Not every household is in a position to try this. There are jobs and family circumstances that just won’t allow for two unplugged days a week, or even one. Still, I think there are many who could try it without a great deal of inconvenience. When you do something out of conviction, the world has a way of rallying round and lending a hand. I now often get e-mails with subject lines like “I know you won’t see this until Monday but…” If more people started building alcoves and terraces within the digital environment, new customs and protocols would inevitably arise around them.
Were this idea to spread, it would change the life lived not just inside each home but between homes. Another benefit of our Sabbath is that we wind up spending a lot more time outside, seeing the neighbors and enjoying the natural world. According to A Pattern Language, the healthiest, most vibrant communities are those in which people meet and mix casually in public squares and other common physical spaces. There’s a pattern called “Dancing in the Street,” which the book describes as a lost art: “All over the earth, people once danced in the streets…. But in those parts of the world that have become ‘modern’ and technically sophisticated, this experience has died.”
Digital society affords a kind of street dancing, through social networks and the like. But it feels more like the Saint Vitus’ dance that Thoreau talks about, frantic rather than joyful. If more modems were to shut down on Friday nights, I can see windows being thrown open and people wandering outside the way they do when there’s a power outage, meeting neighbors they barely know. There might even be dancing in the streets.
Afterword
Back to the Room
No matter how carefully you think about it or how assiduously you work on new approaches and habits, there’s no getting around the fact that we live in a very busy world. So busy that some days you inevitably wind up back in that hectic place where existence is all about tap-tap-tapping, and the very idea of escape feels quixotic.
I had one of those days not long ago. It began with something ostensibly unrelated to digital technology, a summons for jury duty delivered the old-fashioned way, by our mail carrier. When I opened the envelope, my heart sank. Though it’s never a good time for a jury call, this one was especially unfortunate. I had a deadline approaching, Martha was working hard on her own book, and various family matters had us both stretched to the limit. And it wasn’t the typical order to report to the local courthouse ten minutes from our house, or to the state superior court several towns away. It was a federal jury summons stating that on the appointed morning I was expected to appear at the U.S. District Courthouse in downtown Boston. That meant a two-hour drive each way, possibly more, depending on traffic. I’d be a prospective juror for three weeks, but if I wound up on a jury, it could go much longer.
In the fine print was another unhappy twist: no computers or mobile phones allowed in the building. Based on the ideas I’ve laid out in these pages, I should have exulted at this out-of-the-blue mandate to spend most of a day disconnected. But to be honest, I didn’t. I had a mountain of work to do and much of it required a connected screen. As it is, I get only five digital days a week, and this was a time when I really didn’t want to lose one of them. While notching down our connectedness has been fantastic for our family life, and I would never go back, it occasionally presents brand-new dilemmas. In this case, my frustration about not being able to connect during jury duty was mixed with self-loathing about feeling that way. As I lay in bed the night before, pondering all this, I realized I was trapped in the digital room again, and the walls seemed to be closing in.
When I left the house at 4:30 A.M., the waxing moon was enormous in the western sky. Driving along with music playing, I gradually relaxed into a better mood. I had no choice in the matter, after all; might as well make the best of it. Traffic was no problem and I arrived quite early. I parked at the courthouse on Boston Harbor and wandered on foot into the city in search of breakfast. There were few signs of life until, crossing Post Office Square, I noticed overcoated figures converging from all directions on a certain doorway on Milk Street. This being Boston, it naturally turned out to be a Dunkin’ Donuts. There was a newspaper vendor out front and, noting that the regulars were all buying his wares, I did the same.
I got a doughnut and coffee, grabbed a stool at the front window next to a young woman submerged in a Boston Herald, and opened my USA Today. These days, the act of reading a hard-copy newspaper feels curiously out of phase, in two quite different ways. On one hand, it’s absurd to be holding these inky sheets in your hands, deciphering words formed by atoms rather than bits. Part of you wonders, Why on earth am I doing this? News is supposed to be new, and a hard copy is dated long before it arrives. With a screen, you can race around the whole world in seconds, getting all the latest developments in close to real time. The buzz of online news is one of the great pleasures of this era.
On the other hand, a printed newspaper is even more useful now than it was twenty years ago. Like a Moleskine pad, it’s a disconnected medium that takes you out of the digital swirl into a calmer, more patient mental space. Buzz is good and important, but so is de-buzzing. There we were, just the pages and me. I could browse lazily, pause over anything that caught my eye, and take the time to think about it, as I rarely do on screen. In this high-speed world, a physical newspaper is a still point for the consciousness. It’s also a reminder that any room, even a humble doughnut shop, can be a kind of refuge if you know how to use it. It didn’t hurt that at this early hour there was no action whatsoever coming from the mobile in my pocket.
“We’re Killing Communication,” said one headline on the op-ed page. The column was a hilarious rant against all things digital by Bill Persky, a seventy-eight-year-old television writer, producer, and director who had been spending a lot of time with the latest technologies, including social networks. This had brought him a barrage of new “friends” he didn’t need and updates about their lives he didn’t want, such as “Eating leftover lasagna” and “Getting a colonoscopy.” Now, Persky announced, he was quitting the whole scene.
I’m not losing my patience but my sanity. With the wisdom I have gained from age and experience, I have finally decided it’s time for all these breakthroughs to take a break from breaking through, since they’re no longer improving communication but actually destroying it. How? By making it easier and faster for people everywhere to be in constant contact with each other—about nothing.
I knew just what he was talking about, and I also knew that he was overreacting. Like the mob attacking the printing press in Shakespeare, in his frustration he perceived only the oppressive downside of the new tool, not its many benefits. It’s a natural reaction when you feel cornered and see no way out. But, as I could see clearly now from my window seat on Milk Street, there are ways out, and they’re all around us.
When I got to the courthouse, the other prospective jurors were arriving. Inside the front door was a checkpoint where we had to surrender our phones and computers to armed security officers. There were seventy-five of us in the jury pool that day, but even as the waiting area—an open space with spectacular harbor views—filled up, it remained quiet and still. A crowded room is different when the rest of the world is out of reach. The usual ringtone-initiated yak sessions weren’t breaking out every few minutes. Some of us struck up casual conversations with one another, while others read books and paperwork or just stared out at the boats and seagulls. We were present in a way people are seldom present anymore.
Many of us had come here reluctantly, convinced we had far more urgent things to do. Under normal circumstances, we would have been spending this time toiling in offices, schools, hospitals, restaurants, and other settings, at tasks we felt deserved our full attention at least as much as jury duty. But if we were in those places now, would we really be giving those tasks our full attention? Doubtful. Too often, devices like the ones we’d left downstairs would be calling the shots, interrupting, distracting, and generally
ensuring that our minds never quite settled down.
I wasn’t placed on a jury, and by midday I was free to go. When I retrieved my phone at the front door, there was a handful of new messages waiting, and I went through them before driving off. Nothing urgent had happened in my absence—and how often does it, really? I’d expected to be in a foul mood now, frantic to make up for lost time. But sitting in those disconnected courthouse rooms had been as refreshing as a long walk in the woods. I’d done some useful thinking and stumbled on several promising new ideas, and I was eager to get back to work.
Experiences like this are crucial, and finding them shouldn’t require federal regulations and armed guards. As life in the digital room grows ever more intense, I see a dawning awareness of this need. Not long after jury day, my academic friend—the one who had complained about her nervous system being “interlinked” to those of her colleagues—e-mailed me a news story about colleges “encouraging technology-free introspection.” Stephens College in Missouri has revived a long-dormant tradition of vespers, an evening chapel service, but with a digital-age twist. Where the old vespers gatherings were religious, the new ones are secular, expressly designed as contemplative time away from digital devices. Smart phones and other devices are placed in collection baskets so the students can just sit quietly in the pews for an hour. The president of the women’s college “fears all that time spent in the twenty-first century’s town square leaves few opportunities for clutter-free thought,” and she wants these young women to learn self-reliance. Amherst College in Massachusetts organized a “Day of Mindfulness” to give students, in the words of one professor, “a complement to the very hurried world of gadgets they normally live in.”
A week later, one of our local newspapers reported on an effort to restore dilapidated houses in our area that are considered historically significant for their twentieth-century modern designs. Many are in isolated spots in the woods, some overlooking tranquil ponds. A nonprofit organization has raised money and begun turning them into places where artists and scholars can live and work for a few weeks at a time. The first artist to stay in one of the houses, a woman from nearby Provincetown, said of the experience: “It’s nice to be away from the Internet.”
Technology makes the world feel smaller than it really is. There are all kinds of rooms in all kinds of places. Every space is what you make it. But in the end, building a good life isn’t about where you are. It’s about how you decide to think and live. Place your index finger on your temple and tap twice. It’s all in there.
Notes
CHAPTER 1: BUSY, VERY BUSY
the “movie-in-the-brain”: Antonio R. Damasio, “How the Brain Creates the Mind,” in Best of the Brain from Scientific American, ed. Floyd E. Bloom (New York: Dana Press, 2007), pp. 58–67.
“It all depends”: William James, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” On Some of Life’s Ideals (New York: Henry Holt, 1912), p. 37.13
William James acknowledged: Ibid., pp. 3–46.
A news story: “Teen Tops More than 300,000 Texts in Month: Sacramento Teen Says She’s Popular,” www.ksbw.com, posted May 5, 2009.
New findings are released: “Americans Spend Eight Hours a Day on Screens,” AFP (Agence France-Presse) wire story, March 27, 2009. Tim Gray, “Study: U.S. Loaded with Internet Addicts,” www.sci-tech-today.com, October 18, 2006. “Texting and Driving Worse than Drinking and Driving,” www.CNBC.com, June 25, 2009.
CHAPTER 2: HELLO, MOTHER
“Get Connected!”: Parade, November 18, 2007.
“ridiculously easy group-forming”: Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), p. 155.
an arresting television commercial: Commercial broadcast on television, fall of 2007.
“I’ve been to enough Steve Jobs”: Michael Arrington, “I Am a Member of the Cult of iPhone,” www.techcrunch.com, June 10, 2008.
Here was a device: Frank Bruni, “Where to Eat? Ask Your iPhone,” New York Times, July 16, 2008; Heidi N. Moore, “Can the iPhone Really Save America?” Wall Street Journal, http://online.wsj.com, July 17, 2008.
“tribal experience”: John Boudreau, “IPhone 3G: ‘Worth the Wait,’” www.mercurynews.com, July 12, 2008.
The total number: Based on data from the International Telecommunication Union (www.itu.int) and The World Fact Book (Central Intelligence Agency, www.cia.gov, updated as of November 2009).
surveyed people in seventeen countries: “The Hyperconnected: Here They Come!,” www.idc.com, 2008.
Countries are engaged: OECD statistics on broadband growth and penetration, www.oecd.org.
Barack Obama: The campaign quotation about broadband penetration and the postelection address are widely available online.
One reason South Korea: OECD statistics, www.oecd.org. On gaming as obsession see, for example, the discussion of Seoul as the most connected city on earth, “Most Connected Cities,” www.dailywireless.com, March 6, 2007; and “South Korea’s Gaming Addicts,” BBC News online, November 22, 2002.
CHAPTER 3: GONE OVERBOARD
I’d read a self-help book: Mildred Newman and Bernard Berkowitz, with Jean Own, How to Be Your Own Best Friend (New York: Ballantine Books, 1971); quote appears on pp. 56–57.
Paul Tillich once wrote: Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963), pp. 17–18.
E. B. White: E. B. White, Here Is New York (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), p. 13.
Alvin Toffler coined: Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Bantam Books, 1984).
According to Edward Hallowell: Sonja Steptoe, “Q & A: Defining a New Deficit Disorder,” www.time.com, January 8, 2006.
Continuous partial attention: Phrase coined by technology expert Linda Stone; quoted definition is from www.wordspy.com. “E-mail apnea,” also attributed to Stone, is defined in “The Too-Much-Information Age,” www.yankelovich.com, August 4, 2008.
Internet addiction disorder: In the March 2008 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, Dr. Jerald J. Block wrote, “Internet addiction appears to be a common disorder.” Block’s claim was widely reported. See, e.g., Andy Bloxham, “Internet Addiction Is a ‘Clinical Disorder,’” www.telegraph.co.uk, June 20, 2008.
nomophobia: “Nomophobia Is the Fear of Being out of Mobile Phone Contact—and It’s the Plague of Our 24/7 Age,” www.thisislondon.co.uk, posted March 31, 2008.
Time magazine: Claudia Wallis, “The Multitasking Generation,” Time, March 19, 2006.
The Nielsen Company reported: See, e.g., Katie Hafner, “Texting May Be Taking a Toll,” New York Times, May 26, 2009.
true headline: Dave Carlin, “Teen Girl Falls in Open Manhole While Texting,” www.wcbstv.com, July 11, 2009.
nature-deficit disorder: Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 2006).
writer Lowell Monke: Lowell Monke, “Unplugged Schools,” Orion, September/October 2007, www.orionmagazine.org.
By 2009, people over thirty-five: See, e.g., Claire Cain Miller, “What’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens,” New York Times, August 26, 2009.
why you can sit in a café: The café scenario I use to illustrate how the mind juggles tasks (or doesn’t) was inspired by an analogy drawn by Christopher F. Chabris in “You Have Too Much Mail,” Wall Street Journal, December 15, 2008.
By some estimates: Studies by Basex, www.basex.com.
It’s estimated: Ibid.
The brain is the most: Daniel Tammet, Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind (New York: Free Press, 2009), p. 7.
“the sustained attention of the genius”: William James, “Attention,” in Talks to Teachers on Psychology; and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (Charleston, S.C.: BiblioBazaar, 2007), p. 70.
One of the sharpest observers: Jen Sorensen, Slowpoke strip, Funny Times, June 2009.
One study by Basex: www.basex.c
om.
“the world’s greatest challenge”: From a statement issued by the Xerox Corporation about the founding of the Information Overload Research Group.
“We will be happy to serve you”: Hand-lettered sign in the café at the Providence, Rhode Island, Amtrak station.
“a symbolical mental liberation”: Risto Etelamaki, quoted but not named on National Public Radio, August 26, 2008; and by name in Agnieszka Flak, “Ants Bite, Phones Fly in Finnish Summer Bonanza,” www.reuters.com, August 26, 2008.
“You won’t find a television”: Jeryl Brunner, “10 Unplugged Vacations,” www.forbestraveler.com, June 26, 2008.
CHAPTER 4: SOLUTIONS THAT AREN’T
launched a new ad campaign: Gates-Seinfeld commercial broadcast on television, fall of 2008.68 Wired.com, for instance: Brandon Keim, “Digital Overload Is Frying Our Brains,” www.wired.com, February 6, 2009.
“Warning”: L. Gordon Crovitz, “Unloading Information Overload,” http://online.wsj.com, July 7, 2008.
The Takeaway: Broadcast of May 22, 2009; listener’s audio comment posted at www.thetakeaway.org.
“There’s a competitive advantage”: IBM researcher John Tang, quoted in Matt Richtel, “Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast,” New York Times, June 14, 2008, p. A1.
“up to 950 words a minute”: Randall Stross, “The Daily Struggle to Avoid Burial by E-Mail,” New York Times, April 20, 2008, Sunday Business section, p. 5.
A popular self-help book: Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (New York: Crown Publishers, 2007), pp. 114–16.
The human brain is wired: My discussion of the brain and attention issues benefited greatly from conversations with Christopher F. Chabris, Ph.D., of the psychology department at Union College.
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