Ultimately, human experience is not about what happens to most people, it’s about what happens to each of us, hour by hour and moment by moment. Rather than using the general as a route to the particular, sometimes we need to take exactly the opposite approach. This is especially true when the question is the quality of our lives. In recent years, there’s been a tremendous fascination with crowd thinking and behavior. The digital crowd not only has power, we’re told, it also has wisdom.
Watching the crowd can certainly tell you which way popular tastes are heading and who’s buying which products at any given moment. This isn’t wisdom at all, however, but what’s commonly known as “smarts,” that canny ability to read the landscape that serves one well in stock picking, gambling, and other short-term pursuits. Every crowd is just a collection of individual selves, and to understand what’s happening to those selves right now, we all have instant, no-password access to the most reliable source of all. Our own lives can teach us things that no data set ever can, if we’d just pay attention to them.
To help you think about your own connected life, I’m going to begin with two stories from mine. The first is about the urge to connect to others through screens—where does it come from, and why is it so urgent? The second is about the opposite impulse, the desire to disconnect. My experiences won’t be exactly like yours. I offer these stories as illustrations of the conflicting drives so many of us are feeling lately, in our own particular ways. What we haven’t figured out is how to reconcile these drives or whether they even can be reconciled. It’s the conundrum at the heart of the digital age, and in order to solve it, we first need to see it up close, in the granular details of the everyday.
Chapter Two
HELLO, MOTHER
The Magic of Screens
I’m in my car driving to my mother’s house. She lives about two hours from me and close to one of those small-city airports where it’s easy to park out front, the lines are short, and the security people are friendly. When I travel for work, I try to book my flights out of that airport and I get to visit my mother on both ends of the trip. This time I’m catching an evening flight, and she’s cooking dinner.
As usual, I got a late start and won’t be arriving anywhere near the time she’s expecting me, so I need to call her to say I’ll be late. I wait for a stretch of empty highway where it feels safe to look away for a few seconds. I open my mobile phone and hit the 4 key, which is programmed with her home number.* A photo of my mother appears on the screen, a head-and-shoulders shot that I took months ago with the phone’s camera. I later selected it as her ID photo, so it comes up automatically when I call her or she calls me.
I really like this image of her, and I contemplate it for a moment before putting the phone to my ear. She’s wearing a pink-and-white-striped sweater and looking up at the lens with a certain cat-that-swallowed-the-canary expression she always gets just before bursting into a laugh. She laughs a lot, so this is a characteristic look for her. In other words, the photo captures something essential about my mother.
When she answers, I tell her I’m on my way but running a little behind. She chuckles knowingly. We’ve had this conversation so many times, it’s Kabuki now and we both know our parts. She says she’ll hold dinner and why don’t I call again when I’m twenty minutes away? I agree to do this and tell her I can’t wait to see her. We sign off.
I take the phone from my ear, glance again at the photo, then hit “END” and watch it disappear. Driving along, I feel an unexpected surge of emotion. I’m thinking about how fun it always is to spend time with my mother, how lucky I was to be born to such a warm, companionable person. Lately I’ve noticed shades of her humor in my son, and I wonder now if he somehow inherited that from her. Have they isolated a gene for good-naturedness?
As the minutes pass and I drive along, these thoughts about my mother flow into new ones. In my consciousness, the smile from the photo merges with the pine woods on either side of the highway and the jazz playing on the radio, beamed down from a satellite miles above the earth. Memories rise up out of nowhere and flit around me in the car. They’re not specific memories of particular events but rather scenes in which I see my mother doing normal, habitual things. In the video archive of the mind, these would be the generic clips I’ve filed under “Mom.” There she is walking across a lawn. Sitting under a beach umbrella with a book. Talking to someone at a party. Holding her sides as she breaks up over a funny story. For a while, the car is a floating cloud of filial affection and, well, joy. It’s extraordinary, this feeling of time out of time. Everything dreary and confusing about my quotidian life has dropped away. I’m not the rushed, cornered, inadequate creature I often feel like. I’m absorbed in these memories, which seem to come from a place both beyond me and deep inside me, as if far and near, outward and inward, have come together in a new harmony.
My mother and I are no longer connected in the literal sense, as we were minutes earlier. Yet I’m feeling a connection to her that is stronger than the one we had when we were actually chatting. Even as I enjoy this, I find myself thinking about the tool that engendered it, the unprepossessing, low-end clamshell-style phone now sitting dormant in the cupholder. How did it do that?
THIS EXPERIENCE IS a microscopic example of life in the early twenty-first century, just one digital connection out of the billions that now transpire every day. However, if we step back and examine it a little more closely, there are certain basic elements that figure in just about every connection and in everyone’s connected experience.
First, notice that it all began with an utterly practical need. I was running late for an appointment, and I needed to notify the person who was expecting me. In this sense, it doesn’t matter that that person was my mother. I was using my mobile phone to perform a simple, utilitarian task. The call represents all the useful tasks our screens enable each day, not just in family and private life but in the working world and everywhere else.
Not so many years ago, this particular useful task would have required a lot more time and effort. I would have had to stop the car and find a landline pay phone, probably at a gas station or a highway rest stop, where it would have been necessary to pull over, park, and get out of the car. The phone, in all likelihood a grimy, graffiti-smeared affair, would have required coins or a phone card, meaning more time and bother. The whole cumbersome process would have cost me at least ten minutes, making me that much later for dinner. Instead, I hit one button, instantly reached the party I needed to reach, and accomplished my goal without losing a minute of drive time.
This was not an earthshaking achievement. The trouble and time I saved weren’t valuable to anyone but me and my mother, and even then, ten minutes is hardly a big deal. Yet it was the very triviality of it, paradoxically enough, that made it meaningful. Life is full of tiny moments like this one. Need to find somebody’s address? Order a pizza? Copy a colleague on that memo you wrote yesterday to the vice president for sales? Find out how you did on the math test? Pay a bill? Check the weather? Many of the tasks that we use our computers and cell phones to accomplish are mundane and, by themselves, seemingly insignificant. But taken together, they add up to something very important.
After all, we spend most of our time and energy on the practical side of life, the ceaseless flow of routine tasks performed all through the day. And there’s little choice in that matter. Before you can get on to the more consequential tasks you really care about, you have to take care of the small stuff. If you don’t pay the mortgage, you won’t have a house to shelter you and your loved ones. If you don’t book the tickets and renew your passport, the dream vacation will never happen. If you don’t check your work inbox regularly, there goes your brilliant career. In effect, our highest goals and dreams, everything we’re shooting for in life, is riding on our ability to plow through those practical to-do items as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Though ten minutes is a paltry gain, when you multiply it by the n
umber of practical tasks performed in a typical day, the potential savings in time and energy are considerable. This is the first and most basic reason why, in the last two decades, human beings have embraced digital technologies and reorganized their lives around them. And why it makes good sense that we have done so. Computers and smart phones make it much easier to accomplish the small workaday jobs that are the foundation, the sine qua non, of our larger lives and ambitions.
Our culture reminds us every day how useful these devices are, and exhorts us to take advantage of this by making sure we are as digitally connected as current technology allows. “Get Connected!” urges the cover of Parade magazine, one of the more reliable windows into the mind of middle America. The cover photo shows a celebrity comic wearing his trademark wacky grin. He’s surrounded by digital devices, and there’s a USB plug coming out of his ear. Inside are articles explaining how digital technology “is putting politics back in your hands,” “bringing people together in unexpected ways,” and “can make your life easier.” And there’s “A Bonus Pull-out Section” about “your digital home.” The emphasis is on the practical: save yourself trouble and prosper with the new connectedness.
It’s a no-brainer, not just for individuals but for businesses, government agencies, and organizations of all kinds. In this highly competitive world, speed and efficiency are the name of the game. Technology is about cutting costs, expanding reach, and streamlining management, thereby improving (if all goes well) overall performance and the bottom line. Again, a brilliant way of getting the small goals accomplished in the service of much larger ones. These tools have also made it much simpler for individuals with common interests and goals to find one another and create new organizations and movements. The advent of what writer Clay Shirky calls “ridiculously easy group-forming” has brought down repressive political regimes, helped communities respond to natural disasters and terrorist attacks, and worked countless other wonders of human cooperation and problem solving.
Why do you see people urgently staring into screens everywhere you go? Pick out some nuts-and-bolts task from your own professional, community, or personal life, the equivalent of my mundane need to call Mom about dinner, and you have part of the answer.
But there’s much more. In addition to helping us do the everyday work that supports our ultimate aims, screens can serve those higher ends directly. Think again about my phone call. While for practical purposes it didn’t matter who I was calling, spiritually and emotionally it mattered hugely. I was calling the woman who gave birth to me, a person with whom I have a relationship unlike any other. The phone brought that person’s voice and personality—and, through the photo, a sense of her physical presence—into the car with me. It gave rise to that moment of pure Mom-ness, which, though brief, was extremely valuable to me, so much so that I remembered it long afterward. That moment stayed with me because it took me out of the nitty-gritty burdens and distractions that tend to dominate my thoughts and allowed me to go deep. I appreciated in a new way my relationship with one special person, and the movie-in-the-brain that is my inner life went from a yawn to a blockbuster.
What more could you ask for? In an ideal world, our days would be full of experiences like that one, brimming over with the “vital significance” that is the essence of a good life. And those experiences don’t grow just out of personal relationships and interactions. Ideally, our work should be just as significant to us, palpably, while we’re working. Every moment of every day is a candidate for this depth of engagement and feeling.
Digital devices can and do make this happen. We use them to nurture relationships, to feed our emotional, social, and spiritual hungers, to think creatively and express ourselves. It’s no exaggeration to say that, at their best, they produce the kinds of moments that make life rewarding and worth living. If you’ve ever written an e-mail straight from the heart, watched a video that you couldn’t stop thinking about, or read an online essay that changed how you think about the world, you know this is true.
In this particular case, it all happened because of a simple phone call. But notice that it happened after what we typically think of as the connection, the call itself, was over. There was a gap between the practical task and the deeper experience that followed. If that gap had not been there, would I have reaped the same benefits? Doubtful. If I’d kept on using the phone for other tasks, there wouldn’t have been time or space in my thoughts for the moment to unfold as it did. The same goes for any screen task with the potential for deeper impact and value, and many do have that potential—it could happen, but only if you give it room. We don’t know about those lost opportunities, of course, because they never see the light of day. But I think we miss them, nonetheless, whenever it occurs to us that life isn’t quite hanging together, isn’t adding up to what it might be. It’s all those unrealized epiphanies, insights, and joys—journeys the mind and heart never get to take.
If you’re sitting in the office zipping from e-mail to e-mail to text to Web page to buzzing mobile and back again—that is, doing the usual digital dance—you’re likely losing all kinds of opportunities to reach the depth I’m talking about. An e-mail from a client requesting an innovative improvement in the product you sell might inspire you to draw up a brief sketch of how to make it happen. Heck, you might be motivated to go home and do it yourself and perhaps start your own company selling this superior product, taking on your current employer and shaking up the whole market. It could change your life. But if you never pause to allow that thought to blossom and instead move on to the next tiny screen task and then the next and the next, guess what? No new life for you.
The gap in time between my call to Mom and the “payoff” it yielded is tremendously significant. It’s the essential link between the utilitarian side of the digital experience and the “vital significance” side. And it’s a link that’s completely overlooked in current thinking about technology, with its unexamined faith in nonstop connectedness.
This is not to say the technology industry ignores the deeper potential of these gadgets. To the contrary, it advertises it, literally, because it’s crucial to the appeal of the products. If they did only menial jobs, we would view them roughly the way we view our vacuum cleaners. Instead, we think of them as friends, muses, passports to higher realms, and that’s how they’re marketed. A few years ago, there was an arresting television commercial for what was then the most fashionable mobile device, Apple’s first iPhone. A gorgeous young woman was shown standing by herself against a simple black backdrop, holding the sleek wedge in her hand. A dancer with the New York City Ballet, she talked about how she used it to mobile-blog about her art from backstage during performances. “It’s multitasking,” she said perkily. “It’s important. Even for ballet dancers.”
Now, Apple could have cast any attractive, articulate multitasker in the commercial. But the ballerina spun the message in a very particular way. This tool, she suggested, isn’t just for utilitarian drudgery. It’s for the artist and the spiritual seeker in each of us. For the soul.
The creative potential of digital tools is very real, and it’s manifest in the exuberant, richly inventive culture that has grown up online in a relatively short time, perhaps best exemplified by all the playful new additions to our language, from Googling to tweets. This imaginative and inspirational dimension of screen life is as relevant to organizations as to individuals. Whether you’re running a small business, a university, a hospital, or a global conglomerate, there’s nothing more valuable than an employee with a fertile, creative mind. Witness the countless business management articles and books about how to “think outside the box,” make conceptual leaps, tap the right side of the brain, discover hidden strengths. Under the best circumstances, digital screens can help us do all these things. That is the other reason, beyond pure efficiency, why they are essential tools of every modern organization. They bring out the inner ballerina in us all.
But here’s the question: if the baller
ina is using her smart phone for serious multitasking—not just doing the blog but jumping among many other tasks at the same time, racing from this to that and back to this again—is she really tapping her inner muse, as the ad implies? Is she using the tool to optimal effect?
MY PHONE CALL to Mom demonstrates the two essential benefits digital connectedness confers: we can get everyday jobs done more easily and nurture our minds, hearts, and souls, all with a little gizmo that fits into our pockets. It’s a combination that doesn’t come along very often, and it explains why screens have taken the world by storm, inspiring the kind of intense devotion and popular mania typically associated with political movements and religious crusades. For some people, digital technology isn’t just a new kind of tool, it’s a revolutionary creed to believe in and live for, a movement that’s transforming and perfecting life on Earth. The Answer.
This view has been on especially prominent display in the news media, where major political, social, and cultural events are increasingly seen through the prism of technology. When dramatic news breaks out somewhere in the world, whether it’s a terrorist bombing in London or a prodemocracy uprising in Iran, often it’s not the substance of the events or the stories of leading figures that garner the most avid coverage; it’s the role played by technology. A freedom march is one thing, but a freedom march planned and executed via digital gadgets—that’s news.
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