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.

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.

No Internet Week raises the stakes.

Addicted To Your Phone? It's Your Fault, Wired Says http://t.co/euAN1YUCW6

— Co.Exist (@FastCoExist) November 2, 2013

The strongest argument I've seen yet for unplugging comes in an appreciation of The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning at Brain Pickings. Here's the passage that makes the case most convincingly for me. I wish I could count the times I've been frustrated by a "just-the-facts-ma'am" approach that made a more leisurely investigation and conversation impossible. I'm deep into the telling of Dorothea Brooke's story in Middlemarch (and still finding surprises), but I'm looking forward to following the whole argument of The Spirituality of Imperfection.

Without imperfection’s ‘gap between intentions and results,’ there would be no story.

[…]

Listening to stories and telling them helped our ancestors to live humanly — to be human. But somewhere along the way our ability to tell (and to listen to) stories was lost. As life speeded up, as the possibility of both communication and annihilation became ever more instantaneous, people came to have less tolerance for that which comes only over time. The demand for perfection and the craving for ever more control over a world that paradoxically seemed ever more out of control eventually bred impatience with story. As time went by, the art of storytelling fell by the wayside, and those who went before us gradually lost part of what had been the human heritage— the ability to ask the most basic questions, the spiritual questions.

For the record, here's another passage to appreciate via William James and Brain Pickings.

This is not a spirituality for the saints or the gods, but for people who suffer from what the philosopher-psychologist William James called ‘torn-to-pieces- hood’ (his trenchant translation of the German Zerrissenheit). We have all known that experience, for to be human is to feel at times divided, fractured, pulled in a dozen directions … and to yearn for serenity, for some healing of our ‘torn-to-pieces-hood.’