Let’s Argue About Our Phones (and Tech in General)

To the Editor:

Re “The Only Phone You Need Is a Dumb One,” by August Lamm (Opinion guest essay, Feb. 2):

Three cheers for Ms. Lamm, an anti-tech activist.

I am a boomer who grew up meeting people face to face, talking with family members at the dinner table, playing outdoors, writing with a ballpoint pen and going to the library to get information. So it’s refreshing to see a young person striving to restore our basic sanity — our basic humanity, in fact — by encouraging us to dump harmful, unnecessary technology.

We’re living in a dangerously dizzying time in which high tech threatens to end our very existence.

Dennis Quick
Charleston, S.C.

To the Editor:

August Lamm announces that she is “on a mission … to get people off their smartphones.” Why has she made it her mission to change the lives of strangers who have never asked for her intervention? Because “we’ve become so used to selecting partners on a sterile, simulated interface that we’ve lost the ability to make spontaneous, messy connections in real life.”

But I often make spontaneous, messy connections in the real life of cyberspace, which lets me make these connections based on mutual interests and values rather than mere propinquity.

The only opinion I need about how to live my social life is my own, supplemented by suggestions from friends who actually know something about me.

Felicia Nimue Ackerman
Providence, R.I.

To the Editor:

August Lamm is 29 years old, so she may be too young to know: Seventy years ago, everyone in the United States smoked, or at least it seemed that way. Today, far fewer Americans smoke. I suspect that social media is headed in the same direction.