Recent studies tell us most Americans are spending too much time with their computers, smartphones, and other devices. At the beginning, writers tended to follow the advice of agents and editors who felt that platform was all important, and platform had to include a website, blog, and a strong social media presence. That was the trap no one anticipated. Do the sites help authors and their publishers sell books? I’m guessing not too many. At least, not enough to warrant spending more than a few minutes a day updating, reading, and/or tweeting/retweeting. Image via Pixabay Facebook , more than Twitter , is also a hotbed of bandwagons, started by goodness knows who and jumped on by everyone who can’t resist being part of the latest groupthink, hivemind, lemmings-jumping-off-the-cliff fad. I don't believe that sells books either. The part of my online activities that keeps me in touch with family and friends is not all bad. Believing that being online more than a few minutes...

I’m old enough that when I took typing in high school, we had only one electric typewriter for the whole class. We had to take turns practicing on it. I was thrilled—I could type seventy words a minute! And when I typed up the school newspaper to copy on the mimeograph machine, I “justified” by typing slashes at the end of each line, then retyped everything with extra spaces in each sentence. When I graduated from college and went to work for a newspaper, we still used manual typewriters. We literally “cut” with a pair of scissors and “pasted” with glue when we needed to revise a story. I remember coming back from an evening meeting I had covered, and as I typed a few paragraphs, the copy editor would come to my desk and rip the page out of my typewriter to take it to the “backshop” to get it set so they could meet the deadline. After a few years, the newspaper went “high-tech.” The company purchased a few computers, which resided on wheeled carts. Since there were not enough for...