never heard it, and the dictionary app on my phone doesn’t have it. The prospect of winning in four moves didn’t seem well served by this entry. Neither did her next “guess,” SPANE.

Well, even though MOULS didn’t gain her much in this round, she tried it again a day or two later. I texted, “Mouls cannot be a word, can it?” This, combined with a random photo of our cat, kicked off a nice dialogue:

Thus did MOULS become a thing. A week or so later I crashed and burned for the first time, on the word PINEY, which seems about as abstract and non-wordlike as MOULS, but which Alexa somehow got in a mere three moves. I was devastated. Yeah, of course I recognize that this is just a silly game, with nothing hanging in the balance, but man … I just felt so defeated and low, especially when I compared our cards:

I complained, “You’ve got better mouls.” She replied, “Yeah, you’ve gotta embrace the mouls!” She tried to console me: “Well, at least you don’t have a year-long streak that got broken! Relatively early for a miss.” I replied, “Now you’re just rubbing it in.” She came back with, “Sorry, my intention is not to cause further mouls!”

I looked some more at my losing card and realized my last guess was really stupid: I’d put a D in it even though Wordle had told me there was no D. I had just been swinging wild, in desperation. I was also growing increasingly irritated at my own irritation. Why get all bent out of shape over a stupid game?

“No worries, the whole thing is just a pain in the mouls anyway,” I replied. What a useful catch-all word this was proving to be. And just like that, it’s entered our private lexicon. (Well, not entirely private: as Alexa has noted, her Autofill now suggests “mouls.”) A week or two later when I nailed a Wordle in three tries, she texted, “The mouls were with you today.”

Can the Wordle change us?

Some weeks into our Wordle dialogue, Alexa texted me with a discovery: “Did you know Wordle has a hard mode? You need to use every known letter in each word.” I replied that this is what I’ve always done anyway, risking the heartbreak of failure for the prospect of a better score (i.e., fewer guesses). So she switched over, with the eventual result that she crashed and burned—for the first time—on BAKER, which is one of these deadly words that offer too many possible candidates. For example, in this case you could waste a lot of tries on words ending in –AKER (e.g., FAKER, MAKER, TAKER). Ruling out several possible leading consonants with one “guess” (that wouldn’t, couldn’t include known letters) would be safer in this case.

But notwithstanding the end of her streak, Alexa came to embrace the riskier path that can lead to greater glory. I put forth that playing in the easier mode would be “like riding [your bike] up Wildcat when you could ride up Lomas Cantadas.” Alexa, who has suffered on both climbs, saw my point: “Time to go big or go home,” she replied.

Oddities

I’ve only been at this about a month, but I’ve had some fairly odd games. Look at this one: nothing but green.

And here’s its evil twin:

Victory lap

And finally, check this out:

How do you like them mouls?

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Mourning and the Digital Age

Introduction

This will necessarily be the soberest thing I’ve ever posted.

A good friend of mine died last Saturday, trying to rescue his six-year-old daughter after she’d been swept off the beach by a rogue wave.  Both father and daughter drowned.  This indescribably sad accident is not an appropriate topic for this blog, and yet I cannot fathom writing about anything else.  Nothing else seems to matter right now, and to write on a lighter topic would be to ignore my sadness.  It’s the elephant in the room I feel I should confront, so that maybe, eventually, I can go back to more quotidian topics.

So, I’ve decided to come at this thing sideways and examine the more general notion of how the digital age affects the grieving process.  I find I have a lot to say about that.

Getting the news

There’s no good way to receive such horrible news, but some ways are more awful than others.  I learned over the phone from a friend on my bike club, who’d been contacted by a journalist looking for background on our late friend.  At least when a friend breaks it to you, there’s a moment to brace yourself as he gasps or sobs, and he’s bound to treat the news with the delicacy it demands.  Contrast that to finding out via the Internet.  I ended up googling the story because I simply could not understand what I was hearing.  The words were probably strung together adequately, but what they communicated didn’t seem possible.

It’s really jarring, and tacky, to see clickbait alongside such a tragic news story.  “Suri Cruise Looks So Grown Up on Set of Katie Holmes’ TV Show,” and “[Shocking] Remove Your Eye Bags & Wrinkles In 1 Minute!” accompanied the online news of this drowning.  As a friend of the bereaved family, I’m struggling to hang on to my belief that life is still good and meaningful, and yet there’s all this added evidence to the contrary.  These news websites are complete strangers to tact and decorum.

Then there are the typical Internet trolls, like the self-righteous shit-for-brains who commented (inaccurately), “there had been warnings of adverse surf conditions ... these were no ‘rogue’ waves.”  There was no advisory that day, and this jerk wasn’t there, and why does he do this?  What kind of sad sack makes sport of casting judgment on victims of a terrible accident?  And right below this, another comment:  “my neighbor’s step-sister makes $75 an hour on the computer.  Visit the website [...].”

Social media

I went to a website designed to collect tributes to the victims, which is fine, but everywhere I looked were rows or columns of buttons to share these tributes (and photos, etc.) via Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest, etc.  As somebody who avoids social media, I don’t like the idea that if I died, I might suddenly have representations of myself scattered across all of these platforms and I wouldn’t be around to protest.  This site also featured a “Donate” button to give money (presumably to the family).  Not all sorrow can be assuaged by money and I doubt this family did anything to set that up.  In the absence of a closely managed strategy—which I doubt any grieving family has the time or energy for—I could see a platform like this taking on a life of its own.

I did get some comfort from the tributes and shows of support on the website, but then I came to a post from someone who, by her own admission, didn’t even know the family but was nevertheless offering emotional support to my friend’s widow.  I found this jarring and a little chilling.  Perhaps I’m not the only one who did.  For whatever reason, the page has now been reconfigured to block anonymous readers, by requiring users to create a login.  I’m not quite ready to do that; after all, sites like this tend to overwhelm me pretty quickly.  The last thing I need is perpetual spam stemming from a glancing engagement with a web portal.

My point is, digital technology like clickbait, social media, likes, and links can creep up on us—or seem to fall suddenly out of the sky—without waiting for us to decide whether it’s good for us.  How many parents had the luxury of contemplating the influence of Facebook and Instagram on their teenagers, before those teens immersed themselves in this virtual world?  Who foretold this worldwide phenomenon?  (Answer:  nobody.  It wasn’t a phenomenon at first; it was just a technology.)  When it comes to grieving, how does the digital world fit in?  Would the healthiest thing be to close the laptop, power off the phone, and mourn in peace?

Who knows.  I do consider whether my personal inclination to opt out of social media is appropriate in this case.  After all, there are instances when it becomes antisocial to extend one’s neo-Luddite principles too far.  For example, for an adult in the corporate world not to have a cell phone is no longer tenable; we’re expected to be reachable.  And to not have e-mail in any industrialized society is nowadays absurd.  And so, when my bike club decided a tribute to our late teammate would be appropriate for our club’s Facebook page, and asked me to write it, I immediately stepped up.  It would be callous not to acknowledge the tragic death of our friend/teammate and his daughter, and I welcomed the chance to give this statement the thoughtfulness and delicacy it deserves.

Digital storage

Where the conveniences of digital life can become really wrenching is in the realm of digital caches and other storage.   On my smartphone right now, when I open Contacts, my dead friend’s name is right at the top on the “Frequently contacted” tab.  He’s also on the first page of my chat history (not deep correspondence, but just the most perfunctory logistical stuff like “Yo, I’m at Fieldwork”).  In the main phone app, there he is on the Recents tab.  In the Voicemail app, I still have a years-old message from him, when he called to see if I’d really been hauled away from Grizzly Peak Boulevard in an ambulance.  I originally kept the message as a handy way to remember exactly when that happened, but now I don’t want to delete the voicemail because it’s the only one from him that I have.  He’s all over my phone, like a ghost.

Of course most of these relics will be gradually pushed down the stack until they slip out of Recents altogether ... but that’s actually kind of disturbing too, like a bad omen.  Will my friend will be similarly pushed out of my memory by all the new stuff coming in?  (Of course not, but grieving isn’t a rational process.)  And what of my friend’s programmed entries in my contact list and phone book?  What about his presence in my archived message history, and that saved voice-mail?  I cannot bring myself to delete these.  How could I?   Sometimes humanity trumps efficiency—and perhaps it ought to.

My e-mail archive is another quandary.  I’ve got almost 700 messages from him I could sift through, looking for ways to jog my memory ... but is that healthy?  And that’s not even the entire trove; it’s only what’s stored in my current e-mail software.  I have some other virtual file cabinet I could probably delve into if I bothered to try.  At what point does this kind of sentimental, digitally assisted reminiscing shade toward the obsessive?  Obviously it would be weird and nutty to build a shrine for a departed friend, but that’s kind of what a digital archive is.  The difference is, the artifacts are enshrined automatically so we have access to them whether we’re pack rats or not.  Is it healthy to take advantage of this, or is it the emotional equivalent of picking a scab?

Browsing through old photos is even more captivating.  I hunted through my archive as part of the bike club tribute project, and was plunged ever deeper into memory, which naturally intensified the sense of loss.  How young we both look in that early photo!  (Subtext:  we go back so far, and now—nothing!)  Perhaps most bittersweet of all, for reasons I can’t quite grasp, is the last photo I have of my late friend, which is on my phone as well as my PC.  I distinctly remember him chiding me for my recklessness in riding past this bull to get the shot.

Maybe this photo makes me sad because it’s so recent, I didn’t even get the chance to e-mail it to him.

One of the hallmarks of our digital age is how we keep hopscotching from one brief thought to the next, based on this or that alert, picture, or other stimulus.  Such digital saturation is notorious for precluding careful contemplation.  Perhaps this is why I keep catching myself being self-indulgent—too wrapped up in my own grief to look at the bigger picture.  This family lost a father, a husband, a daughter, a sister, a brother, and a son.  I only lost a friend.  My grief is entwined with a more complicated feeling, something like guilt.

This feeling hit me like a hammer when, sitting at my desk and staring into space, I noticed my slide-show screen-saver start up.  It picks photos at random from my hard drive and displays them for 5 seconds apiece. At first the photos of my wife and kids, going back so many years, started to cheer me up—oh, remember when the girls were small, and wore dresses, and held hands?—and then I had this horrifying thought:  what if I had lost a daughter and a spouse?  Suddenly this slide show would be a torment.  Instead of showcasing family—the best part of life—it would highlight what has been taken away.  The entire photo archive, along with the e-mail archive and all those artifacts littering the smartphone, and so many posts and photos scattered across all those social media platforms ... all of these would intensify the grief.  What a torment.

I suppose I should try to coalesce these thoughts into some kind of pithy conclusion, but nothing is coming to me but the sense that it’s time to save this file and power down. 

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Down With Convenience!

Introduction

“I appreciate the seamless ease….”

That statement is the inspiration for this post.  It’s from a letter a friend wrote me recently.  The point isn’t that he sounds like a TV ad (from the days when ad spokesmen were earnest instead of arch). The point, rather, is that I found this simple statement oddly inflammatory.  I asked myself why.  And the answer is, I should find it inflammatory, and so should you.  Ideally, all my friends would join me in mounting a War on Convenience.  If I can’t have that, well, maybe I can influence a few readers.

A paradox

Of course I was being bombastic and hyperbolic a second ago.  Who doesn’t want convenience in his life?  But I think convenience is like alcohol:  it should be enjoyed responsibly.

Paradoxically, my worldview straddles two seemingly conflicting ideals:  I’m a great lover of efficiency, but I bristle at society’s infatuation with ease and expedience.  “Wait,” you may ask, “aren’t efficiency and convenience pretty much the same thing?”

Nope.  When I say “efficient” I mean that I can get something done exactly how I want it done in as little time as possible.  (Often this involves doing a lot of work up front, like creating macros for a software application.)  When people talk about seamless ease, they’re often referring to systems that are merely intuitive, such as a user interface that can be grasped quickly, without any need for help menus or a manual.  Some products are convenient because they remove tedious steps; other products are convenient because they rescue you from having to learn something.

I think it’s widely assumed that where user interfaces go, intuitive is best.  But this isn’t always true.  Consider the computer keyboard:  to be maximally intuitive, its keys ought to be placed in alphabetical order.  That would make it easier for the first-time user, wouldn’t it?  But of course this idea seems silly, since typing efficiency is more important than making the keyboard layout straightforward for the newcomer.

What’s even sillier is that the QWERTY layout was actually designed to be maximally inefficient, to keep early typewriters from jamming.  The Dvorak layout I use was difficult to learn, but my long-term gains in efficiency were well worth the trouble.

Low-lying fruit

The simplest argument against the embrace of convenience is that it often requires us to forsake quality.  I give you microwave popcorn:  it’s certainly easy to make, but a) it literally stinks, b) it’s more expensive than traditional popcorn, c) it tastes pretty bad, d) it’s full of salt and fat, e) it’s full of chemicals, and f) the excessive packaging is bad for the environment.  The popularity of microwave popcorn makes me embarrassed to be a member of the human race, considering that an air popper is also extremely easy to use, and cheaper, and lets you control how much salt and butter you add.

Whipped cream in an aerosol can is also really convenient, but it’s more expensive and less tasty than what you whip at home, and has the added problem of unpredictability:  it’s hard to tell when the can is low on cream (or non-dairy “kreme” as it often is), so you never know when you’ll foul up your sundae with the liquid dribble that comes at the end.  By whipping my own cream, I can choose an organic product; whip only as much as I need; control the amount of sugar; and save money.

But enough of these convenient examples.  I want to get into the more subtle ways that, through our love of convenience, we sell ourselves short without even realizing it.

The problem of control

Often, complicated systems are made more intuitive, and sometimes more efficient, through a simplification of the user interface and/or automation of repetitive operations.  A little Cessna surely has a simpler interface than a commercial airliner, though it often lacks that handy autopilot feature.

Automation is a fine idea in theory, but in practice, it’s only as good as its execution.  How accurate are product developers’ guesses about what should be automated and how?

Well, here’s a horror story.  My family was visiting some friends in their lovely, sunny home in London.  One afternoon, when our friends were out, I thought, hey, my mother-in-law is always asking for a nice photo of my wife and me.  And here we had this great lighting, so I suggested to my wife that we finally take the time to shoot a nice photo together.  My wife has a tendency to close her eyes in photos, so it took us at least a dozen tries.  Well, on the last day of our visit, our host said, “Hey, why not give us some photos of your visit from your SD card?”  Great idea!  So I took the card up to their Mac and stuck it in the card reader, expecting that I could cherry-pick the best photos of both families.  But to my surprise the operating system seized control, copied every photo off the card, and launched a little slide show, set to music.  This might have seemed really helpful to a novice computer user who hadn’t mastered file management software, but I was appalled.  The software must have chosen to show the pictures in reverse chronological order, because the first two dozen shots were of my wife and me.  We came off looking like the biggest narcissists you’ve ever seen.

Probably there’s a way to tell the Mac not to automatically grab all the photos from an SD card.  But some systems don’t give us a choice.  We consumers often put up with this lack of control because we enjoy the convenience of the overall product.  I see this problem most frequently in Internet-based systems, particularly when the revenue model is more complicated than “you pay me directly for goods or services.”  Things are automated with more than just the user’s experience in mind.

Here’s an example:  the Gmail Adsense engine, which automatically produces custom ads based on my e-mail text, doesn’t exist to serve me.  Were I given the choice to opt out of Adsense, I certainly would.  I don’t even use Gmail, and yet (as detailed here) my e-mails to Gmail users nevertheless produce these tailored ads I like it or not.

But you know what’s even worse than that?  It’s when we’re unaware of how convenience is costing us.  Consider LinkedIn:  it’s very convenient, and a great idea, and I’m glad that it’s free.  But as I’ve only recently discovered, LinkedIn does what it pleases with the information I give it.  Awhile back, because my profile photo was like five years old, I put up a new one.  (The idea was anti-vanity:  I didn’t want people to think I was using an old photo just to look younger to the world.)  To my embarrassment, LinkedIn contacted my 400 contacts on my behalf:  “Dana Albert has a new profile picture!”  As in, “Dana Albert, devoted curator of his own image and his self-important notion of an Albert ‘brand,’ wants you to see his latest self-portrait!”  A few people responded, perhaps snidely, “Nice picture!”  How embarrassing.  (Yes, I am easily embarrassed.  What can I say … I’m an introvert.)

But that’s not all.  I’ve come to find out that LinkedIn evidently does something special for their newer users:  they send an update anytime one of the user’s contacts has made new connections.  Since I don’t get such updates, I’d never have known about this behavior, except a couple of friends commented.  (“Wow, I’ve see a lot of LinkedIn updates on you lately … did you lose your job or something?”)  Once I looked into it, I figured out how to change these settings, but it wasn’t easy—which means that those who thrive on convenience will probably just accept the default behavior.  (Surely I don’t need to go into the various ways Facebook has surreptitiously exploited their users’ tastes, preferences, and purchasing data.)

Are your choices my business?

“Fine,” you might say, “Go whip your own cream, and type on your weird keyboard, and shun Facebook, if that’s what floats your boat—but let me do as I please.”  In other words, you might wonder why your behavior is any business of mine.  Here’s why:  other people’s behavior often affects what choices are available to me.

Here’s how that happens.  Because I worship efficiency, I enjoy figuring out how to make a complicated process go quickly—but not everybody enjoys this process, and manufacturers know it.  New products are often targeted at teens and young adults (to build brand loyalty early), so new consumers’ habits can have an immediate influence on industry.  Streamlining a process, modern consumers believe, should be figured out by the manufacturer and baked into the product.  Thus, the focus is outward on the product, rather than inward on the user.  It’s not “How can I get better at this” but “How can this be better for me?”  The “smarter” our products get, the lazier we’re permitted to be.

(Fortunately, schools are still essentially old-school.  If it weren’t for teachers making kids learn math, do you think these kids would bother, given the ease-of-use of smartphone calculator apps?  And yet, once you’ve learned arithmetic, it’s faster to do it in your head.)

The result of this consumer/producer dynamic is that perfectly valid products are often kicked to the curb.  Consider the manual car transmission, aka stick shift:  is it straightforward?  Not very.  Is there a benefit to learning how to work a clutch?  I think so.  After all, a manual transmission offers better gas mileage, and enables me to roll-start the car if my battery is dead.  My mastery of manual shifting impresses the ladies, and enables me to rent a car in Europe.  The popularity, in this country, of automatic transmissions didn’t used to affect me, until that choice became so ubiquitous that some foreign car companies stopped exporting their stick-shift models here.  When I bought my last Volvo, I couldn’t get one with the transmission I wanted.  I had to settle for an automatic. 

(By the way, that bit about impressing the ladies?  Yeah, that was a joke.  Just seeing if you’re awake.)

Another example:  digital cameras.  What a great invention, and yet the camera industry is really suffering.  You know what the number one camera is today?  The iPhone.  It’s easy to see why:  you’re carrying your phone anyway, so why carry another device?  The problem is, phone cameras are not nearly as good as regular digital cameras—even the more humble point-and-shoot ones.  A phone camera takes inferior pictures because the lens is too small and doesn’t let in enough light for non-flash photography in low-light conditions.  Phone cameras also lack a zoom (their so-called “digital zoom” is pure malarkey—cropping masquerading as telephoto).

Look at these two photos.  The first was taken with a $200 Panasonic Lumix point-and-shoot camera.  The second was with a Motorola Droid phone of the same vintage. 

The point-and-shoot photo is much better, and not because I got out a light meter, set the F-stop, adjusted the shutter speed, etc.  It was as easy to snap as with the phone (easier, actually, because there’s way less delay at the controls).  The only convenience I gave up was having everything in one device.

If the camera industry were healthier, I’d have even better products available to me, and at lower prices (due to economies of scale).  Alas, the market for standalone cameras has been strangled by the ubiquity of camera phones—the more convenient choice.

Whom does convenience benefit the most?

Sometimes the person who seems like the most direct beneficiary of convenience-oriented technologies actually isn’t.  Consider the grocery store UPC reader:  it’s very intuitive, and thus perfect for bringing new cashiers up to speed quickly.  It’s also more efficient, but this benefit does not accrue to the cashier, who is paid by the hour.  The system’s efficiency doesn’t mean the cashier gets a raise; it means he or she is easier to replace, and the store can get by with fewer checkout stations.

Now let’s move beyond human consumers and consider other consumers, like cattle.  Being kept in a small stall in a feedlot is certainly convenient for the cow, in terms of her basic need for sustenance.  Of course this diet causes all kinds of trouble for the poor animal, but her well-being was never the point.  The convenience of the feedlot mainly benefits the meat packer.  Since this arrangement translates into lowered operating costs, which can be passed along to the human consumer, it looks like a win-win.  So it is with cheap, high-margin products like soft drinks and sugary cereal.  Needless to say, in the long term this convenience isn’t benefiting the human consumers, either.  The countless Americans who buy junk food and frequent fast food chains are basically backing in to their own feedlot stalls.

Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies grasp that there’s big money to be made in drugs that treat lifestyle ailments, and doctors prescribe these drugs because doing so is so much easier than trying to get people to exercise and eat well.  Consumers participate in this lowest-price, lowest-effort economic model without an appreciation for its real costs.  The companies at the top in this economy are the direct beneficiaries of our rampant convenience addiction; by indulging it, they introduce a variety of societal ills.  In this regard, convenience is like secondhand smoke.

Convenience and parenting

If you’re a parent who has made it this far into my essay, I doubt you’re the kind who feeds his kid soft drinks, sugary cereal, and fast food.  But addiction to convenience is also present in the most upscale of products.  I’m talking about PCs, smartphones, tablet computers, and Netflix.

It’s more convenient to park kids in front of the TV or PC than to try to get them to help with dinner or with setting the table.  It’s easier to let a kid use his iPad in a restaurant, while his food gets cold, than to teach him how to behave like a grown-up.  So kids and their parents become co-dependents in a family dynamic that ultimately favors no one.

I won’t lie and say I never give in to such temptations.  But when I do, I don’t pretend I’m being a good dad.  “Shall we sit our kids down in front of a video and let them rot their brains out, just to get them out of our hair?” I’ll ask my wife.  And I’ll say to my kids, “Would you like to put in a video and let your brain be automatically extracted?”  This raises awareness and may help us fend off bad habits.

Do modern kids have the mental space required to daydream?  I’d guess a lot of them don’t.  So when my kids complain that they’re bored, I say, “Good.  It’s good to be bored.”  Necessity being the mother of invention, boredom is a good problem for the mind to solve.  Solving this problem with a library book, a blank piece of paper, or some random household detritus doesn’t do much for the economy, but the economy is not my problem.

“But wait,” you may protest, “Computers can be very educational!”  Yes, they can, but that doesn’t mean just any computer-based activity is intrinsically useful.  Too many parents pretend their Internet-addicted kid might become the next Mark Zuckerberg—because this fiction is more convenient than fighting with the kid about limits on his or her screen time.

My wife and I are all about limits.  This is why we don’t have cable, our kids don’t have phones or tablets, and their PC time is closely monitored and rationed.

“Okay, fine,” you might say, “You’ve identified some troublesome trends, but how are the habits of other families any of your business?”  Well, where the hell are my daughters going to find husbands?  My kids won’t settle for a passive, inert, pasty, video-addled mouth-breather who doesn’t read.  Meanwhile, the boys out there won’t settle for out-of-touch, pop-culturally illiterate nerds who don’t even text.  Sure, there are some boys out there whose parents are just as socially unconventional as my wife and me, but it’s a small pool.

Call to action

If you disagree with all of this, that’s fine—and I thank you for at least reading it.

On the other hand, if you agree with me, you may wonder what I propose to do about this rampant convenience addiction.  The answer is simple (though not easy).  Next time you appreciate the convenience of something, ask yourself if that convenience came at any great cost to you:  to your privacy, to your health, to your family, or to the environment.  Then ask yourself if it’s worth it.  I’ll keep on doing the same.

And at a minimum, if you find yourself using the phrase “seamless ease,” please don’t say it like it’s a good thing.

Misspelling in Hawaii

Introduction

Earlier this month, my family took a vacation to Kauai.  (There, I typed “Kauai” without misspelling it.  That word, and all Hawaiian words, often trip me up, as “Hawaiian” did just now, and it’s a good thing—perhaps—that  my word processing program instantly flagged the error.)

Where was I?  Oh, right, Hawaii.  I can’t blog about how great a time I had there, because nobody wants to hear about it.  But I also can’t complain about anything, because any complaint that starts out “When I was in Hawaii” isn’t going to generate any sympathy.  And yet, this having been a terribly expensive vacation, I feel like I should somehow get some good blogging mileage out of it (as I have done with an overpriced museum visit and a pricey pair of cycling shoes).  So in this post I’m going to examine the strange sense I got that nobody in Hawaii can spell.

Not that I’m not saying Hawaiians can’t spell.  Somehow, visitors to Hawaii also can’t.

Misspelled food

My family is a foodie bunch.  (Can “foodie” be an adjective?  It can now!)  So perhaps it’s not surprising that the first misspellings we spotted were food-related.  The very first was a section on a menu called “Desert.”  I cut people slack when they (incorrectly) write “just desserts” because when the word “desert” is used as a noun but (correctly) pronounced like “dessert,” to indicate “something that is deserved,” we’re into some pretty arcane English-major territory.  But when a restaurant misses that second “s” in “dessert,” you hope they’re better at hygiene than spelling.  Still, we’d have brushed it off had not another restaurant, a day or two later, made the same error.

Later on, we saw “TACO’S” on the banner for a taqueria called Da Crack, and I decided this wasn’t a deliberate error (along the lines of “da” for “the”) but just an uneducated approach to spelling that treats apostrophes like garnish.  (Too bad Da Crack didn’t have any really good garnish, like cilantro.)

In the case of ethnic food, particularly Asian food, I’m very quick to forgive misspellings, and often count them as a sign of authenticity (along with their cousins, the weird word choices you see like “Fire Burst Stomach Trips” or “Eight Precious Rice Pudding”).  And sometimes Asian restaurant misspellings can be really funny, like “Braised pork in spicy Human sauce.” 

I’m less understanding when it comes to Western misspellings, like we found in our condo.  The hosts had left a handy list of restaurant recommendations, and it had some pretty blatant errors.  For example, a burger place was touted as “a much healthier choose than McDonald’s.”  The name of this burger place?  “Bubba’s Buger.”  This led to lots of corollary jokes (especially popular with my daughters) such as, “Anybody feel like eating boogers tonight?”  But the funniest misspelling on this list was a recommendation for a health food restaurant where we should “order the Acai bowel, full of antioxidants and pure energy.”

Misspelled journal entries

Perhaps you’ve stayed in a bed & breakfast or inn where there’s a nicely bound little journal in which guests can record their feelings about the place.  This journal doesn’t function like Yelp, since you’ve already paid for and occupied the place, so most guests just gush about how great a time they had and how wonderful everything is.  So there’s a lot of gloating, and perhaps some one-upmanship as well (i.e., attempts to be more thoughtful or articulate than the last guy).

Almost every entry in the little book at our Princeville condo had misspellings.  Here is a partial list, courtesy of my older daughter who read them out to me as she went along: 

• beutifil, beutifilly
• foget
• eastun (for “eastern”)
• beatifull
• evere (I had to see this one myself to make sure it wasn’t just a handwriting flourish)
• do able (for “doable”)
• awsome
• well (for “we’ll”)
• what so ever
• cando (for “condo”)
• click our heals (within a “Wizard of Oz” reference)
• use to (for “used to”)

What I found particularly strange about all this is that the people writing in the guidebook didn’t seem slapdash about it; their handwriting was neat and their sentences well-crafted.  None of the entries looked to have been penned by a sloppy t(w)een  (other than that of my own daughter); and there weren’t any LOLs or FWIWs or GR8s or other signs of Gen-Y shorthand.  And yet it costs big bucks to stay in this “cando,” so it’s not like these were uneducated people.  I was, and am, deeply perplexed.

By the way, here is my own condo journal entry, which you can scrutinize for misspellings and/or one-upmanship:

Why so much misspelling?

I suppose it would be very imperialist of me, almost Manifest-Destiny-ish you might say, to judge Hawaiians’ spelling of English words when their native language is so very, very different.  Throughout our vacation I struggled to pronounce the native Hawaiian words that frequently popped up as place names and other proper nouns.  I fared far worse than our GPS narrator when saying, for example, “Ala Kalanikaumaka Street” (though we noticed that the GPS Lady pronounced it a little differently each time).  And yet this is actually pretty straightforward compared to words like “pu’uwai”  and “ku’uipo,” with their surplus of vowels and weirdly placed apostrophes.

Still, I can’t explain away the English misspellings based on the oddities of Hawaiian spelling.  After all, plenty of people are able to master two entirely different alphabets; as a high school student I was pretty good at spelling Russian words correctly.

Could poor spelling be related to the blissful, carefree apathy that comes from drifting your life away in an island paradise?  Well, it is the case that the lovely Anini Beach had been called “Wanini Beach” until the “W” fell off the sign, and rather than fix the sign, the Hawaiians just shrugged their shoulders and let “Anini” become the new name. 

But, as you’ve already noticed, these theories don’t explain why visitors to Kauai, like those writing in the condo journal, can’t spell.  It’s not like something comes over us in the week or two we spend here.   Even my daughter’s journal entry had only one typo—a missing apostrophe—which is exactly the kind of sloppy mistake she makes at home.

And those comical misspellings in the list of restaurant recommendations provided by the condo owners?  Well, the owners don’t actually live in Hawaii.  This is their just guest home.  If memory serves, they live in Texas.

And so, after much reflection, I’ve decided that the misspellings have little to do with Hawaii, and mostly to do with technology—and the lack of it.

Huh?

Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about the journal in the condo is that it’s the rare example of non-typed text.  Think about this for a second:  how often do you read something handwritten?  The non-typed text I come across generally falls into one of two categories:  1) graffiti, and 2) my kids’ schoolwork.  Do I see misspellings in these kinds of text? 

Why, yes.  Perhaps the only words I see among graffiti that are consistently spelled right are the profanities.  Everything else reflects the fecal-mindedness of the graffitist.  Meanwhile, my twelve-year-old isn’t bad at spelling, but my younger daughter, age ten, still has much room to improve.  A sonnet she wrote recently— which  had very good meter and perfect rhyme, and which was very deep, being a letter to her future teenage self, bagging on herself in advance and promoting nostalgia for a time when she wasn’t “blotet [sic] and lazy”—contained no fewer than twenty-three spelling errors.

Aside from graffiti and kids’ stuff, virtually everything I read is typed, and our modern means of typing have all kinds of built-in technology to (help) eradicate misspellings and typos.  The original tool, the spell-checker, not only identifies errors but arguably helps people learn from their mistakes.  The spell-checker is not a perfect tool—for example, it’ll catch “buger” but not “Acai bowel”—but it’s been masking poor spelling fairly effectively for about thirty years now.  (At least, when it’s turned on.  I’m going to assume that restaurant people just aren’t very good with computers.)

The problem is, the classic spell-checker is losing out to more modern tools that are less educational.  Smartphones have features that enable you to type sloppily, generating character strings that only remotely resemble words; the operating system is smart enough to make good guesses at what you’re trying to type.  I can type “t-y-p” and it suggests “type,” “types,” “typo,” and “typed” and I can touch any of these to accept that word.  This is especially handy with trickier words like “beautiful.” 

When I’m on my smartphone I use the Swype technique, aka slide-typing, where I drag my finger through the letters of a word and, amazingly, the OS recognizes these words, no matter how sloppy I get.  It’s not so good with “Acai” or “mahalo” but does great with most common English words.  If I Swype “beutifil” it seamlessly corrects it to “beautiful,” just as it discreetly turns “awsome” to “awesome.”  Typing in this way, a person could generate readable text for decades without ever learning how to spell.  This is just great, until you’re suddenly forced to use a pen and paper to compose your message.

So, if you think the spelling is bad now in handwritten messages, just you wait.  We’re seeing the mere lack of spell-checker now; in another couple decades, when Gen-Y starts making enough money to rent “candos,” they’ll be even less well equipped to work out tricky words like “bowl” and “awesome” on their own.

Epilogue:  voice recognition

Do people also use voice recognition software to compose messages?  I don’t know.  I suspect that this technology is mainly used for giving instructions to your phone, and that the modern generation prefers the silence of typing and Swyping.  That said, it’s hard to really tell.  When you see a guy walking down the sidewalk yakking on his smartphone, he could either a) be having an old-fashioned voice conversation, b) be dictating a message to his e-mail program, or c) be a crazy person talking loudly to nobody or nothing at all, with the phone held up as a prop.

As it happens, I did investigate the efficacy of voice-recognition for large bodies of text:  because I find Swype typing tedious (and didn’t have a laptop with me on vacation), I dictated a restaurant review to my phone.  Needless to say, I’ll be making that review available on albertnet:  maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.