Clippings

Digital Detox

Today’s edition of The New York Times contains a great essay on digital detox. It notes “Mindy Weiss, a party planner in New York and Los Angeles who specializes in celebrity events, said cellphone bans are becoming a new normal “on the high-profile end.” She advises hosts to explain the cellphone rules in the invitation, have clear signs at the party and, when possible, carve out a special area for important calls — like a smoking area for those who need to check in with the baby sitter.” It also contains several strategies for making less time for cell phones and more time for the people you are with.

I wonder if I could code something to make this appear every time I commit something to Pocket

As my Pocket queue becomes more unwieldy, Dara Horn's reflections at The Washington Post are especially timely.

But what’s our excuse? Beyond narcissism, do we have a reason for Instagramming every instant of our lives? What is it about data-dumping that we find so compelling and necessary?...What is lost in that cloud is the art of forgetting, the selective memory that distinguishes trash from treasure. My parents spent 30 years as avid snapshot-takers. An entire floor-to-ceiling bookcase holds their albums of our family’s adventures, including four children’s birthdays, graduations, weddings and more. But if my husband and I were to print all our photos from our four children’s lives, the resulting albums would easily fill a room — and our oldest is only 8. Saving everything, it turns out, is eerily similar to saving nothing, especially when there are no British academics waiting to catalogue our joys and woes. In sheer quantity of data, many people’s personal records may come to resemble that room in Cairo: a bottomless well of mostly trivial information, its treasures concealed in a cloud.

Will have to find out more about A Guide for the Perplexed.