The Offline Report

Oh he said it. He took a bold step. Kevin Roose said it : “For me, the best attention-guarding ritual of all is reading — sitting down to read physical, printed books for long stretches of time, with my phone sequestered somewhere far away.” Of course, if reader zooms back, they discover the boomer writer included this disclaimer first so that people didn't dismiss this comment as symptomatic of an OLDE person: Thus technology becomes humanity’s master, rather than the reverse. “There are established ways to train our brains to better guard our attention,” writes Roose — who, it is worth noting, is a millennial-era writer who specializes in digital technology . “For me, the best attention-guarding ritual of all is reading — sitting down to read physical, printed books for long stretches of time, with my phone sequestered somewhere far away.” Further Reading: ---------------------------------- "The kiosks are like vending machines for creative writing, dispensing st...

If you have kids, subscribe to the paper paper. Paper is technology ! Get your kids started with the gateway drug that is the comics. Next get them hooked on a favorite columnist. Then they can read the sports section, or business and or the arts and entertainment section. Next get them into reading the letters to the editor. From the letters to the editor move to the OpEds and editorials. In 1791, Madison wrote that newspapers were needed to counteract “passionate, ignorant and irrational men who had been led to hold ‘counterfeit’ opinions by persuasive men,” according to “These Truths,” Jill Lepore’s outstanding new history of the United States pic.twitter.com/IoSoDFXZX1 — Joseph Lichterman (@ylichterman) December 29, 2018 This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Technologies declared dead make an under-radar U-turn. A thread on the virtues of newspaper erupts on twitter. #paperistechnology I bought a newspaper this morning. It’s really great. Tons of information. Portable. Browsing friendly. No pop up ads, autostart videos or surveys about how many tractors you own. — Mike Sisak (@mikesisak) October 4, 2018 Subtweets: We started getting a print paper last year. My kids fight over it! — Susan Thibeault (@SusanFThibeault) October 4, 2018 Comprehensive reading is difficult online: With a newspaper you know you've physically scanned every single item, and not missed something that sits on an unseen tab, buried in another story or link. fwiw I can never feel 100% certain I've seen everything in a digital edition unless I've clicked thru pages multiple times. — LA Resident Tourist (@LA_Res_Tourist) October 4, 2018 Coda: And you feel good for reading them instead of being guilty for staring at your phone all d...

A textbook for college Magazine Production classes explains that a magazine brings the reader, temporarily, into its world. Through its masthead, artwork, article tone, advertisers, even weight and glossiness of paper, a magazine creates an atmosphere. A media producer wanting repeat business is smart to heed this point. "Television," Jerry Seinfeld tells Norm MacDonald in the latter's video podcast, "is a place medium." MacDonald was probing the motive behind a tv set backdrop piece for the long-running CNN show "Larry King Live." Adapted for the digital era, "peak TV" and beyond, some are calling strides to create place experiences the "Be Here Now 2.0" movement. In the first hours and days of a personal digital detox quest and its concurrent activity, intentional attention span lengthening (IASL,) it can be a struggle to read or peruse within the bounds of even your favorite magazine or newspaper without clicking away. The Ea...

Subversion (SVN) and Git track computer source code changes, and iPhone 4s denotes an older model than an iPhone 6s plus. In an information overload age, we could use version control for online news stories or storylines to combat two-hour nostalgia plaguing news consumer brains. Paper news already uses version control and most people don't realize it. The unsolved trick facing news publishers and consumers, is how to port this user-friendly system used in offline dead-tree newspaper sections, to individual internet news stories, and general news storylines. First the backstory: Before the internet and especially before television, a regular edition of a newspaper or radio program would seldom be the last edition of that show (or paper) for that day. As tvtropes.org explains in Extra! Extra! Read all about it! : In the old days before TV, radio, and the Internet, most people who followed the news got their information from the newspapers, which were (and still are) norma...

The What Now We fight the urge to *share* a story with a textpad interrupt "want-to-tweet" list. Some stories pull us in past the first sentence. The cartoons capture much in a one-panel drawing. We don't smell newsprint. Note the irritation anxiety having left our bodies. Is that ... traction? The news won't slip around on the screen? Letters to the editor, nobody we know. Viewpoints we do. (Are they all really old? The Silent Generation, that still writes in? Some are witty.) OpEds and editorials, we recognize that guest contributor's name. Business section, cryptocurrency speculators, optimism, Dilbert still funny. Sports. Fewer wire stories in Sports. Human optimism. The 1981 roster flies in to lunch with ALS-stricken Dwight Clark ? Cowboys too ? Flip. Skim: story-hed lede sentence story-hed lede. Flip. Unconsciously growing happy closer to accomplishment "arrival". End target is the jumble puzzle on penultimate page embedded in comics. Rea...

The How Getting to the paper interface of this month's regional newspaper of choice* is five steps**: point browser www.sfchronicle.com click "e-edition" link in upper right (hard to find) without logging in again, click "OK" on "Your login is expired. Please sign-in again." close 'X' the animated table of contents in left column close 'X' animated right column Stillness. We're on the front page. Morning headlines, front page photo, lead story. Right-to-left page flips. Zoom in out, flat treasures, cartoons don't escape attention. Perspective. Read boldfaced story-heds and lead sentences, then next hed. *We had read the NY Times until this year, when they violated the paper interface with red popup news alerts pushing items that could have waited for morning. Happy to report our regional paper of record exceeds expectations. **The steps to get to SF Chronicle on a laptop screen. These differ for mobile phone o...

The What A "paper interface" site has competent formatting and: no popups and no autoplay video sufficient whitespace effectively colored css choices of white-shade for background and black-shade for typeface Twitter would almost qualify but a paper interface offers reader: finishability ...with those four requirements met, we'll allow in this category text-dominant sites displaying clickable links, even a playable video. But that's stretching. Final Note on the Paper Interface Ideal citizens of the open web embed the date month year of a published post/page within its permalink. --- Further reading: see more in  'Paper Interface': How and finally 'Paper Interface': Why .