Taking a walk under the night sky

hat tip Ann Althouse

Dare we turn off our smart phones for a few hours each day?

Seth Godin writes,

Urgent or important?: Your phone has been optimized to highlight the urgent. It buzzes and beeps. It sorts things. It brings everyone else's urgent things right under your nose, reminding you about them until they become your urgent things. A full day on your phone is almost certainly a day where you buried the important in favor of the urgent.

The moment: The smart phone brings the world to us, in our pocket. But if the entire world is there, presenting its urgencies, it's harder than ever to be here, right now, in this moment.

Brevity over density: Just about everything produced on a smart phone is done in a hurry, because there's something urgent happening just a click away. As a result, we favor brevity. Brevity in what we consume (LOL) and brevity in what we produce (GTG). It's not clear that brevity ought to be our goal in all things, or in how we spend hours of each day.

The filter bubble: Even more than on the web, the closed gardens of the smart phone world mean that we're most likely to consume ideas that we already understand, from people we already agree with. Not a path to growth, certainly.

Off the hook: Because it's so easy to hit 'send' and because there's so much noise, we can easily relieve the tension of creation with a simple click. Easy in, easy out, easy delete.

Like most things that are taxed, smart phones are often worth it, creating connections and giving us information when we need it. Perhaps, though, turning our phones off for six hours a day would be a useful way to cornering us into creating work we can't live without.

Taking it from the streets to home computers and smart phones

Police have charged Alix Catherine Tichelman with manslaughter in the heroin overdose death of a Google executive on his yacht.

Jessica Guynn reports at USATODAY that

The glare of the national spotlight is on Silicon Valley sex workers after news broke this week that an alleged prostitute is charged with leaving a Google executive to die on his yacht in Santa Cruz, Calif., after shooting him up with heroin. The Internet is rife with anonymous websites that match sex workers with clients and help them avoid being arrested or assaulted. The websites have both broadened the sex market and helped customers hire prostitutes more discreetly. Scott Cunningham, an associate professor at Baylor University who studies the economics of prostitution, said the Internet has made the sex trade "extraordinarily efficient," taking it from the streets and red-light districts to home computers and smartphones. "Before the Internet, clients didn't know where to find the prostitutes and prostitutes did not know where to find the clients. If you think about it in an economic sense, the Internet has removed a lot of the friction from the market," Cunningham said. "And when you reduce search friction, you get a lot more searching and a lot more of that activity."

Read more here.