Hamlet's BlackBerry (6 page)

To their screens, of course. Where they always go these days. The digital crowd has a way of elbowing its way into everything, to the point where a family can't sit in a room together for half an hour without somebody, or everybody, peeling off.

What's lost in the process is so valuable, it can't be quantified. Isn't this what we live for, when you come down to it, time spent with other people, those moments that can't be translated into ones and zeros and replicated on a screen? Obviously, relationships are about more than being with others in the literal, bodily sense. They can be maintained and nurtured across great distances using all kinds of connective tools. For centuries letters served this function beautifully, allowing people to conduct elaborate, long-running dialogues that could be more intimate and affecting than in-person conversation.

E-mail plays an analogous role today, though we put less thought and care into e-mail messages than our ancestors often put into their letters. In e-mail programs the button to start a new message reads “Compose,” connoting a level of artistry that my e-mails don't deserve. I slam them out, one after another, rarely pausing to consider how well they read or even to correct typos. I read most of the e-mails I receive in the same way. The point is almost
not
to be thoughtful, not to pause and reflect. To eliminate the gaps.

The rushed, careless quality of screen communication is of a piece with the discounting of physical togetherness. When everyone is endlessly available, all forms of human contact begin to seem less special and significant. Little by little, companionship itself becomes a commodity, cheap, easily taken for granted. A person is just another person, and there are so many of those, blah, blah, blah. Why not flee the few of the living room for the many of the screen, where all relationships are flattened into one user-friendly mosaic, a human collage that's endlessly clickable and never demands your full attention?

Somewhere inside, we all know this isn't the path to happiness. My most cherished childhood memories, the ones that made me who I am and sustain me today, are about moments when a parent, grandparent, or somebody else I cared about
put everything and everyone else aside to be with
me alone
, to enter my little world and let me enter theirs. In the old Doors song “Break on Through (to the Other Side),” there's a line about finding a “country in your eyes.” We weren't visiting one another's countries much anymore—they were becoming foreign lands. As I watched the Vanishing Family Trick unfold and played my own part in it, I sometimes felt as if love itself, or the acts of heart and mind that constitute love, were being leached out of the house by our screens.

It's been happening for a long time now to families everywhere, and nobody seems to know how to stop it. Several years ago,
Time
magazine ran a cover story about children and technology that opened with this slice of life:

The gadgets and brand names change over time, but the tendency remains the same: away from the few and the near, toward the many and the far. Parents, the magazine concluded, should teach their kids “that there's life beyond the screen.” In fact, most parents don't need to be told that, and
many have been trying for years. They aren't having much success because our thinking has never gotten beyond the vague notion that “there's life” of some unspecified sort out there that's good for you, kid, trust us, and you'd better go find some now. This is the old eat-your-brussels-sprouts argument that's never worked for any generation, and it's a particularly weak approach to this problem.

Kids aren't stupid, and they're especially good at spotting double standards. Everything they see and hear around them tells them that the screen is where all the fun and action are and where they need to go to thrive and succeed. The occasional news report tut-tutting digital addiction can't undo a thousand others touting the new “must-have” gadget, the social network
everyone's
joining, and so on. Parents can lecture all day, but their moral authority is rooted in their own lives. What can Mom and Dad know about this alleged life beyond the screen if they themselves never go twenty minutes without a BlackBerry glance?

The Nielsen Company reported that in one three-month period, American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages each per month, which was more than twice as many as a year earlier. This was viewed as shocking news, seized on as the cause of rampant distraction in school, failing grades, and numerous other ills. What's far more shocking is that we were shocked at all.
Of course
children are texting like crazy. Of course they spend so much of the day huddled with screens, they're barely aware of the third dimension (true headline: “Teen Girl Falls in Open Manhole While Texting”) and increasingly unfamiliar with the natural world—nature-deficit disorder, it's now being called. This is how we grown-ups are teaching them to live, implicitly and explicitly, with a conviction they can't fail to miss.

Educator and writer Lowell Monke shared with his students
a troubling study that showed that many young people prefer to interact with machines rather than directly with human beings. The next day, one of the students sent him an e-mail explaining why this might be:

“In a society in which adults so commonly treat each other mechanically,” Monke writes, “perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that our youth are more attracted to machines.” We believe in our screens so much, we've placed them at the center of our lives, so why shouldn't they? If anything, the kids deserve merit badges for doing their best to emulate the values and norms of their community and their elders—to be more like us.

For years, conventional wisdom held it was the young, the so-called digital natives, who were leading the way into the connected future, with grown-ups reluctantly tagging along. This notion was based on hard statistics about relative technology usage by various age groups and an abundance of anecdotal evidence. Younger people are always comfortable with the new technologies of their own era because to them the devices aren't “new” in the way they are to those who can remember a world without them. Kids took digital screens in stride just as their parents took TV screens in stride decades earlier: the gadgets were there in front of them, and they did interesting things—what's the big deal? However, as with television fifty years ago, today's children didn't purchase the first screens they encountered as toddlers. This revolution was
started by grown-ups, and if many older people were initially slower to adopt the digital life wholesale, they've played an excellent game of catch-up. By 2009, people over thirty-five were driving the growth of then-cutting-edge digital tools such as Twitter, giving the lie to the youth paradigm.

In the end, this isn't about any one generation. The girl who sent 300,000 texts in a month didn't make the news because she was young or some kind of freak. She made the news because she represented, in slightly exaggerated fashion, how everyone, regardless of age, now lives. When you hear a middle-ager bellyaching that “these kids” don't make a move without their screens and barely know how to conduct a face-to-face conversation, they're really talking about themselves. We've all immersed ourselves in one very particular mode of connectedness, to the point of obsession and pulled away from all other modes. Why? Because to share time and space with others in the fullest sense, you have to disconnect from the global crowd. You have to create one of those gaps where thoughts, feelings, and relationships take root. And for a good maximalist, there's nothing worse than a gap.

 

I
F THERE'S ANYWHERE
one would expect maximalism to have no downside whatsoever, it's in the most outward dimension of life, the bustling world of work and business. The free-market society is itself an ingenious form of connectedness, one in which the goal is to sell goods, services, and ideas to as many people as possible and reap the rewards. To thrive in the marketplace, businesses and other organizations are constantly seeking competitive advantages, in technology above all. From the start of the digital age, it's been management gospel that an office can't be too connected. The more wired an organization and its workers are, to each other and the world
beyond, the better positioned they are to compete and thrive. In other words, the pursuit of excellence requires the pursuit of connectedness.

Lately, however, it's become clear that it's not so simple. What's true in our individual lives and families is equally true in the workplace: the tool that giveth also taketh away. Once again, it all comes down to what digital busyness does to the mind. These gadgets are adept at performing various different tasks simultaneously and switching quickly among them. As I wrote this sentence on my laptop, for instance, in addition to the word-processing document I was focused on, there were seven other applications open, plus dozens of internal processes working in the background. When I clicked away briefly from this text just now to check my e-mail, the computer deftly made the switch, and just as deftly switched back. One second it was crisply displaying my words as I typed them, the next it was showing me what was in my inbox, and then (since the e-mail I was waiting for hadn't arrived) it returned immediately to the words, with no perceptible loss in performance.

The human mind can also juggle tasks, of course, which explains why you can sit in a café and read a book, taste the coffee you just sipped, and hear the pleasant music playing in the background, all at the same time. However, we can only
really
pay attention to one thing at a time. If the book is gripping, the music will fade into the background of your consciousness, and you'll forget to sip the coffee, discovering a half hour later that it's gone cold. And, unlike computers, when we switch tasks—either by choice or because we're suddenly interrupted—it takes time for our minds to surface and focus on the interruption, and then still more time to return to the original task and refocus on
that
.

Psychologists tell us that when you abandon a mental task to attend to an interruption, your emotional and cognitive
engagement with the main task immediately begins to decay, and the longer and more distracting the interruption, the harder it is to reverse this process. By some estimates, recovering focus can take ten to twenty times the length of the interruption. So a one-minute interruption could require fifteen minutes of recovery time. And that's only if you go right back to the original task; jam other tasks in between and the recovery time lengthens further.

Returning to the café, let's say that while you're reading that great book, a friend stops by to say hi. Just as you begin chatting, your phone rings and you ask the friend to hold on a second while you answer it. As you're taking the call, the waitress interrupts and asks if you want a refill. While she's holding the carafe over your mug awaiting an answer, the café's fire alarm goes off. In a matter of minutes, you've gone from three potential objects of interest (book, music, coffee), with one squarely at the center, to seven potential objects (book, music, coffee, friend, phone, waitress, fire alarm), with
none
at the center. Satisfying immersion has given way to unsatisfying confusion. Even when things have calmed down again, the spell is broken and you might as well forget about the book.

What does this have to do with offices and technology? These two café scenarios represent what's happened to the American workplace in the last several decades, as screens have added countless tasks and distractions to every cubicle. The office worker of 1970 had numerous responsibilities and tools to manage, including multiline telephones that had to be answered when they rang because there was no voice mail. Still, it was a relatively disconnected world, and the array of competing tasks was much smaller than it is today. So it was easier to choose one and stay with it, while others waited quietly in the background. Today, thanks to our screens, as we work we're constantly contending with far more tasks than our
minds can handle. We find it increasingly hard to concentrate on any one of them for more than a few minutes. It's estimated that unnecessary interruptions and consequent recovery time now eat up an average of 28 percent of the working day. In cubicles everywhere, daily existence now mirrors the book-music-coffee-friend-phone-waitress-fire-alarm onslaught, all the time.

When it's happening live, the seemingly harmless journey from click to click to click, it doesn't feel all that significant. You look away from what you're doing every five minutes to check the inbox—so what? To grasp why it matters, you have to think not so much about what we're doing when we click as what we're not doing. In the first place, we're not working as efficiently as we could, because of the time that's wasted as we lose and then regain focus over and over. Digital work appears to happen at lightning speed, but only because we conflate the speed of our gadgets with the speed of our thoughts. In fact, it's the way screens allow us to shift rapidly
among
tasks that winds up slowing down our execution of the tasks themselves, due to the recovery problem. It's a false efficiency, a grand illusion.