Still amazed that even with all the research telling us to rest the phone before we rest, we can’t put our phones down before bed, during the night, in the morning… pretty much anytime…

1. Nearly one-third of teens take their phones to bed, per new research from Common Sense Media.
2. One in four parents wake up to check their phones at least once per night.
3. 61% of parents and 70% of teens check their phones in the half hour before bed, despite plenty of evidence suggesting that’s a terrible idea
4. At night, parents say they keep their device within reach of the bed (62%). While at a lower rate than parents, many children also say they have their device within reach of their bed (39%), but they are more than twice as likely as their parent to have it in the bed with them (29%). Girls tend to sleep with their mobile devices more than boys (33% of girls vs. 26% of boys).
5. In 2017, sleep aids generated $69.5 billion in revenue, and they’re on track to tally $101.9 billion by 2023.

So why aren’t any of those makers of highly addictive apps (that’s pretty much all of them) incentivizing sleep? Turns out one is.

Pokémon Sleep, announced in Tokyo Tuesday and set to launch next year, will turn players’ sleep habits into parts of Pokémon games – rewarding users for “good sleep habits.” Using data – like how long you slept – will impact your gameplay. Their aspiration is to turn sleep into entertainment… Yeah, Ok… But a start at least…

Quote of the week from Jim Balsillie:

Data at the micro-personal level gives technology unprecedented power to influence. Data is not the new oil – it’s the new plutonium. Amazingly powerful, dangerous when it spreads, difficult to clean up and with serious consequences when improperly used. […]

And:

Social media’s toxicity is not a bug – it’s a feature… The online advertisement-driven business model subverts choice and represents a foundational threat to markets, election integrity, and democracy itself

I’m encountering more and more friends that are retreating from social media and finding new ways and places to engage. Tired of the spam, trolls, fake news, real news, and more… they are done. Yancey expresses this trend well.

The Internet is becoming a dark forest.

In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream.

Podcasts are another example. There, meaning isn’t just expressed through language, but also through intonation and interaction. Podcasts are where a bad joke can still be followed by a self-aware and self-deprecating save. It’s a more forgiving space for communication than the internet at large.

Dark forests like newsletters and podcasts are growing areas of activity. As are other dark forests, like Slack channels, private Instagrams, invite-only message boards, text groups, Snapchat, WeChat, and on and on. This is where Facebook is pivoting with Groups (and trying to redefine what the word “privacy” means in the process).

These are all spaces where depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments. The cultures of those spaces have more in common with the physical world than the internet.

That isn’t to suggest Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others are going away. But some of our attention will. And that has huge implications for marketers.

Amazon generally gets it right. But with all that data, all the opportunity to know me, you’d think they wouldn’t have a message like this on a bast-selling product that they make. Sometimes Amazon doesn’t stand-up to all the touting of retail perfection from people like me… Maybe a new Kindle is coming… 

Great read from the AFR on Jack Ma (paywall).

Two quotes stood out for me:

“Spending money is more difficult than making money for me today,” says Ma, the richest man in a country with more than 300 billionaires. “I did not expect I would be that wealthy and now I’m that wealthy, I have convinced myself that wealth is not mine.”

“I understand that Jack Ma and Jack Me, they are different. Jack Ma has become the model image for a lot of people. But I’m not that guy,” he says. “I don’t want to take all the credit for Alibaba. It’s not me. When people in the media say ‘Jack Ma is so great, he launched this thing’, I say ‘I saw it on the news, too’. It is the team that is making it great,”