I remember my excitement when I first heard years ago that a device was on its way that would distribute a broadband Internet connection wirelessly all through the house. This struck me as excellent news. We were still living in the city then and had two Internet-connected desktop computers, one in my home office and one in Martha’s. So if for some reason we wanted to work on a laptop in, say, the kitchen, we had to tap in through a telephone jack, a cumbersome process. Rooms without jacks were “dead” zones unless you had a really long cord.
How nice it would be to have an effortless digital connection anywhere I wanted it in the house. Wherever the urge hit me, I could just “surf the Web,” as we used to say, a phrase nicely evoking the adventure and personal freedom the burgeoning medium offered. Catch a digital wave, and you were sitting on top of the world. I saw myself happily surfing Amazon.com from a chaise in the backyard. When Wi-Fi routers duly arrived I paddled right out and bought one, and in no time we were a thoroughly connected household.
The surround-screen kitchen would simply take the same principle to a new level. Sure, in our wireless broadband home we can now go online from any room. But most laptop and smart phone screens are so small, the connected experience is inherently limited in scope. And to the digital maximalist, limits are the enemy. For instance, when I’m having a wireless connected experience at the kitchen table, as I sometimes do with my laptop, the material world often intrudes. If one of our cats happens by in my peripheral field of vision, I’m liable to pick it up and stroke it while burbling meaningless baby talk, losing my train of digital thought. Screen walls would diminish the wandering-cat effect. The digital sphere would more fully command the room and my attention. I don’t relish this prospect, but some people apparently do.
Besides, the futurist thinking goes, there’s something wonderfully elegant and Jetsons-esque about connected kitchen walls. Rather than looking into the electronic realm through a tiny window, we’d be living in and moving through it all the time. E-mail fonts could be a foot tall, while the life-sized people in videos would feel as though they were right there with us in the room. And imagine the convenience. If you suddenly needed a recipe or were curious about the overnight stock market numbers from Asia or wondering if the HR folks had replied to your last message or just wanted to wave to Grampa, you could reach out as easily as you do for the butter dish, touch a spot on the wall, or say a few words (these walls will have intelligent ears) and make it happen. Why stop at the kitchen? In some scenarios, the whole house will someday be a full-blown screen environment, every surface seamlessly digitized and world-fastened. And when that day finally arrives, we’ll all be very…
Very what? What would it be like to live in such a thoroughly digital domicile? We don’t know. Do we care that we don’t know? Do we give it any thought amid the daily chatter about technology, the blithe upgrading to whatever is new and more connected? We think incessantly about the technology itself but not about how it’s shaping everyday experience. And so, with our tacit permission, everything is becoming a digital “platform,” even the home and, by extension, the people in it.
“Home” means so many things. On the most basic level it’s simply a location, the place where one lives. It’s also the physical structure, the house or apartment that is home. Last, home refers to the environment that’s created inside that structure, a world-away-from-the-world offering refuge, safety, and happiness.
It’s this last idea of the home as sanctuary that’s absent from most thinking and decision making about technology. A kitchen with giant digital screens for walls would certainly offer convenience, but a household isn’t just another utilitarian gadget. Like all connective devices through history, wherever screens go, they bring the crowd and the busyness that comes with it. This, in turn, has a powerful effect on how we think and feel. The home has traditionally been a shelter from the crowd, within which human beings experienced life in a different way from how it was experienced on the outside. For the individual, home has always offered privacy, quiet, solitude. For those living in couples, families, and other cohabiting groups, it also afforded an intimate sort of togetherness that’s possible only in shared isolation.
The crowd drives us away from the reflective, the particular, and the truly personal. At home we could be more human.
High-speed, around-the-clock digital connectedness has already diluted these vital aspects of home life. The more connected our house became in the last decade, the less it provided the sense of peace and soul nourishment I associate with “home.” What was once a happy refuge from the crowd is becoming a channel for crowd delivery. The walls are membranes through which a tide of people and information flows in and out around the clock. It’s not just online friends, interests, and work duties but news, popular culture, and the never-ending bustle of the marketplace. We’re swimming in massacres and tragedies, drowning in celebrities, trends, fads, sensations, crazes. It sucks you in, and as it does, the here-and-now experiences and interactions that should be the core of home life are reduced to fading background music.
I didn’t see this coming. Radio and television have been delivering their own crowds into private homes for generations, and the telephone has long been a link to the world at large. I must have been assuming in some unconscious way that always-on digital connectedness would be more of the same. In the long run, it may be. Perhaps it’s just the newness of it that makes the interactive screen experience seem so much more intense than what older technologies offer. Just a few generations ago, television was viewed as an invasion of the sacred space that is home and a particular menace to children. Those dangers are still real today, but over the years it’s also become clear that, if used properly, television can be a useful tool as well as a gathering place, an alternative hearth. Television is just that in our house, where we carefully regulate its use and enjoy it immensely. So we may just be at the start of an adjustment period, and someday it will seem silly that anyone ever questioned the wisdom of that universally beloved instrument of happiness, the digitally walled kitchen.
But you can’t live in the future. In the reality that is the present, these devices have a mesmerizing hold on us, and it’s altering the nature and meaning of our domestic lives. One of the most reliable routes to inwardness and depth has become an increasingly outward experience. How can you relax and recharge when the whole world is living with you?
We’re already pretty far down this road, and the question is whether it’s still possible to do anything. Can this drastic repurposing of the home be amended or modified so it remains a home in every sense of the word?
I think so, and the best way to see how is to go back to the origins of today’s wired world a century and a half ago and the unlikeliest of all digital philosophers, Henry David Thoreau. In the familiar telling of his story, Thoreau would seem to be the last person with anything useful to say about managing home life in a digital world. He’s best known for abandoning civilization for the one-room house he built in the woods outside Concord, Massachusetts, where he lived a simple life close to nature. Walden, his account of that experience, is ostensibly a rejection of society and the insidious ways it warps us and robs life of its richness. In making his case, he often mentions technology, in particular two new inventions that were transforming the world, the railroad and the telegraph.
At a time of rapidly growing connectedness, Thoreau disconnected. He was the great escape artist, and escape would seem to be his message. If you want to take back your life, Get out! Or, as he puts it in Walden:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived…. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.
The essential problem hasn’t changed, nor has the goal. Who doesn’t want to live the fullest, deepest life they possibly can? For the overconnected soul wishing to apply Thoreau�
��s message, however, the sticking point is his method. As a practical matter, not many people have the freedom to escape society—jobs, family, and other obligations—and hole up in the woods. In any case, very few of us want the pure solitude that Thoreau seems to be advocating when he writes, “I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
It’s the rare person whose ideal of home is a cabin for one in a neighborhood without neighbors. Part of what’s always been special and invigorating about the typical home is that it makes solitude available within the context of the larger social environment. It’s an intermittent respite, a space into which one retreats briefly at regular intervals, to emerge later refreshed.
Today there’s another factor that makes Thoreau’s approach seem not just unappealing but downright pointless. Even if we wanted to run away physically from society, in a digital world there’s no place to go. With ubiquitous mobile connectivity, you can’t use geography to escape what he called society, because it’s everywhere. If you have a screen of any kind with you—and who doesn’t these days?—you haven’t left society at all.
But to dismiss Thoreau for these reasons is to miss the whole point of Walden and its relevance to our time. In fact, he wasn’t trying to escape civilization, and what he created at Walden Pond was not even close to pure solitude. As for ubiquitous technology, it’s true that the world was a lot less connected in the middle of the nineteenth century than it is today. However, Thoreau lived through a major technological shift, the arrival of instant communication, that foreshadowed the current one. The woods weren’t wireless in his era, but for the first time in history they were getting wired, and the wires were carrying information around the world at unimaginable speeds. Thoreau saw the enormous human implications of this change, and he structured the Walden experiment so that it spoke not just to his own time but to the technological future he saw coming.
In a world where it’s increasingly hard to escape the crowd, can you still build a refuge, a place to go inward and reclaim all the things that a too-busy life takes away? Thoreau says you can, and he offers a practical construct for making it happen. Walden can serve as a philosophical guidebook to the tricky challenges of twenty-first-century domestic life, including the matter of connected kitchen walls. The quickest way “home” in a digital world is to follow Thoreau.
FIRST, HOWEVER, IT’S necessary to correct a few misimpressions, beginning with the idea that Thoreau was trying to escape society. Walden Pond was not exactly Antarctica. It was just a mile and a quarter from the town of Concord, where Thoreau grew up and spent nearly all of his life after college. To him, the world of Concord was society in the most immediate sense, and when he speaks in Walden about the harried lives of his contemporaries—“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”—he was thinking especially about his friends and neighbors. He refers to them often, collectively and individually; they are his chief source of real-life examples, the evidence for his diagnosis of society’s ills. Despite the hell-is-other-people statements he sometimes tossed off, he saw those people frequently while at Walden. For a famous recluse, he had an unusually active social life, which he describes in a chapter called “Visitors.” Though the cabin was only ten by fifteen feet, he entertained as many thirty people there at one time—hardly a hermit’s life.
Moreover, when the twenty-seven-year-old Henry moved to Walden in the summer of 1845, the railroad, which was society in motion, came with him. A brand-new track had just been laid connecting Concord to Boston and the rest of the world, and it ran right beside the pond. He could see and hear the trains from his place. The railroad wasn’t just a visual and aural symbol of civilization, it was a dynamic reminder of how technology was making the world much smaller in the middle of the nineteenth century. In today’s terms, it would be like building your rustic retreat in the woods beside the runaway of an international airport. If he really wanted to escape society, Thoreau could have done much better. He liked to go on wilderness trips around New England and certainly knew more remote places.
He went to Walden because that’s where the opportunity presented itself. The owner of the land was Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Concord philosopher who was his mentor and friend, and the location made practical sense in a number of ways. He was going to be very busy in this endeavor, writing, growing vegetables for both meals and income, working at other odd jobs to support himself, and keeping house. For logistical reasons it would be far easier to do all this close to town, where he knew everyone and where there were stores, a post office, and other conveniences.
Beyond these practical considerations, the fact that Walden was so close to Concord was a key element of the venture, crucial to its meaning and value. He’d recently spent the better part of a year living on Staten Island, where he had been unhappy. He’d “learned that his heart really was in Concord,” writes his biographer Robert D. Richardson, Jr., and the rest of his life would be firmly grounded there. This was home, in other words, and in Walden and his other writing projects he was consciously exploring the meaning of that home, as well as “home” in a more general sense: What is a home, really? What kind of home makes us happy?
Walden isn’t just a philosophical tract, it’s a detailed account of one man’s life at home, from the nitty-gritty economic details—he provides elaborate charts of household expenses and revenues—to the spiritual and emotional experiences that living there yielded. This wasn’t merely a shelter, it was a place to “live deep,” as all the best homes are. Thoreau had times of intense happiness, even ecstasy, in his home, and they’re central to the book’s message.
His nearness to society also made the project relevant to others. If he had fled to a truly remote place, his life there would have borne no resemblance to the lives of most other people, and they’d be unable to emulate it. “It would be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life,” he wrote, “though in the midst of an outward civilization.” That is, he consciously didn’t flee the busy world of society but instead set up camp just on its periphery. “Thus,” Richardson points out, “it was clear to him at the very outset that what he was doing could be done anywhere, by anyone. It did not require a retreat from society…. He himself thought of it as a step forward, a liberation, a new beginning, or as he put it in the second chapter of Walden, an awakening to what is real and important in life.” An awakening that others could have in their own homes, if they wanted it.
But can we apply Walden to our time? Thoreau may have been close to town, but he wasn’t holed up with the rest of the planet, as we are with our screens. Given that digital technology has so altered the landscape of modern life, and particularly life at home, is it a stretch to think Thoreau could have anything useful to say to us?
Not at all. Though it’s true that he lived in a very different information environment from today’s, he and his friends and neighbors really were living close to the rest of the planet in a new way. Previously, information could travel only as quickly as the swiftest mode of physical transportation, which was trains. With the arrival of the telegraph in the 1840s, messages could suddenly dart from place to place instantaneously. Oceans, deserts, and mountain ranges were no longer barriers. All it took was a wire. The notion that one could now theoretically keep up with anything and everything happening on Earth, and around the clock, was both thrilling and unsettling. An East Coast American of Thoreau’s generation wasn’t just increasingly connected to the wide world, he was increasingly immersed in it, and he needed to manage that immersion. What to read? What to care about?
This was a subtle but significant shift in the nature of inward life, and everyone was grappling with it. “A slender wire has become the highway of thought,” observed the New York Times in an editorial published on September 14, 1852.
Messages follow each other in quick succession. Joy spreads on the track of sorrow. The arrival of a ship, news of a revolution, or a battle, the price of pork, the state of
foreign and domestic markets, missives of love, the progress of courts, the success or discomfiture of disease, the result of elections, and an innumerable host of social, political and commercial details, all chase each other over the slender and unconscious wires.
With a little updating of the language, this could be a description of the moment-by-moment randomness now offered by any digital screen. There was simply a great deal more information bearing down on everyone, and even the home was no safe haven. In The Victorian Internet, a history of the telegraph, Tom Standage quotes W. E. Dodge, a prominent telegraph-era businessman from New York, describing the plight of a family man battling information overload:
The merchant goes home after a day of hard work and excitement to a late dinner, trying amid the family circle to forget business, when he is interrupted by a telegram from London, directing, perhaps, the purchase in San Francisco of 20,000 barrels of flour, and the poor man must dispatch his dinner as hurriedly as possible in order to send off his message to California. The businessman of the present day must be continually on the jump.
In other words, the telegraph was the latest agent of the “quiet desperation” that Thoreau saw all around him and felt in himself. Devices meant to relieve burdens were imposing new ones, pulling people away from life’s most meaningful experiences, including the family dinner table. “But lo! men have become the tools of their tools,” he wrote, and though he wasn’t specifically referring to the telegraph, elsewhere in Walden he made it clear that the slender wire could make tools out of people. New technologies, he said, are often just “pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things…. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” Yet at other times, he wrote about the telegraph in a hopeful, lyrical way, suggesting he saw the wonder of the technology and perhaps its potential to do good. “As I went under the new telegraph wire, I heard it vibrating like a harp high overhead,” he noted in his journal. “It was as the sound of a far-off glorious life.”
Hamlet's BlackBerry Page 17