by John Freeman
In this sense, the Internet and e-mail, while designed to make the world ever more connected, reinforces the already existing gaps. Mighty work is being done by several charitable organizations, such as Nicholas Negroponte’s foundation One Laptop per Child, to help provide computers and Internet access to more libraries and communities, to get parts of the world wired that still don’t even have dial-up. Helping poorer countries and populations get connected is important work, and it should be done. In the meantime, it is important for those of us who are in the Internet’s imagined community to remember that this digital utopia doesn’t exist for everyone.
The Age of Missing Information
In May 1992, Bill McKibben performed a fascinating experiment. He recorded an entire day of television—all ninety-three channels in Fairfax, Virginia—and compared the information it provided with the information acquired in a day spent atop a mountain in the Adirondacks. It was a straw man context, he admitted, since no one can physically watch ninety-three channels at once, but the comparison provided an illuminating argument for what is missing in the so-called age of information. Many people spend a fifth of their waking life before the machine; what is it telling them?
One key ingredient missing from television, of course, is any sense of the natural world and its constant reminder of human hubris. “Even the dullest farmer quickly learns, for instance, a deep sense of limits,” he wrote. “You can’t harvest crops successfully until you understand how much can be grown without exhausting the soil, how much rest the land requires, which fields can be safely plowed and which are so erosion-prone that they’re best left to some other purpose.”
Now that we’re plugged into a different screen, the computer screen, for many hours per day, this denaturing has only increased. Many of us who work in offices don’t touch a single natural substance all day long, from the plastic keyboard to the mesh fibers on the back of our chair to the faux lacquered tables in conference rooms. These tangible objects are the new machine world, and their message is that human engineering drives the day; our hands, our designs are stamped upon everything. We have forged an environment made for work.
By projecting ourselves into the computer, by imagining it as a surrogate brain, an extension of ourselves, we have bought into a false metaphor that travels with us everywhere our gadgets go. The computer is not a brain any more than our brain is a computer. The computer, for one, is far better at batching and sorting than we are; it can work longer hours. It feels no pain. But we cannot help projecting ourselves into and through it because not to do so would be to recognize how much we live in a world that is outside ourselves—denatured, not human. This paradox puts us into an emotional and physical bind. We have become dependent upon a machine that cannot sense our physical strain and has no intuitive knowledge of our limits, a machine that is immune to sunlight—and in some cases, does not work well under direct light due to the glare. In turn, this relationship has pushed us far beyond our known limits. As Elaine Scarry has written in her treatise The Body in Pain, “The act of human creating includes both the creating of the object and the object’s re-creating of the human being, and it is only because of the second that the first is undertaken.” In other words, it is not the machines that are doing this to us: it’s ourselves, because we keep inventing the machines. We have collectively desired this augmentation of our power, our reach, our communication skills. But if we want to change the way we are living and working, we have to acknowledge our limits and the fact that we may have reached terminal velocity a long time ago.
6
MANIFESTO FOR A SLOW COMMUNICATION MOVEMENT
The best hope for emotional maturity, then, appears to lie in recognition of our need for and dependence on people who nevertheless remain separate from ourselves and refuse to submit to our whims. It lies in recognition of others not as projects of our own desires but as independent beings with desires of their own. More broadly, it lies in acceptance of our limits. The world does not exist merely to satisfy our desires; it is a world in which we can find pleasure and meaning, once we understand that others too have a right to these goods.
— CHRISTOPHER LASCHE
In a secret way, we have always wanted to speed up to this point—to accelerate into “that instant,” writes Hélène Cixous, “which strikes between two instants, that instant which flies into bits under its own blow, which has neither length, nor duration, only its own shattering brilliance, the shock of the passage from night to light.” In the instant we are everywhere and nowhere, the boundaries of space and time do not matter; we will never die. The instant between 0 and 1.
But the boundlessness of the Internet always runs into the hard fact of our animal nature, our physical limits, the dimensions of our cognitive present, the overheated capacity of our minds. “My friend has just had his PC wired for broadband,” writes the poet Don Paterson. “I meet him in the café he looks terrible—his face puffy and pale, his eyes bloodshot…. He tells me he is now detained, night and day, in downloading every album he ever owned, lost, desired, or was casually intrigued by; he has now stopped even listening to them, and spends his time sleeplessly monitoring a progress bar…. He says it’s like all my birthdays have come at once, by which I can see he means, precisely, that he feels he is going to die.”
We will die, that much is certain; and everyone we have ever loved and cared about will die, too, sometimes—heartbreakingly— before us. Being someone else, traveling the world, making new friends gives us a temporary reprieve from this knowledge, which is spared most of the animal kingdom. Busyness numbs the pain of this awareness, but it can never totally submerge it. Given that our days are limited, our hours precious, we have to decide what we want to do, what we want to say, what and who we care about, and how we want to allocate our time to these things within the limits that do not and cannot change. In short, we need to slow down.
Our society does not often tell us this. Progress, since the dawn of the Industrial Age, is supposed to be a linear upward progression; graphs with upward slopes are a good sign. Processing speeds are always getting faster; broadband now makes dialup seem like traveling by horse and buggy. Growth is eternal. But only two things grow indefinitely or have indefinite growth firmly ensconced at the heart of their being: cancer and the corporation. For everything else, especially in nature, the consuming fires eventually come and force a starting over.
The ultimate form of progress, however, is learning to decide what is working and what is not; and working at this pace, e-mailing at this frantic rate, is pleasing very few of us. It is encroaching on parts of our lives that should be separate or sacred, altering our minds and our ability to know our world, encouraging a further distancing from our bodies and our natures and our communities. We can change this; we have to change it. This book has been an attempt to step back from the frenzy and the flurry of the now—the now we have created and the now we have to slowly remove ourselves from—to make this argument. Of course e-mail is good for many things; that has never been in dispute. But we need to learn to use it far more sparingly, with far less dependency, if we are to gain control of our lives.
The reduction of distances has become a strategic reality bearing incalculable economic and political consequences, since it corresponds to the negation of space.
— PAUL VIRILIO
Each new birth of reality, however deformed, can be exploited in its turn.
— GEORGE W. S. TROW
The first parameters—the only parameters—for human existence are natural ones. Even our most dazzling cities are embedded into ecologies that scratch stealthily at the steel and brickwork, ready to reclaim the ground upon which skyscrapers and streetlamps are built. Wolves haunt Central Park at night. An empty suburban home, as it crumbles, will be taken over by thousands of living organisms that feed off its timber, dig roots into the floor joists. We are short-term leasers in this world, even if there are concrete beneath our feet and fiberglass roofs above our heads. W
ere humans to abandon the streets of New York City, they would collapse into the subway tunnels in just two decades.
Technology amplifies human instincts and desires, but it must obey the laws of nature if it is to sustain human life, not destroy it. And so we must remember we are part of nature, too. We may be dependent on machines, but we operate like them at our peril. A diving suit can sustain a swift ascent from 3,000 meters below sea level; the human body inside it cannot. A man who works past the point of exhaustion in a mine will collapse; a machine can keep on digging.
Technology that appears to transcend the limits of the physical world merely shifts the costs of its use elsewhere. The wheel allowed crops to be transported and sold a distance from where they were harvested; in doing so, it transformed communities, spreading them out, while also making workers travel farther than ever before in order to make a day’s wage. The automobile enabled people to live farther than ever from their loved ones and offices, and our overuse of it has polluted the skies and tarred our lungs. We may “obliterate distance,” but another part of nature always pays the price.
We are living in an age of communication revolution—using machines that far outpace human capacity, talking, writing, and typing to one another at greater speed than ever before. We can now work through the night to keep up with colleagues around the globe; we can send an e-mail from New York to Marseilles and have it arrive instantly. We enjoy relatively cheap remote, instantaneous access to our work areas, to newspapers, to stock prices from around the world. “The markets never rest,” writes the poet August Kleinzahler in “The Strange Hours That Travelers Keep.” “Always they are somewhere in agitation / Pork bellies, titanium, winter wheat.”
We are now beginning to understand the consequences of this new circumambient digital “reality.” The convenience and speed of the Internet have drawn us powerfully into a virtual world in which distance appears not to matter. At the end of the day, though, we need to live in the physical world; we live in communities besides the global village; we need to sleep if we are to live healthfully; we can have five hundred virtual friends, but no matter how often we keep up with them, how many will visit our bedside when we are ill?
We pay the price when we begin to apply the rules of this virtual space to our real life, a lesson that is abundantly clear at work. The Internet was supposed to allow us to work from anywhere, and so we do—from our vacations, from our homes, from our places of worship. It was meant to liberate us from ties to a desk and office space; instead it has led us to work all the time. In the past two decades, we have witnessed one of the greatest breakdowns of the barrier between our work and personal lives since the notion of leisure time emerged in Victorian Britain as a result of the Industrial Age. And we are contributing to this breakdown piecemeal: checking our e-mail in the morning or at night, adding ever more gadgets to our tool kit of connections.
Buying into this way of life—because the Internet is now, at heart, about selling and pitching—has transformed more than just the workplace, though. It has eroded our sense of context, allowing governments and power brokers to create and manipulate a constant state of crisis, because a culture with no sense of its past is blind to the errors of history. It has put us under great physical and mental strain, altering our brain chemistry and daily needs. It has isolated us from the people with whom we live, siphoning us away from real-world places where we gather. It has placed false expectations on real-world living, making us ever more dissatisfied in spite of the huge increase in quality of life in the Western world. It has encouraged flotillas of unnecessary jabbering, making it difficult to tell signal from noise. It has made it more difficult to read slowly and enjoy it, hastening the already declining rates of literacy. It has made it harder to listen and mean it, to be idle and not fidget.
This is not a sustainable way to live. This lifestyle of being constantly on causes emotional and physical burnout, workplace meltdowns, and unhappiness. How many of our most joyful memories have been created in front of a screen? Yet in 2006, it was discovered that Americans spent more than half of their life connected to various forms of media. This means we spend more time engaged in media than we do sleeping, more hours plugged in than we log at work. We work in order to have time to watch. We spend more time with our computers than our spouses. We check our e-mail more often than we drink water. The culture of Western media encourages us to leave a mark on this planet, to transform ourselves and become the most we can be, to project ourselves outward. Yet participating in and keeping up with these media has given birth to the most politically and culturally passive generation the world has ever seen.
If we are to step off this hurtling machine, we must reassert principles that have been lost in the blur. It is time to launch a manifesto for a slow communication movement, a push back against the machines and the forces that encourage us to remain connected to them. Many of the values of the Internet are social improvements—it can be a great platform for solidarity, it rewards curiosity, it enables convenience. This is not the manifesto of a Luddite, this is a human manifesto. If the technology is to be used for the betterment of human life, we must reassert that the Internet and its virtual information space is not a world unto itself but a supplement to our existing world, where the following three statements are self-evident.
1. Speed Matters.
We have numerous technologies that can work with extreme rapidity. But we don’t use these capabilities because they are either dangerous (even the Autobahn has begun applying speed limits, due to severe accidents) or uncomfortable (imagine turbulence at 1200 miles per hour) or would ruin the point of having the technology at all (played back faster than it was recorded, Led Zeppelin’s syrupy metal sound turns to tinsel).
The speed at which we do something—anything—changes our experience of it. Words and communication are not immune to this fundamental truth. The faster we talk and chat and type over tools such as e-mail and text messages, the more our communication will resemble traveling at great speed. Bumped and jostled, queasy from the constant ocular and muscular adjustments our body must make to keep up, we will live in a constant state of digital jet lag.
This is a disastrous development on many levels. Brain science may suggest that some decisions can be made in the blink of an eye, but not all judgments benefit from a short frame of reference. We need to protect the finite well of our attention if we care about our relationships. We need time in order to properly consider the effect of what we say upon others. We need time in order to grasp the political and professional ramifications of our typed correspondence. We need time to shape and design and filter our words so that we say exactly what we mean. Communicating at great haste hones our utterances down to instincts and impulses that until now have been held back or channeled more carefully.
Continuing in this strobe-lit techno-rave communication environment as it stands will be destructive for businesses. Employees communicating at breakneck speed make mistakes. They forget, cross boundaries that exist for a reason, make sloppy errors, offend clients, spread rumors and gossip that would never travel through offline channels, work well past the point where their contributions are helpful, burn out and break down and then have trouble shutting down and recuperating. The churn produced by this communication lifestyle cannot be sustained. “To perfect things, speed is a unifying force,” the race-car driver Michael Schumacher has said. “To imperfect things, speed is a destructive force.” No company is perfect, nor is any individual.
It is hard not to blame us for believing otherwise, because the Internet and the global markets it facilitates have bought into a fundamental warping of the actual meaning of speed. Speed used to convey urgency; now we somehow think it means efficiency. One can even see this in the etymology of the word. The earliest recorded use of it as a verb—“to go fast”— dates back to 1300, when horses were the primary mode of moving in haste. By 1569, as the printing press was beginning to remake society, speed was being used to mean �
�to send forth with quickness.” By 1856, in the thick of the Industrial Revolution, when machines and mechanized production and train travel were remaking society yet again, “speed” took on another meaning. It was being used to “increase the work rate of,” as in speed up.
There is a paradox here, though. The Internet has provided us with an almost unlimited amount of information, but the speed at which it works—and we work through it—has deprived us of its benefits. We might work at a higher rate, but this is not working. We can store a limited amount of information in our brains and have it at our disposal at any one time. Making decisions in this communication brownout, though without complete information, we go to war hastily, go to meetings unprepared, and build relationships on the scree of false impressions. Attention is one of the most valuable modern resources. If we waste it on frivolous communication, we will have nothing left when we really need it.
Everything we say needn’t travel at the fastest rate possible. The difference between typing an e-mail and writing a letter or memo out by hand is akin to walking on concrete versus strolling on grass. You forget how natural it feels until you do it again. Our time on this earth is limited, the world is vast, and the people we care about or need for our business life to operate will not always live and work nearby; we will always have to communicate over distance. We might as well enjoy it and preserve the space and time to do it in a way that matches the rhythms of our bodies. Continuing to work and type and write at speed, however, will make our communication environment resemble our cities. There will be concrete as far as the eye can see.
