Smartphone addiction is a killer

I get Texas Department of Public Safety reports on fatal accidents from time to time and not just in my immediate area. 

Here's one from last month. A driver is westbound on US 80 near Wills Point, a semi with a trailer. He's turning left across the highway into a private drive. 

There's a vehicle coming eastbound on 80 who isn't paying attention and hits the trailer as the first driver is in the middle of the turn. 

She's driving too fast as well. And she's dead. 

Beyond "failure to control speed," DPS notes "driver of vehicle 1 was later determined to watching a movie on her cell phone at the time of the crash."

Smartphone addiction in church

And not from a parishioner.

With a private as well as public high school in my current newspaper bailiwick, I occasionally, as in once a year, have to stick my head inside the local Catholic church. As in, for the Catholic private school's graduation ceremony, which includes a full Mass.

Well, cellphones do go off occasionally in church. Hell, in "real church," 15 years ago, I heard one go off during a Dallas Symphony Orchestra concert. It was about 2 minutes into the first piece on the program. Andrew Litton stopped. Full stop. Then turned around. Then, he made a decorous, but forceful, "suggestion" that everybody check their phone and turn it OFF. ("Vibrate" as an option was rare that long ago.) Then, he restarted.

Anyway, the local priest must have had his brick on "vibrate." And, must be addicted.

And, being Catholic, not a Baptist brother preacher, further illustrates.

No more than 2 minutes before the start of the processional, he reaches under his cassock, whips out his brick and checks it.

Really?

Short of one of your parents facing near death (remember, he's Catholic, no home life family), why are you needing to check your phone at that time?

You're not.

Sidebar: The Mass bell again reminds me of a Pavlov's dog experiment.

Newspapers are dying because nobody's paying online

That "nobody's paying online" is the key takeaway from a big new survey by Reuters, summarized in this very good article from Columbia Journalism Review.

By "nobody's paying," what do I mean?

The survey showed that 47 percent of American Internet users "regularly" use ad blockers. It's 55 percent among the youngest age cohort. And, though I've not seen breakouts correlated to Net usage, I bet more people who are online more often use ad blockers more.

The other big number was 11 percent. That's the amount of Americans who cough up money for paywalled news.

I'm in the 47 percent; I'm not in the 11 percent. For most proprietary news sites that have paywalls, I can work around them. If you're the likes of the Wall Street Journal, I just don't pay.

I've gotten into a dispute with another commenter at a baseball blog about related things.

He's misinformed enough to think that pageviews matter, ad blocking aside, or not aside.

No, they don't. More and more digital media representatives, and advertisers, recognize that page engagement, not numbers of pages viewed, is the key metric. But, that's as much a quality metric as a quantity one, and it's tougher to measure even as a quantity, because,if I have 25 tabs open, how do you tell which one I'm actively engaged with?

Meanwhile, back to the main story. As smartphone use grows, the ad problem does, too. Because, of course, you can't get anything but a small ad on a smartphone. As for paywalls? Beyond what I said about leaky paywalls, paywalling just e-editions don't count. Among other things, I can still read top stories on HTML links. And, smaller daily papers still aren't doing tablet versions of e-editions, and are you going to try to read an 11x21.5 PDF on a smartphone? (And, ad-blocking apps or extensions are headed to smartphones, too.)

As for amounts? The majority of that 11 percent pay $10/month or less. Most who don't pay wouldn't pay more than that; many wouldn't even pay that amount. And, since smartphones in general seem to reduce that page engagement metric, that will probably drop other things, too.

And, that's not all. The shift to "platforms" like Facebook will likely ding the media, too.

These trends don't just affect traditional newspapers, CJR notes. PuffHoes, BuzzedFeed and others face the same issues. Maybe worse. Yes, they don't have the overhead costs of legacy newspapers. But, many legacy papers, albeit by brutal cost cutting, are still profitable in print, and decently so. And, if one bets on the wrong digital platform (i.e., what if WhatsApp makes Facebook into MySpace?) then there's another oops.

On the flip side, while the AP says this could free up money for more news reporting, automated bot-reporting's probable spread to weather stories and more will rather be seen as a way of plugging revenue holes.

As for me? I've "learned" to get news free online and not pay for it.

I use AdBlock Plus.

I use Ghostery to block tracking cookies, so that ads that do get past AdBlock Plus are less "personalized." They will thus be less appealing to me.

I use other extensions to flag advertorial that gets past AdBlock Plus.

I try to remember to use Ixquick or DuckDuckGo, so that Google can't take my search information and personalize ads off that.

I use HTTPS Everywhere for both general security and to otherwise play bits of whack-a-mole on tracking.

This is the basic suite of online privacy extensions and add-ons that cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier recommends to protect against business surveillance.

I haven't even mentioned doing a massive upgrade to one's hosts file, which essentially blocks whole websites, including major online ad creators or hosts, from ever loading in the first place.

This all said, people who have schadenfreude over "the death of newspapers" should note what I said above. This is something that's going to more and more hit online media in general.

That includes web advertising salespeople, or apparent ones, who are making false sales pitches or ideas pitches, whichever.

And, the schadenfreude is also related to the Wild West libertarianism of today's Net 2.0, including many who have made the most money off that.

Why I don't own a smartphone

And likely never will. Julian Assange spells out well all the snooping problems.

That said, I worry more about Big Business, either working on its own, or sucking off the Big Government teat, than I do about Big Government on its own. (I've always said that "Brave New World" will prove to be an even more prescient novel than "1984.")

There's several reasons for this, all related to the almighty dollar. And I say dollar, not yen, euro or even pound, because the U.S. is Ground Zero for hypercapitalism.

First is the "branding issue," most notably with Apple. When iPhone users are confronted with the type of information an Assange presents, cognitive dissonance sets in as many iPhone users await some bulletin from Apple to spin away all of Assange's claims.

Second is Google Ads for mobile phones, coupled with the latest GPS, etc. There's already talk about how, either partnered with straight-up coupon companies, a Groupon, or something even worse, an Android phone will spit out an on-screen coupon for the restaurant you're walking past. In the mall? Well, with Google Maps going inside them now, that's no escape.

Add in the rumored Amazon and Facebook smartphones of next year, and we have this problem in spades.

Reading a magazine at Barnes & Noble, with an Amazon phone in your pocket? Amazon spits out an ad saying you can get that mag for $XX on Kindle for smartphone. Meanwhile, even with its privacy agreement with the FTC, what if Facebook puts auto-updating software in its smartphone? I.e., Facebook creates its own "Yelp" and it's opt-out, not opt-in.

And, all these companies will do the marketing and branding, telling you how their smartphones are better at others on delivering those coupons, at ... "reading your mind," though they won't put it so crassly.

Got a smartphone already? Detox. Get away from the addiction.