The Time of Our Lives

by Tom Brokaw

  On Meet the Press I was critical of New Canaan and other school districts who imagined something sinister in the president’s motives, pointing out that for me, this was not a partisan issue. I reminded everyone that President Reagan did something similar when he was in office.

  The New Canaan superintendent of schools was upset by my criticism and called to complain. He had a rather tortured explanation for the district’s censorious attitude and so I finally asked, “Do your students bring their personal computers to school?”

  “Yes,” he replied.

  Then I asked, “Do you monitor or filter what they access on their computers?”

  “No,” he said.

  “I rest my case,” I replied. He wanted to stand between his students and the president of the United States but he had not a clue what they were reading on their computers during school hours and in the presence of teachers and administrators.

  Equally unsettling are schools that permit smartphones in the classroom without realizing that some students surreptitiously use them to cheat. A strategically placed phone with its browser open to Google is too easy to arrange.

  As we go careening into this brave new world of on-the-go information available at a keystroke, shouldn’t we have an ongoing conversation about the origins, agendas, credibility, and context of the information we’re retrieving? Take, for example, the sometimes bizarre claims dropped into Wikipedia entries like errant mortar rounds.

  It took me several tries to eradicate an utterly false Wikipedia statement that on the day of the 9/11 attacks I had chanted “War, war, war” on the air like a militant yell leader. A Los Angeles friend, a screaming heterosexual who depends on his secretary to guide him through cyberspace, was startled to read in his Wikipedia entry that he was the first openly gay senior partner of a major law firm.

  Personal computers have been accurately described as the first technology in which the children are teaching the parents to drive. Parents and other grown-ups need not concede this territory to their offspring. We’d better get behind the wheel ourselves.

  Older boomers and my generation, slightly older, are at the tail end of the user population, representing less than 13 percent of those going online. There are now a number of online sites dedicated to teaching seniors how to get with the Internet program. For those too intimidated by online instruction, senior citizen centers around the country are establishing inhouse tutorials using local young people as instructors and counselors.

  There is a bonus in all of this. Dr. Laura Carstensen of the Stanford Center on Longevity reports that one of the ways to slow the aging process is to learn entirely new skills. “It’s not enough,” she says, “to do crosswords or play bridge, relying on your memory bank; you should try to learn something entirely new.” Director Gary Small at the UCLA Longevity Center concurs. “The new technology will create a major milestone in brain evolution,” he said, explaining that Internet use among seniors dramatically increases brain activity.

  It’s not that baby boomers and those of us in the generation just ahead are Luddites when it comes to cyber technology and the vast new universe of the information age. During conversations with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his rock star chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, I’ve pressed them for reasons why I should at this age add one more electronic chore to my email, Google, Bing, Yahoo! list.

  Sheryl immediately took me to a Facebook page organized around a Florida community and a local high school. It was a virtual reunion of the class of 1968 and they were all in touch with one another after many years of going their separate ways.

  Sheryl, who was born at the tag end of the boomer years and looks more like a postgraduate student than one of the most powerful executives of the Internet era, laughed when she described an early meeting at Facebook. The executive team was discussing a new launch when one said, “Well, we have to take into account all user demographics,” and then, waving at Sheryl, added, “including the middle-aged.”

  Sheryl at first didn’t know who he was waving at, but she quickly made the story into a parable about Facebook as more than just a youthful fancy.

  She said, “As you get older, the barriers of time and geography become more important and we have to break them down. Facebook does that with virtual reunions which, in turn, get more people to the real reunions.”

  When I asked if Facebook would replace the nursery song “Over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go,” Sandberg responded quickly, “I don’t think so, but Facebook makes it easier to share on a daily basis. We hear stories of people getting to watch their grandkids take their first step on video on Facebook.”

  There is another, unexpected, surge in social networking by baby boomers desperate to find answers to a challenge they had not anticipated: caring for their elderly parents, many of whom have lived into their late eighties or nineties. They may be afflicted with dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, and their boomer children are lighting up the Internet, looking for help or sharing stories. It’s the electronic equivalent of a support group without the need to leave your keyboard.

  Not all senior citizens are enthusiastic about Facebook and other social networking sites. At a Stanford University symposium called Generation Ageless: Longevity and the Boomers, a roundtable about the challenges and opportunities for America’s growing senior population, Sheryl Sandberg was on a panel that included former U.S. Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

  When I asked O’Connor if she stayed in touch with her former law clerks, she said, “Not as much as I’d like; I’m not sure where many of them are now.” Sandberg seized the moment, saying, “We can find them on Facebook.”

  Justice O’Connor quickly made it clear she wasn’t interested. “I don’t need any more publicity, even on Facebook, definitely no!” She did admit, however, she likes to communicate with her grandchildren on Skype, the video teleconference website and software.

  The Internet, with or without Facebook, can be the best kind of common ground for generation-to-generation bonding. Our fourteen- and twelve-year-old granddaughters, Claire and Meredith, routinely share with us interesting or amusing sites on the Internet and we send them suggestions on what to look up. When Claire spent a school holiday in Nicaragua we exchanged impressions of the country via email.

  Sometimes the Internet is an unexpected meeting place for our two widely separated generations. On the weekend of my birthday I took the girls to a rehearsal of Saturday Night Live at NBC when the teen heartthrob Ashton Kutcher was guest host.

  When he appeared onstage to walk through a sketch Claire immediately whipped out her smartphone and began typing furiously. When I asked what she was up to, she said, impatiently, “Tom, I’m texting all my friends about this monumental moment.” Later Kutcher kindly came over to say hello and asked what had brought us all together. When the girls said it was my seventieth birthday, he raised his eyebrows and said, “Seventy? I don’t believe it.” Although I am not a teenage girl I was ready to sign up for his fan club.

  In the cab ride home, my phone buzzed and I learned from friends that Kutcher had tweeted the same message. “I just met Tom Brokaw. It’s his 70th birthday. He doesn’t look a day over 50!” Now my granddaughters were doubly impressed because Kutcher is the king of Twitter, with more followers than any other young star.

  I thought back to my teenage years and how exciting it would have been to have tweeted my friends and parents from the loge in Ebbets Field when I fulfilled a lifelong dream of seeing my beloved Dodgers in their home park the summer they were decamped to the West Coast by the O’Malley family—or the Saturday night I saw Rebel Without a Cause and instinctively knew that all-American boys in crew cuts and letter jackets were about to become passé with teenage girls.

  The Kutcher experience is repeated millions of times a day around the globe, one hopes on more meaningful terms. It will only become an even larger part of our human experience, and it will make our world a
neighborhood of social connections. But the test will be the constructive payoff of those connections: Will they enhance world understanding, promote justice and human rights, or help to organize a global response to issues such as climate change or infectious diseases? I believe you can do all of that and still meet a mate online, tweet about a new video, or buy a used tractor.

  THE PROMISE

  These are all tools that require an active intelligence and a fired-up imagination. These new tools must be an extension of our hearts and minds as well as our thumbs and impulses. Thankfully, a number of cyber whiz kids are already doing that. Microsoft has an alumni association that every year recognizes the innovative work of Microsoft graduates in the social sector.

  Asked to help judge the 2010 competition, I was hard-pressed to single out just one or two efforts. They were uniformly impressive and addressed issues that heretofore had received too little attention.

  William Brindley and Frank Schott work together on NetHope, which can best be described as a central command center for disparate international humanitarian organizations. When a disaster occurs—for example, the Haiti earthquake—NetHope sends teams of technologists to help with communication.

  They set up Wi-Fi hot spots, satellite dishes, and solar generators and arrange for Skype vouchers so the participating NGO relief teams have access to reliable information and a means of coordinating with one another on the greatest needs of the area.

  Chris Hughes, a cofounder of Facebook, is investing his time and a piece of his considerable fortune in an online venture called Jumo that he established to connect individuals and corporations with charities.

  Hughes took the basic model of Facebook and applied it to Jumo, so nonprofits could establish pages and reach constituencies that might otherwise not know about their work, whether that’s building a school in Africa or providing tutors to the inner city.

  When the Middle East exploded with populist rage in the first quarter of 2011 the rebels were able to mobilize millions of like-minded oppressed citizens on Twitter and Facebook. Autocrats everywhere took notice: They could no longer divide and conquer an aggrieved population that now had access to a common and swift form of communication.

  These are just a few of the innovative uses of this wide-ranging technology for the greater good. All of the giants of Silicon Valley and beyond—Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!—have programs and personnel dedicated to finding solutions to substandard education, medical problems, and social needs. As an entrepreneurial class, the men and women of cyberspace are fearless and confident they can do anything.

  Look at what they’ve done so far. We should all be cheering them on for what they’ll do next. The advantages of technology are all around us. A few notable examples:

  Agriculture: The National Academy of Sciences calculated that at the beginning of the twentieth century 38 percent of the labor force was needed for farmwork. By the turn of the twenty-first century, that number had fallen to 3 percent. Moreover, farming is so much more efficient as a result of animal genetics, plant biology, soil conservation, and innovation in machinery that less land is required to grow food for many more people worldwide.

  Energy conservation: In the 1990s manufacturing output in the United States expanded by 41 percent but industrial consumption of electricity grew by only 11 percent. In the past four decades the U.S. economy has expanded by more than 126 percent yet technology has made it possible to expand electrical use by only 30 percent.

  Medicine: Google or Bing the subject “medical technology” and up come pages from the highly regarded Scientific American or Science Daily websites with articles on new drugs, the effects of radiation, global cancer rates, the latest in aging research, and trends in sports medicine, as well as more complex subjects such as positron emission tomography.

  Within the health care system nationally and globally technology makes possible diagnostic, surgical, and medical treatment that was unimaginable twenty years ago. A patient in Mumbai may be examined by a specialist in Boston without either leaving her home city.

  That’s a microscopic snapshot of both the work that is being done as a result of technology in medicine and the ability of laypersons to become more informed.

  In medicine, particularly, it can work both ways. The anxious patient may find ailments on the Internet to fit his or her imagination and the physician may spend many more office hours trying to sort through a do-it-yourself diagnosis on the part of the ailing Internet enthusiast.

  As our doctor daughter says, “We need more of the old-fashioned, sensible, grandmotherly advice to go with the modern technology.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Everyone’s a Journalist

  FACT: According to the Newspaper Association of America, daily newspapers penetrate more than 55 percent of the population fifty-five years of age and older, almost 53 percent of potential readers thirty-five and older, but less than 33 percent of the population eighteen to thirty-four years of age.

  Newspapers have lost an estimated 25 percent of their circulation since the turn of the twenty-first century.

  Network evening news broadcasts on NBC, CBS, and ABC still deliver a lot of tonnage in terms of viewers—almost twenty-five million combined on an average weeknight—but they’re also losing viewers to the proliferation of cable news outlets and, especially, websites, either those produced independently or by traditional newspaper publishers.

  QUESTION: Where do you get your news on a daily basis? If it is a website, do you know who is providing the content? Are you more or less inclined to believe what you read on the Internet than what you pick up from elsewhere?

  Wherever I appear—before civic groups, at conferences on a variety of issues, or at corporate gatherings—I know one question will arise: “What’s happened to American journalism? Why is it all shouting and confrontation? Why can’t we return to the days of Walter Cronkite and The Huntley-Brinkley Report?” As soon as the question is asked, the audience either applauds in support of the premise or leans forward in anticipation of the answer.

  I welcome the opportunity, because I am eager to engage any audience in a wider discussion about the role of readers and viewers—citizens, if you will—on the health and form of the means by which they get the information on which they’ll make decisions about their everyday lives and the future of their country.

  We live in an information-rich environment. Never have there been so many choices available to news consumers. When the economics of the daily newspaper business first began to change and only deep-pockets enterprises remained, there was widespread consternation about the power of the sole surviving papers.

  THE PAST

  The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal were America’s most powerful newspapers in the post–World War II era. They represented the crown jewels of daily American journalism, and it seemed it would be that way forever.

  The Los Angeles Times in the sixties, seventies, and early eighties was the King Kong of Southern California journalism. Minneapolis was dominated by the Star Tribune, a morphing of two separate papers, one morning and one evening, owned by the same company.

  Residents of San Francisco, a sophisticated city with bawdy newspapers, had two choices—the Chronicle and the Examiner—but the Chronicle prevailed when the Examiner was sold to an entrepreneur who turned it into a small broadsheet tabloid.

  Then the world of print came under assault from all sides on the new fields of instantly accessible information. Highly profitable enterprises, including the venerated New York Times and Washington Post, were hit hard and scrambled to find a way to fit into the new realities.

  Gannett, the national chain of small-market papers, moved into medium-sized cities and consolidated their properties. As the economic squeeze of the Great Recession began to choke off ad revenue, Gannett forced employees to take furloughs and instructed local papers to reprint the front page of the chain’s flagship, USA Today.

 
Newspapers first came under assault from all-news cable television channels: MSNBC, CNBC, Fox News, Bloomberg, and the expanded spectrum of ESPN attaching themselves to the established worldwide orbit of CNN.

  The Internet came right behind, with an explosive impact. At first dismissed as a solely academic tool by the likes of Bill Gates and other forefathers of the personal computer age, the Net quickly created a vast new universe of news and information.

  The pressure on the traditional economic models of newspapers, especially big-city papers, was suffocating. One statistic sums up the economic crisis in traditional print journalism: At the beginning of the twenty-first century, print ad revenue brought in almost $49 billion to newspapers. By 2010, that number had fallen to almost $23 billion, a drop of 53 percent.

  The Seattle Post-Intelligencer gave up print editions in favor of an online-only outlet. The Boston Globe went on life support. The Minneapolis Star Tribune filed for bankruptcy. The Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times wound up in the hands of a real estate developer who railed against traditional journalistic practices and promised big changes, but instead lost big money. The New York Times, after an uncertain start, revamped its electronic editions and charged subscribers for access. The Good Gray Lady was suddenly ablaze with blogs and snazzy graphics, gossipy items and more commentary. The Times also became a wine and archival photograph vendor.

  THE PRESENT

  The Second Big Bang is not yet complete, and may never be finished, given the pace of information evolution. However, some patterns are beginning to emerge. Traditional print and electronic journalism is finding new life on the digital spectrum. Newspaper, magazine, and television news enterprises are constantly refining their content-delivery systems so that print, over-the-air, and cable news can all move seamlessly to the websites in an appealing fashion, easily accessible on cellphones or other personal digital appliances such as the iPad.