Christopher Wink

Ban smartphones from schools

Parents and schools should treat social media like they do cigarettes — unhealthy addictions that are distracting from learning and development.

That’s the big argument in “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” a new popular book by psychologist Jonathan Haidt that has gotten widespread media attention.

“Social media use does not just correlate with mental illness,” he writes: “It causes it.”

Haidt has written several books on living healthier and happier, and he has researched social media use for years. But it’s this book at this time that met the moment: I’ve seen him interviewed by countless national media and at conferences. His advice marks one set of strategies for how parents and wider society can respond to the mounting evidence that algorithmic feeds of addictive content is especially challenging for children to overcome.

Below I share a few points I’m taking into my own parenting.

Power and Progress

Technology has a way of dazzling us into the deterministic fallacy: assuming path dependence for the ways a technology develops and its impact on society. But we have agency.

The so-called “productivity bandwagon” that we assume follows a new technology (where Schumpeter’s creative destruction will generate more jobs than are destroyed) is not inevitable. Widespread gains require that a technology creates more demand for workers (by creating new tasks and industries), and that demand induces higher wages. Neither are certainties, and take societal negotiation between labor and capital.

That’s from a 2023 book co-authored by economists Simon Johnson and Daron Acemoglu called “Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity.”

The book is big and thorough, with a sprawling historical comparisons over a millennia. Yet, I was disappointed by how few concrete examples the authors gave for what precisely they want to be done differently — especially in a book that is more than 500 pages. For example, on page 353, they write “digital technologies, which are almost by their nature highly general purpose, could’ve been used to further machine usefulness – for example, by creating new worker tasks or new platforms that multiplied human capabilities.” But that “for example” is not actually an example, but rather a reassertion of the general outcomes they seek (“new worker tasks or new platforms.”) Instead, I wanted an example of what exactly could have been done differently to ensure new worker tasks or platforms.

In that way, I found so big a book disappointing, and felt it could have been half as long. I appreciated their overall point, though, of idealizing “machine usefulness” in four ways: machines should improve worker productivity; create new tasks; distribute accurate information (like the web) and give better access and markets. Just don’t look to this book for the path to get there.

As they write: “How technology is used is always intertwined with the vision and interests of those who hold power.” Below I share my notes from the book for future reference.

I was honored with the 2024 IBIT “Innovators Award”

I proudly accepted Wednesday the “Innovators Award” from the Temple University Fox School of Business’s Institute for Business and Information Technology. The award is “given annually to a person or persons for innovation in applying IT to create business opportunity.”

The award was timed with the launch of the 14th annual Philly Tech Week, which I founded, and the 15th anniversary of Technical.ly, a local news org that has adapted in this strange economic period for community journalism. The transfer of Generocity.org last year was also a relevant example of my work.I was proud that my references for the award were my friends journalist-turned-college-dean David Boardman and entrepreneur Bob Moore. I formerly emceed these very awards, which are led by the thoughtful and analytical Munir Y. Mandviwalla and Laurel Miller. Knowing what they put into these awards made it all the more special. I was certainly in good company: My fellow award-winner was Jeff Hamilton, who was the CIO of Pfizer while the company rolled out its covid-19 vaccine.

Below, I share my remarks from the award event.

A Journey Through Country Music’s Black Past, Present and Future: Alice Randall

American country music has black origins, but that’s been badly erased. So Black artists are often viewed as exceptions rather than representative of a long unbroken chain.

That’s from the new book from pioneering songwriter Alice Randall titled “My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music’s Black Past, Present, and Future.”

This book has a soundtrack of black artists covering Randall’s tracks, and I found it from a Marketplace interview. Randall’s writing is captivating and soulful. She honors and respects country music, and country culture even though she’s had a complicated career turning, as she writes, “wound into sound.”

As a lifetime country music fan, she deepened my understanding of the genre — and Black culture and American identity. She complicates how we should view these relationships.

Of one, she artfully writes: “The South is the abusive mother of black culture but the mother nonetheless.”

Below I share my notes from the book for future reference.

Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

An entrepreneur friend who fell deep into crypto mania said he hadn’t thought of it before.

The inevitability of crypto dominance that he predicted would be led by how traditional fiat currencies would fall out of favor. The thing about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, I told him, was that no military backed them. Tanks favor the status quo.

Now, as the founder of a tech-business publication, I always knew I needed a handle on blockchain, crypto and its myriad interwoven technologies, now increasingly labeled web3 and decentralization. So I still hold a small stash of bitcoin and ethereum, and I do hold an NFT, but I’ve always been prepared for them all to be priced at zero. That did help me better understand the world.

But that friend of mine had a hard fall. His stake in cryptocurrencies has so far fared better, but his portfolio of NFTs are essentially worthless today. It will always be a cautionary tale. And I bet the story isn’t done. Yet, the high-profile fall of the crypto exchange FTX and its boyish, one-time-billionare founder Samuel Bankman Fried was enough to spin an array of books – including one by a former coworker of mine. More recently, I read another account from journalist Zeke Faux, in his 2023 book “Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall.”

Below I share my notes for future reference.

How to use brain science to tell be stories: Story Genius

Your novel is only half the story. The other half already happened.

That’s from the 2016 book from literary agent and story consultant Lisa Cron called “Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel (Before You Waste Three Years Writing 327 Pages That Go Nowhere).”

I love ‘writing about writing,’ and this book is one of the most commonly cited works among writer groups. Because of that, lots of writers have opinions on the book. For my money, it did just what it aims to do, and I appreciated Lisa’s approach. I’ll recommend it just like it was recommended to me.

This book includes a bigger concept that I found insightful: The reason stories attract so much attention is humans evolved to seek self-awareness and understanding from them. “The purpose of story — of every story — is to help us interpret, and anticipate, the actions of ourselves and others,” Cron wrote. “We don’t turn to story to escape reality. We turn to story to navigate reality.”

Below I share my notes for future reference.

Afrofuturism

Afrofuturism was coined in 1993, is entrenched in pan-African history but has everything to do with the future. Our overlooking digital access and equity is a newer part of an old conversation: Imagining a future of state of joy and justice.

That’s from the 2015 essay collection edited by Reynaldo Anderson and Charles Earl Jones entitled “Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness.”

Below I share a few notes for future reference.

Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah’s 1994 novel “Paradise”

In summer 2005, I took classes at the University of Ghana in Accra — in between pickup basketball games and nervously navigating the jitney-style “tro tro” bus system.

Among my self-discoveries that summer was an appreciation for the African aesthetic. I complemented my coursework on the oral histories of Sundiata and the short-lived political writing of Kwame Nkrumah with wood-carving, food culture, drumming, and storytelling. I read and re-read passages from a worn copy of “Th” under a baobab tree, and excitedly emailed a childhood friend from an Internet cafe to tell him that his New England university was home to Chinua Achebe, whose classic 1958 novel “Things Fall Apart” reinvigorated my dream to be a writer.

What clicked for me that summer was that so much of this art and culture I was exploring wasn’t an answer to the dominant themes of my western world. They stood on their own. They didn’t need the West to be complete but rather I needed them to be a little closer to complete myself. In this way, I felt it all nourishing.

One of the novels I added to a list then that I only now got to was “Paradise,” the 1994 Nobel Prize-winning historical fiction written by Abdulrazak Gurnah.

Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz

A new kind of celebrity emerges from social media platforms that rivals legacy media— just as TV did to radio before it. Like other big platform shifts, it’s overlooked because young people lead the attention.

That’s from the 2023 book from my friend and prominent tech journalist Taylor Lorenz called “Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet.”

As she writes: “Tech founders may control the source code, but users shape the product.”

I read the book as a people’s history of early creator culture. It tracks one of the subtler but more important transitions of the recent web: From social networking between people who know each other from real life, to social media, in which people fully define as creators on platforms to fans.

Below I share my notes for future reference.

Walkable City by Jeff Speck

Our built environment is killing us — sprawl contributes to obesity and cars are lethal. Despite all the politically charged crime narratives, car driving makes suburbs less safe than cities.

Urban planners can do something about it, and they know the solutions. But old habits die hard — of free parking and wide drivable streets. Change the narrative.

That’s from the influential 2012 book by urban planner Jeff Speck called “Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time.” The book was part of a wave of research and urban championing that empowered a new generation of policymakers, designers, planners and community leaders. I’ve long seen it referenced by other authors I read, and the publisher released a 10th anniversary issue, so I finally circled back and read this well-regarded read.

The reissue was mostly the original book, though it included a new preface and other updates, including pandemic references. I dug into the treacherous claims about safety and where we live, which are personal and messy — because we’re more often scared of sharks and burglars than car crashes and obesity, the far more prevalent threats to our well-being.

To pick up Speck’s claims: About 25,000 people were murdered in the United States last year, according to the CDC — and of course that’s not all in cities. Nearly 40,000 people die in cars each year, though that isn’t all in the suburbs either. More directly to Speck’s point, as many as 500,000 American deaths each year may be attributed to obesity-related causes, according to one respected analysis, which are far more prevalent among people who don’t do much walking. Altogether, Americans are dying in rural places faster than urban ones, according to a 2022 analysis.

Whatever the case, Speck contributed to a foundation of urbanist thinking a decade ago, and I dug into the work. Below I share my notes for future reference.