> Matthew Crawford, in “The World Beyond Your Head,” contrasts the world of a “peon” airport lounge — saturated in advertising, filled with mesmerizing screens — with the quiet, ad-free world of a business lounge: “To engage in playful, inventive thinking, and possibly create wealth for oneself during those idle hours spent at an airport, requires silence. But other people’s minds, over in the peon lounge (or at the bus stop), can be ­treated as a resource — a standing reserve of purchasing power.”

This is a perfect example of the problem with advertising. It's not that people don't want to know about products, it's that people need to be able to learn about products on their own terms. When you're constantly shoving products in people's faces, you're detracting from all kinds of other pursuits. Advertising is possibly the greatest sink of time and energy in our generation. And what's worse it that the people who are perpetrating this crime on us know that it's a waste of time and energy, which is why they avoid it in their airport lounges.

Not bad, getting famed novelist Jonathan Franzen to write your book review! Sherry does noble work and it deserves wide recognition and readership.

I can't say I am hopeful, but I do hope that society's current preoccupation with mobile devices will start to get old, and after a few years people will begin to realize how negatively they're affecting everyday life and interpersonal interactions. Perhaps it will become "cool" to not have a device, or, it will be societally uncool to use it during meals or at restaurants, like cigarettes have become. I kind of hope that the smartphone market splits soon into two camps, one the same old machines that Apple/Samsung etc pump out, and another camp of slightly less smart, less feature-rich phones, fewer apps, designed to be used occasionally not every damn second of the day... phones that are more about infrequent checks on status and more about making calls and occasional text conversations. Devices that start giving your life back to you. I know, dream on. But as the smartphone owner population gets demographically older, I suspect you will start seeing something like this happen.

It would be interesting to design a user interface that was easy to use, but was designed in such a way to dissuade you from constant use. Perhaps it might reward you the less you used it.

> Unlike [...] Evgeny Morozov, whose perspective is Belarussian, Turkle is a trusted and respected insider.

Forget Turkle, what on earth is the Belrusian perspective?