Hamlet's BlackBerry (5 page)

At those times, I'd been a castaway washed up on a desert island, a digital Robinson Crusoe. And in classic castaway fashion, now that I was rescued, I saw in retrospect that there had been something very special about my island.
Life was different
in disconnected mode. The easier it became to stay connected, the more I thought about this other, different way of being and started longing for it.

I first noticed it on airplanes. Cell phone use has long been prohibited on commercial flights, and at that time there was still no airborne Internet service. Boarding one of those disconnected flights was like passing through a wormhole into another dimension where time moved differently. Buckling into my seat, I felt my mind relax as I was liberated from a burden I didn't even know I'd been carrying. It was the burden of my busy, connected life. The burden of always knowing that everyone everywhere is just a few clicks away.

The limitlessness of digital life is thrilling, but it's also unsettling, in two important ways. First, the hours we spend flitting constantly among tasks train us to treat our time and our attention as infinitely divisible commodities. On a screen, it's easy to jam more busyness into each moment, so that is exactly what we do. Eventually the mind falls into a mode of thinking, a kind of nervous rhythm that's inherently about finding new
stimuli, new jobs to perform. This carries over into the rest of our lives; even when we're away from screens, it's hard for our minds to stop clicking around and come to rest.

At some point, I noticed that it had become hard for me to stay focused on a single task of any kind, mental or physical, without adding new ones. While brushing my teeth, I would wander out of the bathroom in search of something else to do at the same time. I'd be organizing my sock drawer with one hand while trying to reach my wisdom teeth with the other, and even then I could feel myself craving still another job. The digital consciousness can't tolerate three minutes of pure focus.

The second unsettling aspect of this is philosophical. The more we connect, the more our thoughts lean outward. There's a preoccupation with what's going on “out there” in the bustling otherworld, rather than “in here” with yourself and those right around you. What was once exterior and faraway is now easily accessible, and this carries a sense of obligation or duty. When you can reach out and touch the whole world, a part of you guiltily feels you
should
be reaching out. Who's waiting to hear from me? Is the boss wondering why I haven't responded?

In addition, outwardness offers something more potent than mere duty: self-affirmation, demonstrable evidence of one's existence and impact on the world. In less connected times, human beings were forced to shape their own interior sense of identity and worth—to become self-sufficient. By virtue of its interactivity, the digital medium is a source of constant confirmation that, yes, you do indeed exist and matter. However, the external validation provided by incoming messages and the number of times one's name appears in search results is not as trustworthy or stable as the kind that comes from inside. Thus we're forced to go back again and
again for verification. Who dropped my name? Who's read my latest post? Are there any comments on my comments? Who's paying attention to me now?

Up in an airplane without wireless, all of that receded. The world of endless potential tasks was gone, and so too was that feeling of compulsory, needy outwardness. What was special about those flights was the very thing I had long tried to avoid, involuntary disconnectedness. Though air travel is miserable in so many ways—and at six foot five, I'm no fan of the Torquemada-inspired seats of economy class—I actually started looking forward to it. Here was a rare respite from my connected life. Existence was reined in, reduced to just me and my immediate surroundings, the other passengers, the cup of tea on the tray table, the words on my notebook screen. I got some of my best thinking and writing done on those flights. And down on the toolbar at the bottom of the screen, was a constant reminder of why: the red
X
over the wireless icon, for no signal.

 

N
OW, PLOWING THROUGH
the water with a lifeless cell phone in my pocket, I'm having the same sensation. It's bracing being out here all by myself, with nothing to distract me from the task at hand. In fact, there
is
no task at hand other than getting back to my mooring. Not only can nobody reach me, but, just as amazing, I can't click a few buttons and create busywork for myself. If my phone were working right now, I'd be on it with my wife, Martha, saying I'd be home in twenty minutes, though she really doesn't need to know that. I'd tell her about how I'd fallen in the drink, and we'd have a laugh about it.

After years of being so connected, I'm used to sharing all thoughts and experiences impulsively, in the moment, with
everyone and anyone who comes to mind. Why
not
, when they're all around you? I've forgotten that some information is like wine: it gets better if you let it rest for a while.

I'm steering with one finger, watching the seabirds dive for breakfast.
Oh, what a beautiful morning, oh, what a beautiful day.
Okay, I'm not actually singing, but I could be. Could this sudden ebullience be all about a dead cell phone? No, I'm happy first and foremost because I'm out on the water on a nice spring day. But there's a special quality to this mood, a looseness in the way thoughts and feelings come and go, and even in how my body feels. It's a
happier
kind of happiness that reminds me of those early tastes of independence in the old pre-digital world. The little self-help book was right—
what fresh air we breathe when we take possession of our own separateness, our own integrity!

 

L
IKE MANY OTHERS
, I'd been dutifully toeing the line, allowing digital connectedness to reshape my life without asking if it was the kind of life I really wanted. The more connected I was, the busier I became attending to all the people, information, and tasks that the devices bring within our reach. And this had two distinctly negative effects. First, as the gaps between my digital tasks disappeared, so did the opportunities for depth. Screen life became more rushed and superficial, a nonstop mental traffic jam. Second, because I was spending so much time in the digital sphere, I was less able to enjoy my own company and the places and people right around me.

The same tool that added depth to my experience was taking it away. It was only when the tool was rendered useless that I felt the balance shifting back. When my phone died, a space opened up between me and the rest of the world, and in that space my mind was able to settle down. It was an accidental
version of the place I went to after calling my mother and a reminder of how important that place is. I was myself again that morning, free in a way I seldom felt free anymore. What larks!

Yet the opposite message was coming from all directions: Connect! Connect! A revolution was under way and people were sleeping on sidewalks to be in the vanguard. Standing at a crosswalk in midtown Manhattan one day waiting for the light to change, I realized that the eight or ten other pedestrians standing around me were
all
staring into screens. Here they were in the heart of one of the greatest cities in the history of civilization, surrounded by a rich array of sights, sounds, and faces, and they were running away from it all, blocking it out.

When a crowd adopts a point of view en masse, all critical thinking effectively stops. The maximalist dogma is particularly difficult to challenge because it's all about joining the crowd, so it's self-reinforcing. There was an inexorability to it, a sense that if you didn't hop on the digital bandwagon and stay there, you'd be left behind. The industry study I mentioned earlier, which predicted a vast migration of the human species to hyperconnected living, included this stern warning to the global business community: “Enterprises will either manage this migration or get trampled.” Who wants to be trampled? Besides, the technologies
are
remarkable. To have doubts felt retrograde, like throwing in one's lot with the technology pessimists, casting a vote against the future.

Our own perceptions and feelings are rarely as peculiar as we think. The lonely thought you had at 3
A.M
. turns out to be everyone else's lonely thought, you just didn't know it at the time. Once I started to question my own maximalist tendencies, I began seeing evidence that I wasn't alone. In the news outlets I habitually follow, the same ones that cheered the revolution and promoted digital devices as saviors, stories about the burdens of overconnectedness appeared with
increasing frequency. They weren't bannered across the top of the front page or leading the newscast. You had to look for them in the back pages, scroll down, or wait for the second half of the show. Typically, there would be some new study or survey indicating that screen life was taking a previously unrecognized toll. Some of these reports were intriguing enough that I clicked around and found the source material, which tended to be sketchy and inconclusive. Still, the point was that others were noticing what I was noticing.

Problems were turning up in three different but overlapping places: (1) in the interior lives of individuals, where experts were describing psychological and emotional disturbances far more serious than what I'd experienced; (2) in family and personal relationships, where screen time has been replacing face time; and (3) in businesses and other organizations, where distracted workers are hurting the bottom line. Let's take them one at a time.

From the earliest days of computers, there have been worries about the effects these technologies would have on the human mind. Back in the early 1970s, the futurist Alvin Toffler coined the term “information overload” to capture what he believed would happen to the human consciousness as connective technologies brought the world to our mental doorstep. In the last decade, the phrase has gained new currency, mainly through media reports about novel psychological conditions and behaviors that some experts attribute to digital overload. They include attention deficit trait, a malady related to the like-named bane of modern childhood. According to Edward Hallowell, the psychiatrist who first described it, ADT is “like a traffic jam in your mind.” Symptoms include “distractability, restlessness, a sense of ‘gotta go, gotta rush, gotta run around' and impulsive decision-making, because you have so many things to do.”

Many other conditions have been linked to overload, including continuous partial attention, defined as the state of mind in which “most of one's attention is on a primary task, but where one is also monitoring several background tasks just in case something more important or interesting comes up.” E-mail apnea, meanwhile, is “a form of shallow breathing while checking email that, in some extreme cases, leads to an increase in stress-related disease.” There's also Internet addiction disorder and, at the comic end of the spectrum, nomophobia, “the fear of being out of mobile phone contact.”

New, snappily named disorders are always suspicious, crafted as they often are to pull in the very media coverage in which we learn about them. For our purposes, whether they really exist as discrete phenomena is beside the point. What the media serve up each day, more than anything, is an X-ray of the collective consciousness, which is just the sum of our individual hopes and fears. When crime rates are a worry, the headlines are full of serial killers. When global climate change first entered public awareness, every big storm was a symptom. Likewise, this rash of alleged digital neuroses reflects the concern just about everyone now feels about the relentless pull of the screen. Putting a scientific-sounding name on it, however contrived, is a way of feeling in control. As with crime and climate change, this doesn't mean the underlying problem is illusory. Nomophobia may sound funny, but the challenge of the new busyness couldn't be more real.

 

T
HE INTERIOR STRUGGLE
is having a dramatic impact in our personal and family relationships. If we've learned anything in the last decade about technology and human interaction, it's that as screen time rises, direct human-to-human interaction falls off proportionally. We encounter this truth every day in
the small moments when our relatedness to others is interrupted and fractured by technology. The conversation broken off by another person's telephone ringing. The voice that trails away as eyes and brain tunnel into a screen.

It's annoying when you're the victim, but then, don't you do the same thing yourself? You're in a real place with someone who means a great deal to you, say, having lunch with a close friend or colleague or reading a book to a child. To all appearances, you're present and fully engaged. But your attention is provisional, awaiting the next summons from beyond. A faint vibration or beep is all it takes, and off you go.

I'd seen this phenomenon so often in my own family life, I'd given it a name—the Vanishing Family Trick. We're all together in the living room after dinner, the three of us plus two cats and a dog, enjoying one another's company. Our house is very old and snug, and the living room, a former stable with age-darkened paneling and exposed beams, is ideal for this kind of togetherness. In the winter we move the furniture closer to the fireplace, so it's even cozier. It's a natural place to hang out.

Here's what happens next: Somebody excuses themselves for a bathroom visit or a glass of water and doesn't return. Five minutes later, another of us exits on a similarly mundane excuse along the lines of “I have to check something.” The third, now alone, soon follows, leaving just the animals, who, if they can think about such things, must be wondering what suddenly became of a splendid gathering that had barely gotten under way. Where have all the humans gone?