Hamlet's BlackBerry (18 page)

Even if positive, inner-directed rituals like this took off, they wouldn't solve the root cause of office overload, which is the sheer ongoing growth of information and not enough time to handle it all. E-mail is only a piece of the puzzle. As Jonathan B. Spira, the CEO of Basex, has written, “Information overload is far more complex than too much e-mail.” Nevertheless, if workers were reining in their own screen habits because they were convinced it was a good idea, it's hard to imagine that the situation wouldn't begin to improve. Instead of no-e-mail Fridays, a few hours of reading Ben Franklin might be more useful.

“All new tools require some practice before we can become expert in the use of them,” Franklin once wrote. His discovery of how electricity works helped lay the groundwork for this electronic age. Given his strong crowd leanings, it's easy to imagine that, were he alive today, he'd be a massive screen addict. And in all likelihood he'd create a ritual for himself based on some notion of less screen time yielding more time for other highly desirable pursuits. Working on new inventions, perhaps, or his old favorite, venery.

Human nature hasn't changed much since the eighteenth century. Look inward first, and accentuate the positive. The ritual will write itself.

Thoreau on Making the Home a Refuge

“I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”

 

I
once read that someday the walls of the typical American kitchen will be constructed of enormous digital screens. The report had a sanguine tone, a perky world-of-tomorrow certitude that this will be a brilliant addition to any modern home.

Futurists have a remarkable knack for being dead wrong, but there were reasons to take this forecast seriously. There's no question that it's technologically feasible. Wall screens are increasingly common in public places, and some serious tech enthusiasts have had them at home for years. Less certain was the assumption that the broader public will welcome the chance to be bathed in floor-to-ceiling digital data as they chew their cornflakes. But based on consumer patterns of the last decade, including my own, it's not all that far-fetched.

I remember my excitement when I first heard years ago that a device was on its way that would distribute a broadband Internet connection wirelessly
all through the house
. This struck me as excellent news. We were still living in the city then and had
two Internet-connected desktop computers, one in my home office and one in Martha's. So if for some reason we wanted to work on a laptop in, say, the kitchen, we had to tap in through a telephone jack, a cumbersome process. Rooms without jacks were “dead” zones unless you had a really long cord.

How nice it would be to have an effortless digital connection anywhere I wanted it in the house. Wherever the urge hit me, I could just “surf the Web,” as we used to say, a phrase nicely evoking the adventure and personal freedom the burgeoning medium offered. Catch a digital wave, and you were sitting on top of the world. I saw myself happily surfing Amazon.com from a chaise in the backyard. When Wi-Fi routers duly arrived I paddled right out and bought one, and in no time we were a thoroughly connected household.

The surround-screen kitchen would simply take the same principle to a new level. Sure, in our wireless broadband home we can now go online from any room. But most laptop and smart phone screens are so small, the connected experience is inherently limited in scope. And to the digital maximalist, limits are the enemy. For instance, when I'm having a wireless connected experience at the kitchen table, as I sometimes do with my laptop, the material world often intrudes. If one of our cats happens by in my peripheral field of vision, I'm liable to pick it up and stroke it while burbling meaningless baby talk, losing my train of digital thought. Screen walls would diminish the wandering-cat effect. The digital sphere would more fully command the room and my attention. I don't relish this prospect, but some people apparently do.

Besides, the futurist thinking goes, there's something wonderfully elegant and Jetsons-esque about connected kitchen walls. Rather than looking into the electronic realm through a tiny window, we'd be living in and moving
through
it all the time. E-mail fonts could be a foot tall, while the life-sized
people in videos would feel as though they were right there with us in the room. And imagine the convenience. If you suddenly needed a recipe or were curious about the overnight stock market numbers from Asia or wondering if the HR folks had replied to your last message or just wanted to wave to Grampa, you could reach out as easily as you do for the butter dish, touch a spot on the wall, or say a few words (these walls will have intelligent ears) and make it happen. Why stop at the kitchen? In some scenarios, the whole house will someday be a full-blown screen environment, every surface seamlessly digitized and world-fastened. And when that day finally arrives, we'll all be very…

Very what? What would it be like to live in such a thoroughly digital domicile? We don't know. Do we care that we don't know? Do we give it any thought amid the daily chatter about technology, the blithe upgrading to whatever is new and more connected? We think incessantly about the technology itself but not about how it's shaping everyday experience. And so, with our tacit permission, everything is becoming a digital “platform,” even the home and, by extension, the people in it.

“Home” means so many things. On the most basic level it's simply a location, the place where one lives. It's also the physical structure, the house or apartment that is home. Last, home refers to the environment that's created inside that structure, a world-away-from-the-world offering refuge, safety, and happiness.

It's this last idea of the home as sanctuary that's absent from most thinking and decision making about technology. A kitchen with giant digital screens for walls would certainly offer convenience, but a household isn't just another utilitarian gadget. Like all connective devices through history, wherever screens go, they bring the crowd and the busyness that comes with it. This, in turn, has a powerful effect on how we think
and feel. The home has traditionally been a shelter
from
the crowd, within which human beings experienced life in a different way from how it was experienced on the outside. For the individual, home has always offered privacy, quiet, solitude. For those living in couples, families, and other cohabiting groups, it also afforded an intimate sort of togetherness that's possible only in shared isolation.

The crowd drives us away from the reflective, the particular, and the truly personal. At home we could be more human.

High-speed, around-the-clock digital connectedness has already diluted these vital aspects of home life. The more connected our house became in the last decade, the less it provided the sense of peace and soul nourishment I associate with “home.” What was once a happy refuge from the crowd is becoming a channel for crowd delivery. The walls are membranes through which a tide of people and information flows in and out around the clock. It's not just online friends, interests, and work duties but news, popular culture, and the never-ending bustle of the marketplace. We're swimming in massacres and tragedies, drowning in celebrities, trends, fads, sensations, crazes. It sucks you in, and as it does, the here-and-now experiences and interactions that should be the core of home life are reduced to fading background music.

I didn't see this coming. Radio and television have been delivering their own crowds into private homes for generations, and the telephone has long been a link to the world at large. I must have been assuming in some unconscious way that always-on digital connectedness would be more of the same. In the long run, it may be. Perhaps it's just the newness of it that makes the interactive screen experience seem so much more intense than what older technologies offer. Just a few generations ago, television was viewed as an invasion of the
sacred space that is home and a particular menace to children. Those dangers are still real today, but over the years it's also become clear that, if used properly, television can be a useful tool as well as a gathering place, an alternative hearth. Television is just that in our house, where we carefully regulate its use and enjoy it immensely. So we may just be at the start of an adjustment period, and someday it will seem silly that anyone ever questioned the wisdom of that universally beloved instrument of happiness, the digitally walled kitchen.

But you can't live in the future. In the reality that is the present, these devices have a mesmerizing hold on us, and it's altering the nature and meaning of our domestic lives. One of the most reliable routes to inwardness and depth has become an increasingly outward experience. How can you relax and recharge when
the whole world
is living with you?

We're already pretty far down this road, and the question is whether it's still possible to do anything. Can this drastic repurposing of the home be amended or modified so it remains a home in every sense of the word?

I think so, and the best way to see how is to go back to the origins of today's wired world a century and a half ago and the unlikeliest of all digital philosophers, Henry David Thoreau. In the familiar telling of his story, Thoreau would seem to be the last person with anything useful to say about managing home life in a digital world. He's best known for abandoning civilization for the one-room house he built in the woods outside Concord, Massachusetts, where he lived a simple life close to nature.
Walden
, his account of that experience, is ostensibly a rejection of society and the insidious ways it warps us and robs life of its richness. In making his case, he often mentions technology, in particular two new inventions that were transforming the world, the railroad and the telegraph.

At a time of rapidly growing connectedness, Thoreau disconnected. He was the great escape artist, and escape would seem to be his message. If you want to take back your life, Get out! Or, as he puts it in
Walden
:

The essential problem hasn't changed, nor has the goal. Who doesn't want to live the fullest, deepest life they possibly can? For the overconnected soul wishing to apply Thoreau's message, however, the sticking point is his method. As a practical matter, not many people have the freedom to escape society—jobs, family, and other obligations—and hole up in the woods. In any case, very few of us want the pure solitude that Thoreau seems to be advocating when he writes, “I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

It's the rare person whose ideal of home is a cabin for one in a neighborhood without neighbors. Part of what's always been special and invigorating about the typical home is that it makes solitude available
within
the context of the larger social environment. It's an intermittent respite, a space into which one retreats briefly at regular intervals, to emerge later refreshed.

Today there's another factor that makes Thoreau's approach seem not just unappealing but downright pointless. Even if we wanted to run away physically from society, in a digital world there's no place to go. With ubiquitous mobile connectivity, you can't use geography to escape what he called society, because it's everywhere. If you have a screen of any
kind with you—and who doesn't these days?—you haven't left society at all.

But to dismiss Thoreau for these reasons is to miss the whole point of
Walden
and its relevance to our time. In fact, he wasn't trying to escape civilization, and what he created at Walden Pond was not even close to pure solitude. As for ubiquitous technology, it's true that the world was a lot less connected in the middle of the nineteenth century than it is today. However, Thoreau lived through a major technological shift, the arrival of instant communication, that foreshadowed the current one. The woods weren't wireless in his era, but for the first time in history they were getting
wired
, and the wires were carrying information around the world at unimaginable speeds. Thoreau saw the enormous human implications of this change, and he structured the Walden experiment so that it spoke not just to his own time but to the technological future he saw coming.

In a world where it's increasingly hard to escape the crowd, can you still build a refuge, a place to go inward and reclaim all the things that a too-busy life takes away? Thoreau says you can, and he offers a practical construct for making it happen.
Walden
can serve as a philosophical guidebook to the tricky challenges of twenty-first-century domestic life, including the matter of connected kitchen walls. The quickest way “home” in a digital world is to follow Thoreau.

 

F
IRST, HOWEVER, IT'S
necessary to correct a few misimpressions, beginning with the idea that Thoreau was trying to escape society. Walden Pond was not exactly Antarctica. It was just a mile and a quarter from the town of Concord, where Thoreau grew up and spent nearly all of his life after college. To him, the world of Concord
was
society in the most
immediate sense, and when he speaks in
Walden
about the harried lives of his contemporaries—“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”—he was thinking especially about his friends and neighbors. He refers to them often, collectively and individually; they are his chief source of real-life examples, the evidence for his diagnosis of society's ills. Despite the hell-is-other-people statements he sometimes tossed off, he saw those people frequently while at Walden. For a famous recluse, he had an unusually active social life, which he describes in a chapter called “Visitors.” Though the cabin was only ten by fifteen feet, he entertained as many thirty people there at one time—hardly a hermit's life.

Moreover, when the twenty-seven-year-old Henry moved to Walden in the summer of 1845, the railroad, which was society in motion, came with him. A brand-new track had just been laid connecting Concord to Boston and the rest of the world, and it ran right beside the pond. He could see and hear the trains from his place. The railroad wasn't just a visual and aural symbol of civilization, it was a dynamic reminder of how technology was making the world much smaller in the middle of the nineteenth century. In today's terms, it would be like building your rustic retreat in the woods beside the runaway of an international airport. If he really wanted to escape society, Thoreau could have done much better. He liked to go on wilderness trips around New England and certainly knew more remote places.

He went to Walden because that's where the opportunity presented itself. The owner of the land was Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Concord philosopher who was his mentor and friend, and the location made practical sense in a number of ways. He was going to be very busy in this endeavor, writing, growing vegetables for both meals and income, working at other odd jobs to support himself, and keeping house. For
logistical reasons it would be far easier to do all this close to town, where he knew everyone and where there were stores, a post office, and other conveniences.