The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection (4 page)

• • • • •

We carry around in our heads the final version of certain stories. Like this one:

I remember that final blithe summer of 1999 when I—like so many others—embarked on the last trip I’d ever take without a cell phone. Hiking for months through England’s Lake District and island hopping across the Scottish Hebrides, I was oblivious to the fact that I would never experience such splendid isolation again. Never again would I be so completely cut off from work, from family, from friends. And yet, nineteen years old and living happily off apples and beer, I didn’t think it was the end of anything. So, I told myself, this is my life at last, the beginning of my real life.

I was in league, in my little way, with Henry David Thoreau:

Not till we are lost
, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

Like Thoreau, and like any number of young people who then would trek out after high school with no guide but the
Lonely Planet
in their pack, I wanted to get lost. I was in search of absence. I felt that it wasn’t networking I needed, but a connection to some deep source that I could not describe for myself yet intuitively felt was there beyond the busy prescriptions of school. My days were largely filled with walks down silent paths and across wild fields I never knew the names for. In the evenings, I would discuss movies and politics with strangers at some village pub, then happily tramp across a darkening sea of heather.

That heather—the hills and hills of its rustling color. One night, a man with a craggy face invited me to stay on and learn to make thatched roofs from the stuff, be his apprentice, spend my life picking heather in the morning and weaving it into watertight mats in the afternoon. At two in the morning I told him I would; but by dawn my saner self took over, and I left for Heathrow and home.

Flip forward fourteen years. . . . Today, the world’s atmosphere heaves with signals from more than six billion cell phones. I’m writing these words on a worn wooden bench in a train station’s lounge in the Canadian city of Winnipeg. I’m chewing on a Styrofoam cup of coffee, scratching at a head of graying hair. Across from me are four teenagers in depressingly expensive T-shirts, making furious use of the two-hour e-mail break we have, here in the city. (I elected to train across the country, sampling brief patches of Internet abstinence in the signal-free wildernesses of Canada’s glacial mountains and staring plains.) These kids are all about the age I was when I first had a broken heart, when my hair was chestnut brown and I might have become a heather picker. They mumble to one another, friendly enough, but mostly it is their phones that grip their various attentions.

According to research by Nielsen
, the average teenager now manages upward of four thousand text messages every month, so these youths sitting before me must work fast, I suppose, to reach their daily quota. What strikes me, though, is the utter solicitude with which they grip at, gaze at, graze at, their devices. It is the sort of rapt attention normally reserved for babes in arms. Certainly older people may spend half their lives in similar thrall, but I’ve been thinking about my halcyon days in the British countryside this morning, so the phone-leashed youths make me wince.

I think of the lives these digital natives—who have known nothing but an online world—are crafting for themselves, the lives that are being crafted for them. These youths, as bright and eager and ready for life as we all were, have the opportunity to inhabit two worlds: one digital, one corporeal; they could transit between the two. But I wonder which they will cling to as life barrels over them—when they fall in love, when they lose a parent. And which world might they let go of? Young and old, we’re all straddling two realities to a certain degree. In our rush toward the promise of Google and Facebook—toward the promise of reduced ignorance and reduced loneliness—we feel certain we are rushing toward a better life. We forget the myriad accommodations we made along the way.

An announcement echoes senselessly around the train station, and one of the teenagers looks up from her phone; she catches me staring. She holds my gaze for a moment, with the narrowing expression of a woman who is used to being looked at. I smile across the lounge and she rolls her eyes, as though to say, “You
wish
.” She returns to her phone.

Human brains are exquisitely evolved
to adapt to the environment in which they’re placed. It follows that if the environment is changing in an unprecedented way, then the changes too will be unprecedented. . . . So the fear I have is not with the technology per se, but the way it’s used by the native mind.

—Susan Greenfield in
The
New York Times

I
find myself at that troubling time of life when one’s friends proceed—without asking permission—to have children. These offspring are pleasant and worthwhile things, I’m sure, but they’re also expert dismantlers of conversation. I’m speaking here of the sustained and “deep” conversations my group thought we would continue to enjoy long after the conclusion of our university days. Only five years ago, we would stay up late drinking bad coffee and arguing about the banality of evil. Tonight, after a brisk dinner of pasta at one friend’s home, I find myself on the floor with a couple of toddlers, debating the relative merits of
My Little Pony
. The rest of the party is also grounded. We are reduced to the common denominator of infanthood. We pass toy trucks to the children, receive discarded socks in return, quaff some half-decent Shiraz, and end up, inevitably, lying on our bellies trying to wrest the attention of an infant away from his iPad. The tablet glows and we do not.

I was amazed the other night to discover that the iPad is a sedative as well as a stimulant. My nephew Benjamin was fussing at a restaurant until his father produced the tablet from a diaper bag and placed it before his son: instant calm. I silently disapproved of the tactic, as only the childless could. And his dad gave me a guilty shrug as if to say, “It’s awful, but it works.” We carried on with our dinner in peace. (The iPad works as a laxative, too: CTA Digital released its iPotty in 2013, a toilet for toddlers with a stand for their tablets, to ensure entertaining poops.)

Tonight, young Benjamin falls upon a print magazine that has been abandoned on the floor (a chunky issue of
Vanity Fair
). I watch his two-year-old eyes scan the glossy cover, which shines less fiercely than the iPad he is used to but has a faint luster of its own. And then I watch his pudgy thumb and index finger pinch together and spread apart on Bradley Cooper’s smiling mug. He continues this action a few times, and it dawns on me that he’s attempting to zoom in. At last, Benjamin looks over at me, flummoxed and frustrated, as though to say, “This thing’s broken.”

At thirty-three, I suddenly find myself positioned against “kids these days.” To my disappointment, the sentiment smacks only a little of self-satisfaction; mostly it feels like informed foreboding.
Kids these days,
I hear myself say in an ironic interior voice. And then I realize I don’t feel ironic about the sentiment at all. “Kids these days,” I say out loud, taking the magazine from under Benjamin’s arm and slowly, manually, turning the pages for him.

It was one of those
no, really
moments. No, really, this child is a step away from assuming that the world is one cohesive digital technology; one step away from assuming that such technology is inherent
in
the material world—a natural, spontaneous part of it. He’ll grow up thinking about the Internet with the same nonchalance that I hold toward my toaster and teakettle. Why shouldn’t he think of these technologies as a constant, a given, when he has been bathed so persistently in the cool electric glow of LED light?

Back at home, my partner, Kenny, wisely pads off to bed as I stay up, discovering a slew of videos online featuring babies and toddlers experiencing the same confusion as Benjamin. Search YouTube for “baby” and “iPad” and you’ll find clips featuring one-year-olds attempting to manipulate magazine pages and television screens as though they were touch-sensitive displays. And this with hands that cannot yet grip a crayon. Of
course
toddlers think everything’s touch-sensitive, says Kenny the next morning over cereal. Our brains are engineered to work with assumptions about the tools we use. A plastic switch is always going to activate a lightbulb when flicked; a window will safely slide open when pushed. If our brains didn’t make these assumptions, he reminds me, we wouldn’t get very far.

I sigh for effect, wondering about Kenny’s neuroscience credentials, and outside the window, on cue, a set of phone-leashed children go marching softly by. I can resist all I like, but for Benjamin’s generation resistance is moot. The revolution is already complete.

• • • • •

Naturally, the young lead the charge.
As early as 2010
, the Kaiser Foundation found that eight- to eighteen-year-olds were devoting seven hours and thirty-eight minutes each day to their devices.
Of course those youths, expert multitaskers
, are often consuming more than one media at a time; when teens work on their homework, in fact, a full two-thirds of them are multitasking. If need be, they can simultaneously text, watch music videos, groom their Facebook page, and play
Call of Duty,
all while polishing up an essay on
Hamlet
. All told, at least 29 percent of media exposure among teenagers involves multitasking. (That most dubious of digital age virtues is looked at more closely in chapter 6.) When this multitasking is accounted for, the media consumption rate among youths rises to a total of ten hours and forty-five minutes each day. Five years earlier, that number sat at eight hours and thirty-three minutes; five years before that, it was seven hours and twenty-nine minutes. The difference in activity between one generation and the next is stark: Nielsen research from 2013 found that the average American adult sends and receives
764 text messages each month
, a fraction of the several thousand managed by their teenage children. There is, though, one kind of media that youths are consuming less of. Printed books, magazines, and newspapers are dropping from their hands. It is the sole form of media consumption that is waning.
⁴

The numbers are impressive. However, to really see how kids resort to their devices, you need to stake out a miserable, badly lit environment where they’re trapped and bored. A doctor’s office works. But buses are my preferred observational venue. Today I rode one from downtown Vancouver to the suburbs and had an excellent sighting. One boy—perhaps sixteen years old—was sitting, broad-legged and depressed, staring into his own crotch, where he gripped his little glowing phone. When another teenager boarded the bus and sat opposite the first, it was clear that this new youth recognized the other. He smiled at the boy for a moment but then, unable to gain his attention, returned his gaze to his own phone. I watched (slyly, I hope) while the two boys proceeded to message each other, back and forth, for the remainder of their bus ride. About halfway through this engagement, the first boy looked up from a text and laughed at the second boy, who had clearly just texted a “reveal” to the first. But the pair did not proceed to have a face-to-face conversation after this revelation. They reverted to their phones and kept texting back and forth, occasionally giggling and offering shy smiles at each other across the aisle. When we don’t want to be alone and yet don’t want the hassle that fellow humans represent either, the digital filter is an ideal compromise.

Another telling bus sighting: two girls sharing earbuds as they travel. They smile, share their music, play videos for each other; the phone becomes an intersection for their mutual affection. Like the boys, these girls enjoy a constant connection while their device serves as the ultimate party host, the ultimate bonding agent. Have these people found ways to expand their understanding, reduce their estrangement, and produce happier, more fulfilled lives? Or have they simply accommodated themselves to their void-filling tools?

• • • • •

The smartphone is itself a far, far safer friend than a messy, unpredictable human. Far less frightening to deal with and less likely to suffer from mood swings or halitosis. Our solicitous relationship with our phones can seem a creepy kind of attachment, but we forget that this tender love for handheld electronics is not so new a thing. We’ve been bonding in truly affectionate ways with interactive computers for decades. In the late 1990s, robotic creatures called Tamagotchis and Furbies were sold to tens of millions of children. I myself played chess with a robotic chessboard in my lonely bedroom as a child (and was duly gratified by its lack of gloating each time it bested me), but I was just old enough to miss the wave of truly compelling robo-friends. Part of me wonders whether it was this dodge that left me feeling so different from people even a few years younger than me. My younger cousins all carried Tamagotchis and Furbies to school; they constantly monitored what, at the time, seemed to be sophisticated, emotional machines that begged for care and got it. (Hold a Furby upside down and it will cry, “Me scared!”) Much as I liked my automatic chessboard, I never learned to love it.

Sherry Turkle, the director of MIT’s Initiative on Technology and Self, documents hundreds of interviews with children who have bonded with robots and other technologies in her book
Alone Together
. She paints a compelling picture of an emerging population more at ease with technologies than with one another. The phone is easy, people are hard. But even then, it’s texting that is acceptable since voice-to-voice phone conversations have too many potential pitfalls. Text messages, even if they lack subtle intonation, are discreet and controllable. And that’s a trade-off we’re eager to make. “We have to be concerned,” Turkle concludes, “that the simplification and reduction of relationship is no longer something we complain about.
It may become what we expect
, even desire.”

And how we do desire those reductions. As our phones banish the wide-open possibilities of boredom, they deliver a strict context that lets us moor ourselves in an ocean of distraction that would otherwise drown us. Those teenage boys on the bus have found in their phones some intense friendships, but with the kinds of friends that demand obedience. Our “contacts” become ordered by the phone’s own software, and the portal to those ordered contacts (as opposed to actual people) becomes a larger locus of attention. Perhaps this abstracting of “contacts” is reflective of a larger shift?
A University of Michigan metastudy
released in the summer of 2010 compiled data from seventy-two studies conducted between 1979 and 2009, all geared toward monitoring levels of empathy among American college students; the metastudy found that today’s youths were scoring 40 percent lower than their earlier counterparts. Meanwhile, a 2013 metastudy out of San Diego University demonstrated
increased levels of narcissism
among youths. Certainly I’ve found that my own contact with friends becomes increasingly impersonal and less empathetic the more it’s filtered through the reductive emoticons and textual abbreviations of my phone.

When I consider the interpersonal skills inherent in digital natives who multitask a third of the time they’re supposed to be focusing on something, it often strikes me that the elder generation has enormous advantages. In my arrogance, I think to myself that nobody would want to hire an individual incapable of thinking in full sentences. The only significant advantage left to the young will be their youthful looks—their sex appeal—for which an older population will forgive very much. This, I tell myself with a shot of glee, will fade. And then what will a constantly distracted fifty-year-old really bring to the table, except a facility with the technology that made him or her that way? But that, of course, is a fantasy; that fifty-year-old will be a multitasker in a multitasking world. And my own idea of a work ethic will be outmoded.

No two generations in history have experienced such a highlighted cognitive dissonance, because never has change occurred at so rapid a pace. Look at the rate of penetration—the amount of time it takes for a new technology to be adopted by fifty million people.
Radio took thirty-eight years
to reach that mark; the telephone took twenty years; and television took thirteen. More recently, the World Wide Web took four years, Facebook took 3.6, Twitter took three, and the iPad took only two. Google Plus, which nobody even finds useful, took only eighty-eight days to be adopted by fifty million. The rate of technology absorption is stunning: Just one generation after the first cell phone call took place (in 1973), there are now
6.8 billion cell phone subscriptions
—nearing a 1:1 ratio with human beings. In South Korea, that number reaches
a sobering 99 percent saturation
. In some countries—Russia, China, and Brazil, for example—a third of the population maintains two cell phones. And
in China
(in a bid either for compartmentalized lives or to take advantage of multiple billing plans), a committed 6 percent of the population maintains three or more phones at all times.

What we’re witnessing is a kind of instant complicity, a massive and swift behavior shift. And so it may come to pass that a person disconnected from (or merely disinterested in) this flood of new technologies could, in a few years, be made entirely alien to a younger generation. Step out of a running stream and you cannot reenter the same water. I myself stepped away from video games for a decade and now I’m unable to reenter the fray. The latest games are nonsensical and manic to me, though people older than me—who never stepped out of the stream—are perfectly at ease, even thrilled, with the latest offerings.

• • • • •

Wariness about the way our technologies are shaping our thoughts, mutterings about “kids these days” and their gadgets, can be tracked back thousands of years. Most famous among the cranks is kindly Socrates, who was perhaps the first to wonder whether gadgets—in his case
letters
and
writing
—could change mental processes.