The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection
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Sergeant Star, 59–60
Sesame Street, 1–2, 3
sex, 104, 164–77
pornography, 83, 88, 168, 169, 174
Shallows, The (Carr), 38, 86
Shaw, George Bernard, 57
Shelley, Mary, 56
Skinner, B. F., 114
Skype, 106
Sloth Club, 204
Slowness (Kundera), 184
Small, Gary, 10–11, 37–38
smartphones, see phones
Smith, Gordon, 186
“smupid” thinking, 185–86
Snapchat, 168
social media, 19, 48, 55, 106, 150–51, 175
Socrates, 32–33, 40
solitude, 8, 14, 39, 46, 48, 188, 193, 195, 197, 199
Songza, 90–91, 125
Space Weather, 107
Squarciafico, Hieronimo, 33, 35
Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE), 94
Stanford University, 94–97
Statistics Canada, 174
sticklebacks, 124
Stone, Linda, 10, 169
Storr, Anthony, 203
stress hormones, 10
Study in Scarlet, A (Doyle), 147–48
suicide, 53–54, 63, 67
of Clementi, 63, 67
of Todd, 50–52, 67
sun, 107–9
surveillance, 66n
synesthesia, 62–63
Tamagotchis, 29–30
technologies, 7, 18, 20, 21, 99, 179, 188, 192, 200, 203, 205, 206
evolution of, 43
Luddites and, 208
penetration rates of, 31
technology-based memes (temes), 42–44
Technopoly (Postman), 98
television, 7, 17, 27, 31, 69, 120
attention problems and, 121
temes (technology-based memes), 42–44
text messaging, 28, 30–31, 35–36, 100, 169, 192–94
Thamus, King, 32–33, 35, 98, 141, 145
Thatcher, Margaret, 74
theater reviews, 81–84, 88–89
Thompson, Clive, 141–42, 144–45
Thoreau, Henry David, 22, 113, 197–200, 202, 204
Thrun, Sebastian, 97
Thurston, Baratunde, 191
Time, 154
Timehop, 148–51, 160
Tinbergen, Niko, 124
Todd, Amanda, 49–53, 55, 62, 67, 70–72
Todd, Carol, 51–52, 71–72
Tolle, Eckhart, 102
Tolstoy, Leo:
Anna Karenina, 125–26
War and Peace, 115, 116, 118, 120, 122–26, 128–29, 131–33, 135, 136
To Save Everything, Click Here (Morozov), 55
touch-sensitive displays, 27
train travel, 200–202
Transcendental Meditation (TM), 76–78
TripAdvisor, 92
Trollope, Anthony, 47–48
Trussler, Terry, 172
Turing, Alan, 60, 61, 67, 68, 186, 190
Turing test, 60–61
Turkle, Sherry, 30, 55–56, 103–4
Twain, Mark, 73
Twitch.tv, 104
Twitter, 9, 31, 46, 63, 149
Udacity, 97
Uhls, Yalda T., 69
Unbound Publishing, 88
Understanding Media (McLuhan), 14
University of Guelph, 53
Valmont, Sebastian, 166
Vancouver, 3–4
Vancouver, 8–11, 15
Vaughn, Vince, 89
Vespasiano da Bisticci, 33
video games, 32, 104
Virtual Self, The (Young), 68, 71
Voltaire, 83
Walden (Thoreau), 113, 198–200
Wales, Jimmy, 77
Walker, C. J., 79–80
War and Peace (Tolstoy), 115, 116, 118, 120, 122–26, 128–29, 131–33, 135, 136
Watanabe, Takeo, 38
Watt, James, 20
Wegener, Jonathan, 149–51
Weinberger, David, 81
Weizenbaum, Joseph, 57, 59, 108, 188
Wharton, Edith, 117
What Technology Wants (Kelly), 43
Whittaker, Steve, 156
Who Owns the Future? (Lanier), 85
Wikipedia, 63, 73–79, 142, 147, 185
administrators of, 76
Arbitration Committee of, 77–78
errors and hoaxes on, 73–75, 78
Feldman entry on, 73–74, 79
gender bias and, 79
Transcendental Meditation entry on, 76–78
Wikipediocracy, 79
Wilson, Gary, 169
Wired, 142, 144
Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The (Baum), 94, 100
Wordsworth, William, 111
World Wide Web, 31, 47
writing, 32–34, 43, 98, 145, 202
Wunderkammer, 147
Yelp, 84, 87–88
Young, Nora, 68, 71
YouTube, 19, 69, 70, 101
Todd and, 49–53, 70
1. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein points out in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change that the sixteenth-century writer Michel de Montaigne had access to more books at his own home than earlier scholars could have encountered over a lifetime of global travels.
2. The meters and formulas of epic poetry were in fact memory aids that allowed for the recitation of extended narratives held entirely in the orator’s mind. Karl Marx writes in The German Ideology, “Is it not inevitable that with the emergence of the press, the singing and the telling and the muse cease; that is, the conditions necessary for epic poetry disappear?”
3. History is littered with examples of technologies that multiply content and, in doing so, change the monopolies of knowledge in Europe and elsewhere. John Man writes about the Korean emperor Sejong, for example, who in 1443 introduced a simplified alphabet, Hangul, which appalled the elite of his country—they worked to block its proliferation. (See chapter 4 of Man’s The Gutenberg Revolution.)
4. The Kaiser Foundation’s latest numbers tell us that print consumption, outside of reading for school, takes up an average of thirty-eight minutes in every youth’s day (a small but telling drop from forty-three minutes five years earlier).
5. This is, yes, a hyped-up Hollywood version of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.”
6. To “an hero” is a synonym for committing suicide that is used by 4chan communities.
7. The gold medal has not been won yet. Smaller prizes are given each year for the “most human computer” in the bunch.
8. Such content will almost definitely be managed more tightly in the future than it is now—perhaps by the government. To paraphrase Microsoft researcher danah boyd: Facebook is a utility; utilities get regulated.
9. Governments and corporations may use such programs to keep tabs on the whereabouts of “unfriendly” persons. For example, The Guardian reported on February 10, 2013, that “defense giant Raytheon has created software capable of tracking people based on information posted to social networks. Its capabilities are impressively creepy.” Raytheon’s software, called Riot, extracts location information from Facebook or the location tags on uploaded photos, joining a long list of technologies that make mass surveillance (of “terrorists” and “innocents” alike) more feasible.
10. Mostly, Dinakar’s vision is a cheerful, hopeful one. I ask him how he imagines the future, and he begins to describe the talking paintings that J. K. Rowling included in her Harry Potter books. “Thirty or fifty years from now,” he says, “the paintings will talk to you. If I have a picture of my mom, who lives back in India, and she’s happy, then the picture in my home will look happy. I will know how she feels in the moment she feels it.”
11. Uhls’s research indicates that there is, not surprisingly, a relationship between valuing fame and usage of social media.
12. As early as 1370, King Charles V ordered the citizens of Paris to conform their daily activities to the ding-dong of France’s first public clock, which he had installed on the facade of the royal pal
ace (the present-day La Conciergerie).
13. This appalled me briefly before I realized the behavior was no different from paying money to watch a pro athlete play hockey.
14. But the silent reader becomes responsible for the text and, thus, forms an intimate, exclusionary relationship with it. This silent relationship with the text is an invention, not a given: Alberto Manguel describes how, around the year AD 380, the future St. Augustine was astonished, on meeting the future St. Ambrose, to find him reading without moving his lips.
15. That said, eye-tracking software may be useful in keeping long-haul drivers from falling asleep at the wheel. See Olivia Solon’s “Eye-Tracking System Monitors Driver Fatigue, Prevents Sleeping at Wheel,” in Wired, May 28, 2013, http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-05/28/eye -tracking-mining-system.
16. As Elizabeth Eisenstein points out, indexes, tables of contents, and the like were not natural to printed books, but evolved over time. Even alphabetical order (a to z) is of course an invention and a direct result of the printing revolution. (See Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 71.)
17. Tim Berners-Lee indulges in this recall-as-memory fallacy in a coauthored 2012 paper titled “Defend the Web,” where he tells the story of Deacon Patrick Jones, who found succor in “memory aids” after a traumatic brain injury. “His very memory is extended into the Internet,” the authors enthuse; but this is clearly not so.
18. Associations will come into play that shape and strengthen this memory. For example, the “ingle” part of “Inglenook” might be associated in your brain with “ingots,” a building material that might be used to build such a cozy corner; “angle,” which sounds like “ingle,” might be called up, too. And “nook,” which the brain already knows, would be activated in order to form the new word; and so on.
19. Without a “Pandora’s box” technology, we are required to engage in an active scrubbing of digital memory—we must delete contact info from phones, untag ourselves from photos online. Even then, stray digital flotsam seems inevitable. The perfection of silicon recall may now require perfect deletion, too.
20. Even the in-name platonic Web site Friendster.com was founded (in 2002) by a man who later admitted to doing all the work in order to find good-looking girls: Gary Rivlin, “Wallflower at the Web Party,” New York Times, October 15, 2006.
21. More than a century later, Thoreau’s words seem reflected in the work of poet Anne Carson: “When I think of you reading this I do not want you to be taken captive, separated by a wire mesh lined with glass from your life itself, like some Elektra.”