WRT screens, I’m inspired to suggest, that there may be a difference between using software produced commercially and software produced non-commercially. If there was an open-source version of the Kindle, I’d be much more confidently on-board for it. One thing about books is that traditional publishing really was a different thing from other industries, and to was a great extent a public trust, done for reasons other than profit. I LOVE Amazon, and before it, Borders and Barnes and Nobel, in terms of their short-term effects, but in the long term, the world really needs publishing that’s not profit driven. Blogs used to be that too, for that matter. It’s possible that the ban on social media ought really to be a ban on ‘advertising’ or even broader, on ‘communications’ as the topic would be understood in a college classroom, that is, on messages produced with the intention to create a specific outcome.
I like the idea of banning all interaction with advertising/communications, and I definitely noticed that the Kindle Fire showing you advertisements on the login screen for things that aren’t books made it take on a radically different tone than older Kindles that don’t do that, to the extent that I end up not using it. I notice I make the distinction between friendly and unfriendly advertising: Friendly offers you information you likely want in a cooperative way, such as previews before a movie. They’re totally advertisements and we know this, but they’re appropriate and fun and part of the ritual of going to the movies, although still clearly not Shabbistic. Then they added regular advertisements and that was clearly unfriendly.
This comment suggests choosing principles based on broad incentive effects, such as small publisher over Amazon, which to me is very distinct from choosing based on what their attitude is towards you. So one could say that free software is friendly and commercial software is unfriendly, in the my-experience-with-it sense, and you’d have some correlation but in my experience not that much, and/or you could argue that it is good to encourage free software. Doing the collective action thing on a non-personal scale, as opposed to things that encourage good things locally among your friends and community, seems like a different mission and agenda, and so something to keep distinct from Sabbath—one should favor things with good effects in general, all the time, rather than placing additional burden upon one-self on your day of rest.
I’d also agree with the general principle that subjecting yourself to communications is a cost we tend to underestimate, and thus we would be wise to have additional principles or rules that make us correct for that bias.
WRT screens, I’m inspired to suggest, that there may be a difference between using software produced commercially and software produced non-commercially. If there was an open-source version of the Kindle, I’d be much more confidently on-board for it. One thing about books is that traditional publishing really was a different thing from other industries, and to was a great extent a public trust, done for reasons other than profit. I LOVE Amazon, and before it, Borders and Barnes and Nobel, in terms of their short-term effects, but in the long term, the world really needs publishing that’s not profit driven. Blogs used to be that too, for that matter. It’s possible that the ban on social media ought really to be a ban on ‘advertising’ or even broader, on ‘communications’ as the topic would be understood in a college classroom, that is, on messages produced with the intention to create a specific outcome.
I like the idea of banning all interaction with advertising/communications, and I definitely noticed that the Kindle Fire showing you advertisements on the login screen for things that aren’t books made it take on a radically different tone than older Kindles that don’t do that, to the extent that I end up not using it. I notice I make the distinction between friendly and unfriendly advertising: Friendly offers you information you likely want in a cooperative way, such as previews before a movie. They’re totally advertisements and we know this, but they’re appropriate and fun and part of the ritual of going to the movies, although still clearly not Shabbistic. Then they added regular advertisements and that was clearly unfriendly.
This comment suggests choosing principles based on broad incentive effects, such as small publisher over Amazon, which to me is very distinct from choosing based on what their attitude is towards you. So one could say that free software is friendly and commercial software is unfriendly, in the my-experience-with-it sense, and you’d have some correlation but in my experience not that much, and/or you could argue that it is good to encourage free software. Doing the collective action thing on a non-personal scale, as opposed to things that encourage good things locally among your friends and community, seems like a different mission and agenda, and so something to keep distinct from Sabbath—one should favor things with good effects in general, all the time, rather than placing additional burden upon one-self on your day of rest.
I’d also agree with the general principle that subjecting yourself to communications is a cost we tend to underestimate, and thus we would be wise to have additional principles or rules that make us correct for that bias.