Returning to analog and putting digital in its place (opens in new tab)

Quick, what goes in the blank?

    The free access which many young people have to *BLANK* has poisoned the mind and
    corrupted the morals of many a promising youth; and prevented others from improving
    their minds in useful knowledge. Parents take care to feed their children with
    wholesome diet; and yet how unconcerned about the provision for the mind, whether
    they are furnished with salutary food, or with trash, chaff, or poison?

Trick question, it's not "screens". It's "romances, novels, and plays" - quote taken from "Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family", Reverend Enos Hitchcock, 1790.

I'm all for carefully considering which tools you use every day, but spare me the moralizing - it was gauche in 1790 and it hasn't improved with age.

I have to agree with what others here have said: the moralizing rubs me the wrong way and, in this case, I don't think it serves any purpose but to move blame away from the author and onto the technology that he perceives as his primary problem.

I have a child and they have access to a Kindle, our television (with Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc.) as well as our Nintendo 3DS. These all (in my opinion) serve much the same purpose: entertain, distract and in some circumstances help people relax. Since the beginning my partner and I have been clear that it's not okay to sit in front of one (or cycle through them all) for hours at a time. At this point our child is seven and they rarely exceed more than 30 minutes at a time of screen interaction. For the most part, they move onto something else on their own.

Clearly part of it is personality, but I do think some part was the establishment of clear boundaries from the start. Perhaps when my child hits the teen years, I'll have to revisit this battle but for now keeping screen time at a minimum is a fairly low friction activity.

As this author demonstrates, there's a very real challenge as parents to make the time to schedule activities or to encourage children to get out and play. This strikes me as eternal problems: no seven year old is great at planning ahead or has the ability to schedule their own play dates. But, unlike when I was a child, there are more options than staring at a blank wall or digging deep holes in the backyard.

Based on title I first assumed that this is about signal processing, but then came the disappointment.

> Vinyl records, board games, paper notebooks, brick-and-mortar bookstores

All of which are less accessible to people with disabilities than their digital counterparts (at least when the digital counterparts are done right). For the latter three, I'm thinking in particular of blind people (and people with severely limited vision like me). True, a lot of computer and mobile games are not accessible to us, but some are.

All of these tools are also inaccessible to people with mobility impairments. For example, in his book _Hit Refresh_, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella writes about how some high school students helped his oldest son, who has severe cerebral palsy, more easily enjoy a wide range of music, by developing a Windows app that uses a sensor in the wheelchair. That would have been impractical with vinyl records.

> Using analog tools in teaching

This is where the author's preference for analog may inadvertently exclude some students that are there in the room. True, putting something up on a screen doesn't automatically make it accessible. But at least there are possibilities, without requiring someone to transcribe. For example, when a teacher has prepared a slide deck in advance, they can make it available to a blind student by email before the class period, and the student can then review it with a screen reader. Accessibility for content being shown on a screen in real time is still a largely unsolved problem, but a solution is feasible.

Having said all that, I certainly agree that we need to moderate our content consumption for our mental and social well-being, and moderate screen time for a good night's sleep if nothing else. I spend a lot of time in front of a screen, though I can only read it up close and use a screen reader most of the time for web browsing. I think I'll start spending some time away from the screen before I go to bed. Yes, I'll be listening to music in digital format, but as far as I know, the ear can't really tell the difference.

My issue here is that screen content today often of very low quality.

It's even worse than TV was 25 years ago (actual TV became worse too during that period).

Even what I'm having on my screen, non-work-related, is information equivalent of trash food.

I now have doubts whether I am comfortable in letting my kid on this crapfest. Case in point: games that have no gameplay, no difficulty, no plot, no information, and exist solely to make spend money via in-app purchases. This of course lets them kill off everything else on market by putting half of that money into advertising.

Analog beats digital for some things because it's only 2017. In 2047, our tech will seem as clunky and limited as 1987 looks to us today.

Paper notebooks still beat computers in some ways. Acknowledging this is the key to keep moving forward. Computer screens are rigid, paper is flexible. Computers take Wi-Fi and batteries, paper doesn't. Screens often cut up their space with sticky navbars at the top, disclaimers at the bottom, ads on the right and even in the middle. Computer input is by a rigid and limited keyboard or by a blunt stylus across a slippery screen. Pen on paper provides friction for feedback and control.

Relevant quote from article: " [...] I got out an unused Moleskine notebook. [...] I instantly remembered how much I love writing, just the physical sensation of it and the flexibility of analog tools. [...] It's been a revelation to use a paper notebook for this. Before [...] I would try to take handwritten notes using my iPad, or use Evernote. It was always fussy and frustrating: The wifi wouldn’t connect, for example. Or, the pen would lag on my iPad and the resulting notes were illegible. Or, I was using Evernote and couldn’t easily hand-annotate what I was typing; or using OneNote and experiencing horrific data corruption and sync issues."

Am I the only one having a problem with the term "analog" for everything non-digital? First of all digits can very well be analog to something, e.g. a CD contains digits analogous to sound pressure in a similar way a vinyl records has grooves analogous to sound. Furthermore analog means quite the opposite of the "real thing" - as the name says, it is an analogy of something, not the thing itself. I could just let go and accept the new meaning of analog, but I think the implication of using it this way leads to the false impression that everything digital is just fake and a mere approximation of the-real-thing. As someone who breathes digitally, this makes me a bit sad.

I would argue that while there's nothing wrong with digital and I still do plenty of things digitally, there's something to be said for the analog as well. Digital still doesn't offer a few things that can be valuable: in-person social interaction (pretty much by definition), flexibility (I can write literally anything on a piece of paper, it doesn't have to conform to any particular structure or require I load a drawing app to make a diagram, etc), and having a physical artifact of your efforts.

I used to make a bunch of attempts at keeping journals digital only in the past, and in the past year I started keeping a physical design diary where I recorded all my game design ideas. It's hard work keeping up with it, but seeing the result of those efforts is very much worth it to me. Then in addition to that I spend a little extra time digitizing it (basically when my brain is mush and I don't want to think about things), so I have both the artifact and a digital copy of it for reference on the go.

I have a gazillion files on my hard drive, and all those things can easily get buried into archives or deep nests of folders and become 'out of sight, out of mind' for me. But I can pick up the diary, browse through it, go "Oh yeah, that thing! I should think about that some more", and if I happen to die, I bet most of my digital files will be completely overlooked, whereas people will see the design diaries and potentially do something with them.

It is a lot more work to write everything physically though. I seem to be perpetually a month behind on recording in it nowadays.

Secondly, I used to work in video games, and I really got tired of everything I worked on eventually being unable to be enjoyed by friends because it was trapped on an old platform, or the company no longer supported it, it disappeared from an app store (sometimes after only two years), the format stops being supported (in the case of my old Flash games), etc.

Meanwhile, most of my board game designs are all cards, tokens, etc that are completely self-contained, don't require system or platform upgrades, and can easily survive 50 years or more (I know, because I own board games still in excellent condition that are that old).

> For the kids, they get their screens back before they leave for school

Is this the norm now for kids to have smart devices? Are there more benefits than dangers in letting a pre-teen/early teen have a smart device?

Analog is more intimate than digital. When I look at the night sky through my binoculars, the photons of distant stars land upon my retina. They touch me, and I touch them, despite the stars being light years away.

When I look through a digital camera, I see the stars but I know the photons are fraudulent. The information is there, but it's lost something.

With analog, if I could focus better, I'd see more and more detail, until it's inseparable from noise, but it's still in there somewhere

With digital, if I zoom, I know I'll find just a pixel or a cold dead square wave.

Does the author have children... or pets? Because it doesn't sound like he acknowledges his children as people at all. Perhaps the reason the children resort to screens is because it's the only way he's made possible for them to have any degree of autonomy or independence? He makes it clear that he walks around the neighborhood WITH them, he goes to visit their friends from school WITH them, etc. The reason many kids don't like to go outside isn't because outside isn't interesting - it's because the parents expect to go WITH them.

Back. Off. The kids are 8, 11, and 13. The 8 year old might still need some hand-holding, but the 11 and 13 year old should be developing independence and autonomy and figuring out who they are going to be. They're PEOPLE.