from Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport (published in 2019)
Technology
I’ve become convinced that what you need instead is a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else. (Page 7)
We signed up for these services and bought these devices for minor reasons—to look up friends’ relationship statuses or eliminate the need to carry a separate iPod and phone—and then found ourselves, years later, increasingly dominated by their influence, allowing them to control more and more of how we spend our time, how we feel, and how we behave. (Page 35)
In my experience covering these topics, it’s hard to permanently reform your digital life through the use of tips and tricks alone.
The problem is that small changes are not enough to solve our big issues with new technologies. The underlying behaviors we hope to fix are ingrained in our culture, and, as I argued in the previous chapter, they’re backed by powerful psychological forces that empower our base instincts. To reestablish control, we need to move beyond tweaks and instead rebuild our relationship with technology from scratch, using our deeply held values as a foundation. (Page 37)
Digital Minimalism: A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else. (Page 39)
optimizing how we use technology is just as important as how we choose what technologies to use in the first place. (Page 55)
You’ll likely find life without optional technologies challenging at first. Your mind has developed certain expectations about distractions and entertainment, and these expectations will be disrupted when you remove optional technologies from your daily experience. This disruption can feel unpleasant. (Page 80)
Does this technology directly support something that I deeply value? This is the only condition on which you should let one of these tools into your life. The fact that it offers some value is irrelevant—the digital minimalist deploys technology to serve the things they find most important in their life, and is happy missing out on everything else. (Page 86)
we should treat with great care any new technology that threatens to disrupt the ways in which we connect and communicate with others. When you mess with something so central to the success of our species, it’s easy to create problems. (Page 141)
from Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II by Elyse Graham (published in 2024)
Technology
John von Neumann, the Hungarian mathematician who came to the United States from Berlin, pioneered digital computing—work that arose from his military ordnance projects during the war. Historically, modern computers should have been invented in Berlin. Instead, they were invented in Princeton and Pennsylvania. (And Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.) If not for Germany’s path of destruction, today we would spell the word computer with a K. (Page 358)
from Managing Technology in Higher Education: Strategies for Transforming Teaching and Learning by A. W. (Tony) Bates, Albert Sangra (published in 2011)
Priority for technology infrastructure projects should be related to meeting functional objectives, such as more interactive student services, improved learning outcomes, or reducing operational costs, and thus should be determined as part of an integrated planning process, not just because they are the latest technology trend or even because of strong demand from one or two powerful pressure groups.
from Learning with E’s: Educational Theory and Practice in the Digital Age by Steve Wheeler (published in 2015)
Technologies are neutral, and the potential threads reside in society rather than in the technology itself.
Further evolution of technologies and increased reliance upon their use in human activities may advance society into completely new, unexpected and unpredictable directions.
Siva Vaidhyanathan is uncomfortable with the erroneous misclassification of generations and associated assumptions of technology competency levels, and warns: ‘We should drop our simplistic attachments to generations so we can generate an accurate and subtle account of the needs of young people–and all people, for that matter.’
Data and privacy
from Defriending the Web by Dennis Knopf (published in 2009)
this data gathering is more explicit with Blockbuster’s replacements like netflix, where customers fill their preferences into user profiles so as to have movies suggested to them. a great service, and all you have to do is to provide detailed information about who you are and what you like. even greater is your service to them; their market research isn’t just free, you even pay for participating in it.