There's a good point buried in your dismissal that is worth responding to. Do we listen to canaries in coalmines who are tweeting in distress? Because in 20 years a ton of kids are going to find themselves where I am today.

Check the link in my signature, that's sort of my approach too. I'm basing it on Marshall McLuhan who said that the content of the new, invisible medium is always the old thing. So back in the early 80s everyone was used to filing cabinets and manila file folders, which lent the Macintosh a interface a friendly interface for an otherwise difficult transition. Now people may use folders on a computer without ever having made use of a filing cabinet to begin with: the meaning of computer interface is severed from the originating metaphors. If you're strapped for time jump straight to episode II (skipping the Prelude and the first ep).

I think we'd all like to be able to immerse ourselves in a computer generated reality

Speak for yourself. I've a hard enough time maintaining presence and immersion within the physically/chemically generated reality I was born into. Then again, I'm in my late 20s and had a screen in front of my face every day since I was about 6. Seeing as this story about screen time is still on the front page, I think we'd better deal with the long-term effects of the 1080p virtual reality we already have before strapping things onto our face any more than we already are.

I'm pleased by the moratorium.

What? No, no, the marketers would never go for that, too common. How about "video terminal"?

How about no software at all? TVs with just a bunch of easily-identifiable ICs and no programming. "The Future is Dumb."

First time I've heard of this. Had to dig deep to find out it's a distant fork of CyanogenMod. Are they really making their logo an upside-down Google G? Worth following, since being Android it'll be useful for people who need their apps. But Puri.sm is more like what I'm looking for.

Well that's what 3rd Rock from the Sun was all about too, except the reasons for the Solomon's lack of social adjustment were more artfully and sensitively handled. Nobody who might have learned something from that show would think that they were supposed to be the target for the message.

The comparison isn't between computers and books -- it's between computers/books and face to face learning. The media just facilitates one-to-many styles of information dissemination. If classrooms shrunk from one teacher with 30 students down to a 1:1 personal tutor model, and all media were eliminated for face to face working in a totally personal way then wouldn't quality of education increase immensely?

At The Beer Store in Ontario we have price lists for all the product. Taxes are included in the shelf-price. When the power goes out it slows us down, but we can still just use a calculator and tabulate everything manually. No debit or credit, just cash. There are no receipts, obviously, but for the most part customers just want their beer.

If there was tax involved and the products were varied as opposed to mostly of the same sort and fairly consistent in price then it might be harder to do.

I've been reading Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community and Curtis and LambdaaMOO was mentioned in a section about what we call "video game addiction" today.

But to the hardest-core MUDders, the traditional online epithet "Get a life" is more the issue. When you are putting in seventy or eighty hours a week on your fantasy character, you don't have much time left for a healthy social life. If you are a college student, as the majority of MUDders are, MUDding for seventy hours a week can be as destructive to the course of your life as chemical dependency. Computer scientist Pavel Curtis created an experimental MUD, LambdaMOO, on his workstation at Xerox Corporation's renowned Palo Alto Research Center. At a panel discussion in Berkeley, California, Curtis had this to say about the addictive potential of MUDding:

I am concerned about the degree to which people find virtual communities enchanting. We have people who use LambdaMOO who are not in control of their usage who are, I believe, seriously and clinically addicted. . . . These people aren't addicted to playing video games. It wouldn't do the same thing for them. They're communication addicted. They're addicted to being able to go out and find people twenty-four hours a day and have interesting conversations with them. We're talking about people who spend up to seventy hours a week connected and active on a MUD. Seventy hours a week, while they're trying to put themselves through school at Cambridge. I'm talking about a fellow who's supposed to be at home in Cambridge to see his family for the holidays, missed his train by five hours, phoned his parents, lied about why he was late, got on the next train, got home at 12:30 in the morning, didn't go home, went to a terminal room at Cambridge University and MUDded for another two hours. He arrived home at 2:30 in the morning to find the police and some panicked parents, and then began to wonder if maybe he wasn't in control. These are very enticing places for a segment of the community. And it's not like the kinds of addictions that we've dealt with as a society in the past. If they're out of control, I think that's a problem. But if someone is spending a large portion of their time being social with people who live thousands of miles away, you can't say that they've turned inward. They aren't shunning society. They're actively seeking it. They're probably doing it more actively than anyone around them. It's a whole new ballgame. That's what I'm saying about virtual societies.

Just watched the first episode of Electric Avenue and it was pretty great. Giant space voyage simulator with CG view screen, computer usage in the field by archeologists, and a blind woman who runs some sort of graphics design company (!) using microcomputer accessibility devices. Lots of neat footage. https://computer-literacy-proj...

I've been thinking about the Spotify A.I.s and wondering whether or not more people choose music based on the style of the song or on the meaning in the words. Because if lots of people like songs with a certain message, than is it possible to end up getting song recommendations in some sort of subliminal suggestion bubble? Like, every week, you end up with songs telling you how great you are, or, worse, some sad country songs about how terrible everything is?

Yes. Right now I'm running a Radicale server just to my phone's calendar and contacts local to my LAN with WebDAV. It was a pain in the ass to set up, and I only did it after I couldn't figure out how to just sync over my USB connection using flat files. All this work just to recapture the glory of using my Palm V... actually if the digitizer wasn't broken and I could replace the battery for it I'd probably still use it and keep my phone turned off in my bag all day.

Another example of this is the phrase "SJW". No-one can agree on exactly what it means, which is why it's so successful. It means whoever the reader disagrees with and thinks is an idiot, basically a cheat code to make everyone agree with you.

Well the term derives from "keyboard warrior" so we can narrow it down a little bit. Being the digital-media equivalent of a squeeky wheel, producing a surplus amount of noise, commotion, and drama on-line is certainly a defining factor. So "social justice" just qualifies the particular bent.

Yeah it's called brigading. It's sort of like a forum-raid, except on a site like Reddit which has a common-login between different forums it removes the barrier of account registration for snooping and shit-posting.

It's strange how the internet feels so much smaller as more people get on board. The centralizing tendencies and vertical integration of common logins via social media (as how Microsoft envisioned Passport working) just crowds everyone together and causes this sort of friction.