Dude, are you alive or what?
The text is just a flick from an impatient friend, but in my distracted state I read it as a sincere question. Are you alive or what?
And that was the moment. I picked up the phone and, ignoring the message, switched on its camera function. I photographed my monitors, plastered over with e-mails and instant messages and Word files and .pdfs. Never forget that you don’t want this, I thought. Never forget that you live in an ecosystem designed to disrupt you and it will take you for a ride if you let it.
Just before the magazine forfeited half its office space—a bid to consolidate ranks and bring in some money by subletting—I quit my job.
This left me with a distressing amount of free time—time I filled, initially, by reading about a moment weirdly similar to our own: the year 1450, when a German patrician called Johannes Gutenberg, after decades of tinkering and some very sketchy loans, managed to invent a printing press with movable type.
Like the Internet, Gutenberg’s machine made certain jobs either ridiculous or redundant (so long, scriptoria). But much more was dismantled by Gutenberg’s invention than the employment of a few recalcitrant scribes. As the fidelity and speed of copying was ratcheted way up, there was a boom in what we’d now call data transfer: A great sermon delivered in Paris might be perfectly replicated in Lyon. (Branding improved, too: for the first time subjects knew what their king looked like.) Such uniformity laid the groundwork for massive leaps in knowledge and scientific understanding as a scholastic world that was initially scattered began to cohere into a consistent international conversation, one where academics and authorities could build on one another’s work rather than repeat it.1 As its influence unfurled across Europe, the press would flatten entire monopolies of knowledge, even enabling Martin Luther to shake the foundations of the Catholic Church; next it jump-started the Enlightenment. And the printing press had its victims; its cheap and plentiful product undid whole swaths of life, from the recitation of epic poetry2 to the authority of those few who could afford handmade manuscripts. In Blake Morrison’s novel The Justification of Johann Gutenberg, he has the inventor arguing with an abbot not about the content his printing press creates, but about the way text can now be read. The abbot exclaims: “The word of God needs to be interpreted by priests, not spread about like dung.”3 The very fecundity of the press, its ability to free up content and make it cheaply available to the masses, made it a danger to the established powerhouse of the Catholic Church and a serious destabilizer of culture at large. Yet for decades after its invention in 1450, the press produced only a quantitative change (more books); limited marketplaces, limited travel, and limited literacy all conspired to thwart the invention’s true potential. By contrast, we are immediately experiencing a qualitative difference in our lives. Our fate is instantly and comprehensively reimagined by online technology.
For any single human to live through such a change is extraordinary. After all, the original Gutenberg shift in 1450 was not a moment that one person could have witnessed, but a slow-blooming era that took centuries before it was fully unpacked. Literacy in England was not common until the nineteenth century, so most folk until then had little direct contact with the printed book. And the printing machine itself was not fundamentally improved upon for the first 350 years of its existence.
But today: How quickly, how irrevocably, this kills that. Since ours is truly a single moment and not an era, scholars who specialize in fifteenth-century history may be able to make only partial comparisons with the landscape we’re trekking through. While writing this book, I found it necessary to consult also with neuroscientists, psychiatrists, psychologists, technology gurus, literature professors, librarians, computer scientists, and more than a few random acquaintances who were willing to share their war stories. And all these folk, moving down their various roads, at last crossed paths—in that place called Absence. It was an idea of absence that seemed to come up time and again. Every expert, every scientist, and every friend I spoke with had a device in his or her pocket that could funnel a planet’s worth of unabridged, incomprehensible clamor. Yet it was absence that unified the elegies I heard.
• • • • •
We may never comprehend just what was subsumed beneath the influence of Gutenberg’s machine because the change was so total that it even became the screen through which we view the world. The gains the press yielded are mammoth and essential to our lives. But we forget: Every revolution in communication technology—from papyrus to the printing press to Twitter—is as much an opportunity to be drawn away from something as it is to be drawn toward something.
Marshall McLuhan wrote in Understanding Media that “a new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace.” The successful new medium actively subjugates the older ones. It “never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.” So the dismantling of magazine and newspaper offices, the vast fields of lost writers and editors now blogging and bitching from cafés around the world, are not just employment casualties; they’re a symptom of a more profound wreckage.
As we embrace a technology’s gifts, we usually fail to consider what they ask from us in return—the subtle, hardly noticeable payments we make in exchange for their marvelous service. We don’t notice, for example, that the gaps in our schedules have disappeared because we’re too busy delighting in the amusements that fill them. We forget the games that childhood boredom forged because boredom itself has been outlawed. Why would we bother to register the end of solitude, of ignorance, of lack? Why would we care that an absence has disappeared?
The more I thought about this seismic shift in our lives—our rapid movement toward online experience and away from rarer, concrete things—the more I wanted to understand the nature of the experience itself. How does it feel to live through our own Gutenberg moment? How does it feel to be the only people in history to know life with and without the Internet?
And if we work hard enough to understand this massive game changer, and then name the parts of the new game we want to go along with and the parts we don’t, can we then pack along some critical aspect of our earlier lives that those technologies would otherwise strip from us? Or will we forget forever the value of that lack and instead see only a collection of gains? It’s hard to remember what we loved about absence; we never ask for our deprivation back.
To understand our unique predicament, and understand how to win ourselves those best possible lives, we need to root out answers in every corner of our experience. But the questions we need to ask at each juncture remain as simple as they are urgent:
What will we carry forward?
And what worthy things might we thoughtlessly leave behind?
The answer to that second question was painfully clear as I sat at my little beige desk in the offices of Vancouver magazine. What I’d left behind was absence. As a storm of digital dispatches hammered at the wall of my computer screen, I found myself desperate for sanctuary. There was a revulsion against these patterns imposed on me. I wanted a long and empty wooden desk where I could get some real work done. I wanted a walk in the woods with nobody to meet. I wanted release from the migraine-scale pressure of constant communication, the ping-ping-ping of perma-messaging, the dominance of communication over experience.
Somehow I’d left behind my old quiet life. And now I wanted it back.
• • • • •
If you were born before 1985, then you know what life is like both with the Internet and without. You are making the pilgrimage from Before to After. (Any younger and you haven’t lived as an adult in a pre-Internet landscape.) Those of us in this straddle generation, with one foot in the digital pond and the other on the shore, are experiencing a strange suffering as we acclimatize. We are the digital immigrants, and like all immigrants, we don’t always find the new world welcoming. The term itself—“digital immigrant”—isn’t a perfect one: It’s often assumed th
at the immigrant is somehow upgrading his or her citizenship or fleeing persecution. As for me and my peers, we may prefer to keep a pied-à-terre in the homeland of our youth.
Seen in a prudential light, our circumstances are also a tremendous gift. If we’re the last people in history to know life before the Internet, we are also the only ones who will ever speak, as it were, both languages. We are the only fluent translators of Before and After. Our children will no more be able to see online life for what it is than we can comprehend the changes wrought by Gutenberg’s printing press in the fifteenth century (or, for that matter, the changes our ancestors experienced when transitioning from an oral to a written culture). Some inventions are more than discreet gadgets; they dissolve into the very atmosphere of our lives. And who can notice the air?
• • • • •
Early on in my research for this book, I spoke with the celebrated cultural historian Alberto Manguel, who at the age of sixty-five largely eschews the bother of digital immigration. I wanted to hear in particular how this man, who wrote A History of Reading, felt about the movement toward digital text. “I can only describe it personally,” he told me:
For me the experience is one that is above all superficial. That is, the digital text has no physical reality for me. And it seems to require a certain urgency and speed, which is not what I look for when I’m reading.
Manguel encounters similar problems when writing with a digital device. On his computer, he feels constantly “conscious of the instrument I’m using. It always wants to be updated or somehow managed,” while a pen is a comparatively neutral extension of his own body and mind. What’s more, text on a computer always presents itself as though it were a finished work—the editing is invisible. “You don’t see the history of the text,” said Manguel. “This has a tragic side in that the texts written today appear to exist only in the presence of the reader, they have no past. We have eliminated the possibility of our books having biographies.” But, like many in his age bracket, Manguel was quick to allow that such reservations are largely nostalgic, that qualms like his will not be felt by the next generation.
The end of such qualms, though, does not signify the loss of their value. Plenty of smart people have shuddered at new magnifiers of communication in ways that future generations would find quaint. Jean Cocteau thought the radio was a “faucet of foolishness” that was going to wreck people’s minds. He wrote in his 1951 diary: “One wonders how a nation’s intelligence resists the radio. Moreover it does not resist.” Groucho Marx said he found television educational only because “every time someone switches it on, I go into the other room and read a book.” And to Picasso, computers were useless since “they can only give you answers.” While these complaints are outmoded and even naïve-looking today, I wouldn’t call them invalid. For those of us who are buffeted by digital life, the antique tone of our discomfort is itself evidence that we’re aware of the difference in a way that future generations won’t be.
• • • • •
If we maintain that cognizance of the difference between online life and offline life, we can choose to enjoy both worlds and move between them when we wish. This is no Sisyphean effort, either. Even as I began my research, there were intimations of change. Once an e-mail addict, I fled to my in-box less and less—finally settling on a maximum of three checks a day. I started leaving the house without thinking to grab the phone. And as I spoke about this book with friends, others spontaneously took up the challenge themselves.
Well, some did. Some, in fact, were offended by the pretense of my opting out. And that’s fine. Not everyone feels there’s a problem that needs correcting, after all. Not everyone feels this static. But for those who do feel it, there’s a needful reaction that wells up. Perhaps, I thought, armed with the input of global experts and a little resolve, we can safeguard a vulnerable portion of our psyche.
That said, this book is not a wholesale critique of technology. Our technologies produce wonderful abbreviations, quickenings in our lives—and have done since our earliest ancestors looked down at their naked bodies and thought, Surely we can do better than this. Whether a wheel, or a condom, or a $150 billion International Space Station, our tools are brilliant extensions of human will; they shorten the distance between problem (that animal refuses to be eaten) and solution (smack him with my club). Our impulse to take up tools is a good one and—to use a deeply suspect term—it’s a natural one. It’s such a natural impulse, in fact, that those who question whether all technological developments will lead to brighter, happier futures are dismissed as Luddites. Interrogate the dominance of a mounting technopoly with anything more aggressive than cocktail conversation and you will swiftly be accused of “moral panic”—which is one of those tidy terms that carries around its own moral imperative. One must not panic.
Technologies themselves, though, are amoral. They aren’t good or evil, only dangerous and beloved. They are a danger we’ve been in love with for millennia, and rarely do we remember that, for example, the goal of human relations may extend beyond efficient transmissions. (If we annihilate ourselves in the coming years, it will not be for lack of communication technology, though it may be for lack of some finer advancement.) Yet our devotion to tech-bolstered communication—to making common and shared as much of our lives as possible—often overwhelms us.
Consider the rapaciousness of our online activity. By 2012, we were asking Google to help us find things more than a trillion times each year (in a remarkable 146 languages). We were also sending one another 144 billion e-mails—every day. In 2013, we “liked” 4.5 billion items on Facebook every day, too (though boosterish Facebook still won’t allow its users to dislike anything). That year, we uploaded one hundred hours of video to YouTube for every minute of real time. Every second, we uploaded 637 photos to Instagram. The content of our digital lives, in other words, has piled up into such significant forms that it can no longer be passed off as some appendage or decoration.
The breathtaking speed with which digital technologies draw close the world is reason enough to raise your eyebrows: In the past decade, Internet usage expanded 566 percent. Best estimates are that 40 percent of all people on the planet are now online. Social media trains our behavior en masse—half of Internet users connect with friends and family on Facebook, as do 59 percent of online Americans (and 93 percent of college students). I do not, and I am consequently left in the dark about things as essential as weddings, moves, births, and deaths. In Malaysia, where Linda from our prologue hails from, Facebook has now achieved a penetration rate of more than 70 percent among Internet users (apparently because the app allows for cheaper messaging).
The sheer volume of time we devote to our devices means we each are carving “expendable” hours away from other parts of our lives. We rationalize the interruptions that our phones and tablets demand—each checking of e-mail or scanning of YouTube is, after all, just a momentary concession. But in each month of 2012, Americans spent 520 billion of those simple minutes connecting to the Internet on their devices. That’s nearly 100 billion more minutes every month than the previous year.
Nor is this change a mere ballooning of what came before. Like writing, clocks, and the printing press, the Internet and its cronies are indiscriminate game changers. They don’t just enrich our experiences; they become our experiences. This is something Susan Greenfield, a professor of synaptic pharmacology at Oxford University, spoke about recently when being interviewed by The New York Times:
A car or a plane enabled you to travel farther and faster. What concerns me is that the current technologies have been converted from being means to being ends. [The Internet] seems to have become an end in and of itself.
And how might we describe that end? So much of our inventiveness, it turns out, wells up from, and then perpetuates, a deep desire to gather the world into our arms. The harnessing of magnetism leads to the compass, making expansive seafaring possible. James Watt’s invention of the modern ste
am engine in 1765 obliterates distance. The telegraph, the transatlantic cable, and the telephone cast larger and larger lassos to draw home the voices of faraway lovers, peers, and purveyors of news. Motion pictures, at the end of the nineteenth century, reap a world’s worth of glittering images and deliver them to enthralled viewers in the dark.
We crowded the world into our small lives. And the crowding claimed its victims.
• • • • •
In Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (which is set in 1482, when printing presses were just getting established in Louis XI’s France), Archdeacon Claude Frollo sees his first printed book and marvels/glowers at its production quality. He stands near Notre-Dame and, looking up at the cathedral, says, “Ceci tuera cela” (“This will kill that”). How does a book kill a cathedral? We’re speaking in synecdoche here: The printing press (engine of democracy, aid to Martin Luther) will kill the Catholic Church. Also, more literally, the printed book became a nimbler conveyer of meaning than grand architectural gestures (like Notre-Dame), which had stood for millennia as “the great handwriting of the human race.” The printed word disrupts not just the standard hierarchy of information transmission, but a way of knowing that’s sacred and beyond the handlings of everyday folk. Of course, from Hugo’s vantage point—his novel was published in 1831—he could give Frollo a degree of foresight that would have been lacking in an honest citizen of fifteenth-century Paris.
Living in the real maelstrom of change, however, means blindness. And so the details of our own Gutenberg moment remain partly obscure. But this much we know: Just as every technology is an invitation to enhance some part of our lives, it’s also, necessarily, an invitation to be drawn away from something else. The things we’re glad to be drawn away from (dying of exposure, Black Death) are easier to remember than the things we might have wanted to hold on to (rural life, restful mornings). The more I thought about our Gutenberg moment, the more I wondered: Drawn away from what? What is this feeling of mysterious loss that hits us each step down that path? I kept coming back to the loss of lack, the end of absence.
The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection Page 2
