When the news is explicitly about these devices, the zeal hits a fever pitch. In the summer of 2008, for instance, a new, improved version of the handheld endorsed by the ballerina, Apple’s iPhone 3G, came to market. The company’s CEO unveiled it at a press conference that, in one tech journalist’s description, was more like a political rally or evangelical revival meeting:
I’ve been to enough Steve Jobs keynotes now to know that the man is able to take a crowd and bend it to his will. Every time, I’ve been a willing subject—sometimes (but not every time) to find myself in a hangover-like state a day later when I try to remember exactly why I thought that whatever he was pitching would change my life forever. Steve Jobs is masterful and charismatic when he’s on stage and all eyes are on him. And when, like yesterday, the crowd is carefully packed with a throng of Apple developers cheering him on, the press in attendance can easily get caught up in the hype.
Indeed, much of the resulting coverage had a true-believer ring to it. Here was a device that could do anything, from the utterly mundane (“Where to Eat? Ask Your iPhone” headlined one of the nation’s leading newspapers) to the truly heroic (“Can the iPhone Really Save America?” asked another, only half jokingly). Here again, journalists were simply reflecting the public obsession with these devices, rooted in widespread personal experience. It’s as if, having seen firsthand the potential of digital devices, we really believe that Nirvana is just an upgrade away. Consumers desperate to be among the first to own the new model formed long lines outside stores, in some cases even sleeping overnight on the sidewalk to secure the choicest spots. In California, some people were standing in line not because they wanted to buy the device but to participate in what one news report described as a “tribal experience.” As one of the line standers put it, “I’d like to be part of the magic.”
This magic is why we have migrated so much of our lives to the digital sphere. It’s why we go through the day basically tethered to our screens. It’s why these devices have proliferated at such an astonishing pace. The total number of mobile phones in the world went from about 500 million at the beginning of this century to approaching 5 billion today.
But there’s a missing piece: the real magic of these tools, the catalyst that transforms them from utilitarian devices into instruments of creativity, depth, and transcendence, lies in the gap that occurred between my phone call to Mom and the powerful experience that followed. That gap was the linchpin, the catalyst. It allowed me to take a run-of-the-mill outward experience and go inward. It’s the same for every kind of digital task. If you pile them on so fast that screen life becomes a blur and there are no gaps in your connectedness, you never get to that place where the most valuable benefits are. We’re eliminating the gaps, when we should be creating them.
A few years ago, a leading high-tech research firm surveyed people in seventeen countries, including the United States, China, India, Russia, Germany, and Japan, with the goal of “quantifying the state of today’s connectedness.” The subjects of the study were quizzed about how often they connect digitally, where they connect, the devices they use, and so on. Based on the answers, the authors created a taxonomy of human connectedness comprising four different types: Hyperconnected, Increasingly Connected, Passive Online, and Barebones Users.
The study focused on the Hyperconnected, defined as “those who have fully embraced the brave new world, with more devices per capita…and more intense use of new communications applications.”
In 2008, just 16 percent of the world’s working population qualified as Hyperconnected, but the study predicted that 40 percent of us would soon meet the criteria. Bear in mind that this white paper was sponsored by a large high-tech company and had a distinctly boosterish point of view, as suggested by its title, “The Hyperconnected: Here They Come!” But let’s assume for the moment that it’s basically accurate and this is where the world is headed. What would it really mean to live this way? At the time of the study, the average Hyperconnected person was using at least seven different digital devices and nine different applications, in order to stay as screen-connected as possible at all times, including “on vacation, in restaurants, from bed, and even in places of worship.” As this group grows larger, it predicted, there will be a “profusion” of new devices.
Of course, even as the gadgets are multiplying, they’re also converging. Smart phone–like devices that will allow us to conduct our entire connected lives through one screen are currently thought to represent the future. Ultimately, it doesn’t much matter how many or how few different devices we use to connect. The question is whether the hyperconnected life is taking us where we want to go.
Collectively, we seem to have decided it is. In societies around the world, obtaining the very latest, fastest, most extreme version of connectedness isn’t just a core individual goal, it’s a national ambition. Countries are engaged in a global race to become the most connected society on earth. Rather than sleeping on the sidewalk, they’re setting national policies and spending money in pursuit of this goal. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a Paris-based group of about thirty wealthy industrialized countries including the United States, tracks the spread of digital technology and regularly ranks countries by broadband Internet “penetration,” or the percentage of the population with broadband service. These rankings are closely watched by global business and political leaders as a key marker of national status. In recent years, a handful of Asian and northern European countries have dominated the top rungs of the OECD list, while the United States has languished in the middle of the pack. In short, our relative connectedness has been abysmal.
Members of Congress decry the situation and call for a national effort to end this “broadband divide.” Newspapers publish concerned editorials, think tanks issue policy papers. It’s all strikingly reminiscent of the panic that followed the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite in the late 1950s, when the United States suddenly realized it was behind in the space race. But rather than shooting for the moon, we’re after more data per second. In his 2008 campaign for president, Barack Obama said the United States should “lead the world in broadband penetration.” If elected, he promised, he would do whatever was necessary to make that happen. Soon after winning election, he repeated the promise, calling it “unacceptable that the United States ranks fifteenth in the world in broadband adoption” and noting that America’s future competitiveness was at stake.
There’s no question that this is true, if competitiveness is measured purely in terms of who is most connected, which is what the national rankings reflect. It goes without saying that the United States and every other developed country should work hard to provide digital access to all those who lack it. But this worthy goal of bringing broadband to all citizens is not the same thing as devoting yourself to being the most connected society on earth, which at a certain point could actually be bad for competitiveness. As the top countries close in on 100 percent broadband connectedness, the question will inevitably become whose hyperconnectedness is more hyper. One reason South Korea has long ranked among the most connected countries on earth is that it’s more obsessed with online gaming than any other culture. Screen games are fun and, at their best, educational. But spending huge chunks of one’s day gaming is demonstrably not good for personal productivity.
Aren’t a society’s competitiveness and its prospects for a better future rooted in more than sheer technology? Isn’t how well we use the devices just as crucial as how fast they are? Will pursuing more and more digital connectedness make us smarter and more creative? Will it help us understand one another better? When we’re all hyperconnected, will our families and communities be stronger? Will we build better organizations and lead more prosperous lives?
Most important, can we accomplish any of these lofty goals if we continue devoting all our energy to eliminating the very thing we need most to achieve them in the first place—some space between tasks, respites, stopping place
s for the mind?
We don’t ask these questions because they’re philosophical and, unlike technology, which is concrete and quantifiable, philosophy seems abstract and squishy. So we avoid them, focusing instead on the tools themselves, breathlessly trying to keep up with the hot new devices and the latest trends. This is shortsighted since, in the end, it’s the philosophical questions that really matter. Someday, it will be hard to remember why we were once so fired up about 3G connectivity and the wonders of mobile broadband. Seamless, lightning-fast connectedness will be a given everywhere on Earth, and today’s gadgets will be quaint museum pieces. At that point, all we’ll care about is what kind of life these devices have created for us. And if it isn’t a good life, we’ll wonder what we did wrong.
Right now, in these early years of the digital era, without even realizing it, we’re living by a very particular philosophy of technology. It can summarized in a sentence:
It’s good to be connected, and it’s bad to be disconnected.
This is a simple idea but one with enormous implications. Once you assume that it’s a good thing to be connected through digital networks and a bad thing to be disconnected from them, it becomes very clear how to organize your screen time and, indeed, every waking hour. If digital connectedness is intrinsically good, it follows that one should try as hard as possible to stay connected at all times or, to put it another way, avoid being disconnected. Thus, our philosophy has two corollaries:
First corollary: The more you connect, the better off you are.
Second corollary: The more you disconnect, the worse off you are.
Together, these two propositions prescribe exactly how to manage one’s digital existence. You can’t be too connected, they say, so we should seek at all times to maximize our time with screens and minimize our time away. And this is just how many of us are living today. We are digital maximalists.
Having just explored the broad range of very real benefits that these devices offer, it’s easy to see why we’ve embraced this philosophy and the way of life it produces. Those benefits are manifest all around us, so manifest that for many years now it hasn’t seemed necessary even to wonder about the philosophy behind it or question its tenets. Connecting enhances life on so many levels, it’s common sense to conclude that one should be as connected as possible all the times. Digital maximalism is clearly a superior way of living.
Except when it isn’t.
Chapter Three
GONE OVERBOARD
Falling Out with the Connected Life
It’s a sunny morning in late spring and I’m on the water in an old boat. Several years ago, my family and I moved from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., to a small town on Cape Cod. We’d grown tired of the city, particularly the brutal traffic that ate up so much of our time. It was a very digital-age move, an example of the endless possibilities these technologies have opened up for working at a distance in time and space from the traditional workplace. This ability to “time-shift” and “location-shift” holds the promise of a kind of liberation, a chance to own one’s life more fully. Since my wife and I are both writers, as long as we have our screens and a good connection, we can stay in touch with all the people and sources of information we need to get our work done. Friends, too, are now as reachable as the nearest digital gadget. So we decided to try living in a different kind of place. We moved to the outer reaches of the Cape, which we knew from summer vacations and had dreamed about as a place to live full-time and raise our son, who was then seven years old.
In our new hometown, people spend a lot of time in boats, and we wanted to join in. Good-bye urban gridlock, hello open water. We started watching Craigslist for used motorboats. It took many months to find one we liked and could afford. It was more than twenty years old and pretty dilapidated, but it had character and we couldn’t wait to start tooling around in it. We named it What Larks! after a line from Great Expectations, the Charles Dickens novel about the coming of age of a boy named Pip. When Pip’s brother-in-law, the kindly blacksmith Joe Gargery, talks about the good times the two of them will have together someday, that’s what he always says, “What larks!” Life should really be full of larks, and we hoped to have many in our boat.
So I’m out here getting it ready for its first season. I’ve just started the engine, and now I need to back away from the dock, where the boat was tied up for a few days for repairs. As a novice boater, I’m a little nervous about this. There are several other boats moored in the area I’m backing into, and my task is to maneuver between them while swinging my boat around. It goes smoothly at first, and I’m almost home free when I notice I’m passing dangerously close to another boat’s mooring line. I hear my propeller struggle, then seize up.
I turn off the engine and peer over the stern to examine the situation. The line is wrapped tightly around the propeller several times. But if I reach down, bracing myself on the engine with one hand, I’m almost sure I can use my free hand to unwind it. I attempt to do this, but it’s quite a reach and I’m leaning farther out than planned, so much farther I’m worried I might be in danger of…Yiiiiiiiiiikkkes! I tumble into the water headfirst, fully clothed.
On surfacing, the first thing I do is look around to see if there were any witnesses to my ignominy, which I’m sure looked like a clip from one of those world’s-funniest-videos shows. Happily, there’s nobody in sight. The second thing I do is feel underwater for my credit card wallet and mobile phone, which I always keep together in my left front pocket. Both are still there, phew.
Wait, they’re both there? No! The wallet will be fine, but my phone is drowning. Panicked, I pull it out and throw it into the boat, then quickly untangle the propeller. I clamber back in and pick up the phone. It’s buzzing in a strange, halfhearted way that it’s never buzzed before, the digital version of a last gasp. I frantically press every button on the keypad, but nothing happens. The screen is completely blank. After about a minute, the buzzing stops. It’s dead.
I’ve owned many mobile phones in my life, but I’ve never killed one before, and I’m mad at myself. I think of all the names, numbers, and e-mail addresses I have stored on it, the dozens of photos that I never backed up. What a pain it will be to get a new phone, choose a model, decide on the length and other details of my new contract (this time I will get the insurance), reload all my contacts, who knows what else. Sometimes when I’m down in the weeds of my connected life, managing my relationship with all these distant technology companies and service providers, I think of a phrase Thomas Jefferson used in a completely different context: “entangling alliances.” Right now I have a yen to disentangle myself and follow a more isolationist path.
Then reality sets in. Fact is, I need those entangling alliances. They keep me in touch with everyone I care about, not to mention my sources of income. And though it’s true that my screens have added a whole new layer of complications to my life, in other, arguably more significant ways, they’ve simplified and improved it. Without them, I wouldn’t be living in this far-flung place, where I feel more “connected” to my own life and those around me than I’ve ever felt anywhere else. If the phone is my prison keeper, it’s also my liberator, and I’ll need to start looking for a new one immediately. There may be a day or two when I’ll have to be completely phoneless. What a disaster.
Minutes later, heading back across the cove, I notice something funny. It’s not anything I can see or hear. It’s an inner sensation, a subtle awareness. I’m completely unreachable. Friends and family can’t reach me. Colleagues and contacts from my work life can’t reach me. Nobody anywhere on the planet can reach me right now, nor can I reach them. They’re out there in the great beyond, and, short of Jedi-like telepathy, there’s no way of bridging the distance between us. Just minutes ago, I was embarrassed and angry at myself for drowning my phone. Now that it’s gone and connecting is no longer an option, I like what’s happening.
Before I went overboard, I was alone in the boat, in the classi
c sense of alone—there was nobody physically with me. But because I had a connective device in my pocket, in another sense I wasn’t alone at all. Everyone in my life was just a few button taps away. Now I’m alone in a whole new way. It’s a state I used to know very well. I remember walking around my college campus in the early 1980s, on my own in the world for the first time. This was pre–cell phone era, so when I was out in public like that, I had no easy way of communicating with most of the human race. It was a bit lonely being away from my parents and all the other people I’d always been dependent on for support and companionship. But it was also exhilarating. Here I was, a full-fledged person finally at the controls of my own life. I had some doubts that I was ready, but that was part of the thrill.
Years earlier, as an adolescent in the throes of my first existential crisis, I’d read a self-help book called How to Be Your Own Best Friend, a bestseller of the 1970s, now sadly almost forgotten. Written by a pair of married psychoanalysts named Mildred Newman and Bernard Berkowitz in a spare, Zen-like style, it consisted of short philosophical questions (“Why are so many people dissatisfied in so many ways?”) and answers. The book’s basic thesis was that in order to find peace and contentment, we must accept our fundamental separateness from others. Happiness is about knowing how to enjoy one’s own company:
Someone who cannot tolerate aloneness is someone who doesn’t know he’s grown up. It takes courage to let go of that fantasy of childhood safety. The world may never seem so certain again, but what fresh air we breathe when we take possession of our own separateness, our own integrity! That’s when our adult life really begins.
This was a revelation to me. When I had thought of aloneness at all, which wasn’t often, it was as a negative, an absence of something intrinsically good: the company of others. My own emotional experience painfully confirmed this impression. Is there anyone lonelier than a gangly thirteen-year-old with braces and thick eyeglasses? It had never occurred to me that aloneness could be a fruitful, let alone ecstatic, experience. Or that accepting and exploring my separateness might be the way out of misery and into maturity.
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