From a profile of Poet Laureate Billy Collins in today's New York Times. I'm also taken by the advice to read poetry instead of a timeline.

FOLLOWING I am a nonparticipant of social media. I’m not much attracted to anything that involves the willing forfeiture of privacy and the foregrounding of insignificance. So I can proudly say that I’ve never tweeted, but I am struck by the apparent coincidence of the 140 characters — sounds like a Balzac novel — and the 140 syllables in the Elizabethan sonnet. Instead of tweeting that you had great pizza tonight, why not read some haiku by Buson? Doesn’t poetry seem just right for our ever shrinking attention spans? O.K., never mind.

Garfield attributes a good deal of the humanity of the letter — something he so poetically terms its “physical candor and the life-as-she-is-suffered quality” — to the tangibility of how it travels from sender to recipient. Though we know a great more today about how information travels on the internet, Garfield argues for an “intrinsic integrity” that letters hold over other modes of communication and explains:

Some of this has to do with the application of hand to paper, or the rolling of the paper through the typewriter, the effort to get things right first time, the perceptive gathering of purpose. But I think it also has something to do with the mode of transmission, the knowledge of what happens to the letter when sealed. We know where to post it, roughly when it will be collected, the fact that it will be dumped from a bag, sorted, delivered to a van, train or similar, and then the same thing the other end in reverse. We have no idea about where email goes when we hit send. We couldn’t track the journey even if we cared to; in the end, it’s just another vanishing. No one in a stinky brown work coat wearily answers the phone at the dead email office. If it doesn’t arrive we just send it again. But it almost always arrives, with no essence of human journey at all. The ethereal carrier is anonymous and odorless, and carries neither postmark nor scuff nor crease. The woman goes into a box and emerges unblemished. The toil has gone, and with it some of the rewards....

Garfield’s core argument, while anchored a tad too stubbornly and narrowly to the preservation of letters as a medium, speaks powerfully to a broader urgency — the increasingly endangered species of meticulous, thoughtful self-revelation and deep mutual understanding through the written word in the age of reactionary responses and knee-jerk replies. He captures this beautifully:

Great miserabilist that he was, Philip Larkin was spot-on with his famous line from ‘An Arundel Tomb’ … what will survive of us is love. Letters fulfill and safeguard this prophecy. Without letters we risk losing sight of our history, or at least its nuance. The decline and abandonment of letters — the price of progress — will be an immeasurable defeat.

Three years sounds like a long time to spend on a mobile device, but three years is just the blink of an eye. My son is not yet three years old, but in the brief time I have known him, he has already become the most meaningful thing in my life. And he taught me my biggest lesson about technology.

Since my son was born, I’ve spent more time reading my Twitter timeline than I’ve spent reading to him. I am not proud of that fact, but there it is. My son has challenged me to find some worth in all that time spent.

How do we find enough meaning in the hours we while away flipping through a feed on our phones? Years from now, decades from now, will we be able to explain why this is how we spent our days? As the whole world picks up their phones, I actually think this may be one of the most important challenges I can work on.

There's a delicious irony in expressing my appreciation for these words originally read on a mobile device. Anil Dash is writing about the responsibility of app designers, whose work will at least facilitate, if not encourage, us to spend more time on our devices. Dash suggests three criteria—useful, important, and meaningful—and seems most comfortable with meaningful. I'm with him, mostly, but I have hard time setting a standard. Even that fact of reading to his son is somewhat questionable. I'm not sure time you spend reading to your son is always time well spent or the best way to spend your time or that you can absolutely say that time spent on a device is never preferable to time spent reading. We've got to ask rather whether we're spending the sum of of our time to achieve meaning, not choosing devices or other frivolous pursuits over meaningful and important ones. (It's interesting, too, that Dash uses the adjective robotic in discussing the issue—Useful has come to imply an almost robotic utilitarianism, focused on efficiency at the expense of soul.

I read Alone Together with disbelief, and only acknowledge its findings with reluctance. Here's more evidence, from Fast Company. that Sherry Turkle got it right.

As more advanced robots enter more parts of our lives, especially in the workplace, there could be growing emotional and psychological consequences for their human caretakers. Julie Carpenter, a human-robot interaction researcher who did her doctoral work at the University of Washington’s School of Education, recently found that out in a series of interviews she did with 23 military personnel who operate robots that dismantle explosives and other weapons. In their responses, it was clear they had begun to view the robots as extension of themselves.