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

by Michael Harris

  Of course those youths, expert multitaskers: Ibid.

  764 text messages each month: “The Mobile Consumer: A Global Snapshot,” Nielsen Company, accessed January 7, 2014, http://www.nielsen.com/content/dam/corporate/us/en/reports-downloads/2013%20Reports/Mobile-Consumer-Report-2013.pdf.

  “It may become what we expect”: Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 295.

  A University of Michigan metastudy: “Empathy: College Students Don’t Have as Much as They Used To,” University of Michigan News, accessed January 7, 2014, http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/7724.

  increased levels of narcissism: Jean M. Twenge, “The Evidence for Generation Me and Against Generation We,” Emerging Adulthood 1, no. 1 (2013): 11–16.

  Radio took thirty-eight years: Jay N. Giedd, “The Digital Revolution and Adolescent Brain Evolution,” Journal of Adolescent Health 51, no. 2 (2012): 101–5.

  6.8 billion cell phone subscriptions: “The World in 2013,” ICT Facts and Figures, International Telecommunication Union.

  a sobering 99 percent saturation: “The Mobile Consumer Report,” Nielsen Company, accessed January 7, 2014, http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/reports/2013/mobile-consumer-report-february-2013.html.

  in China . . . a committed 6 percent: Ibid.

  “O most ingenious Theuth”: Plato, The Essential Plato (New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1999), 844–45.

  The Florentine book merchant: Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 48.

  “Cortical areas that once”: John Brockman, ed., Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net’s Impact on Our Minds and Future (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011), 271.

  “For the most obvious character of print”: Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 40.

  “The eye speeded up”: Ibid., 50.

  “shrill and expansive individualism”: Ibid., 18.

  On returning to the MRI machine: Gary Small et al., “Your Brain on Google,” American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry 17, no. 2 (2009): 116–26.

  Your brain’s ability to empathize: Gary Small, interview with author, March 26, 2013.

  “the brighter the software”: Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: Norton, 2011), 216.

  The most startling example: Kazuhisa Shibata et al., “Perceptual Learning Incepted by Decoded fMRI Neurofeedback Without Stimulus Presentation,” Science 334, no. 6061 (December 9, 2011): 1413–15.

  “Think of a person watching a computer screen”: “Vision Scientists Demonstrate Innovative Learning Method,” National Science Foundation, accessed January 10, 2014, http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=122523&org=NSF&preview=false.

  Their boiled-down message: “The Future of Higher Education,” Pew Research Internet Project, accessed January 10, 2014, http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Future-of-Higher-Education.aspx.

  Price promises that the young: Ibid.

  40“Some said they are already witnessing”: “Elon Studies the Future of ‘Generation Always-On,’” Elon University, accessed January 10, 2014, http://www.elon.edu/e-net/Note.aspx?id=958393&board_ids=5%2C58&max=50.

  “design out of chaos”: Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 50.

  A 2013 study from the University of Michigan: “The Generation X Report,” University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, Winter 2013, accessed January 9, 2014, http://home.isr.umich.edu/files/2013/01/GenX_Vol2Iss2_print.pdf.

  “Other boys would not play with me”: Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (London: Penguin Classics, 1996), 32–33.

  “We must reserve a back shop”: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1958), 177.

  Chapter 3: Confession

  “The highest and most beautiful things”: Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or (Copenhagen: University Bookshop Reitzel, 1843), 89.

  The girl’s name was Amanda Todd: “Zeitgeist 2012,” Google, accessed January 10, 2014, http://www.google.ca/zeitgeist/2012/#-the-world/people. (Whitney Houston and Kate Middleton held the two top spots that year.)

  She did not look into the camera: “Amanda Todd’s Mother Speaks Out,” YouTube, accessed January 10, 2014, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6dk9moSUqA.

  “it was something that needed to be watched by many”: Carol Todd, e-mail message to author, January 13, 2014.

  seventeen million times: Carol Todd, interview with author, April 19, 2013.

  Singapore children who were bullied online: Thomas J. Holt, Grace Chee, and Esther Ng, “Exploring the Consequences of Bullying Victimization in a Sample of Singapore Youth,” International Criminal Justice Review 23, no. 1 (2013): 5–24.

  22 percent of students: Ibid.

  “every possible social and political problem”: Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), 312.

  “regardless of what you are looking at”: Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013), 357.

  “We bend to the inanimate”: Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2012), xii.

  “There are things, which you cannot tell your friends”: Ibid., 51.

  “Extremely short exposures”: Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation (New York: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1976), 7.

  BMW was forced to recall: Clifford Nass, “Sweet Talking Your Computer,” Wall Street Journal, August 28, 2010, accessed January 12, 2014, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748703959704575453411132636080.

  “One day ladies will take their computers”: Tom Siegfried, “A Mind from Math,” Science News, vol. 181, issue 13 (2012): 26.

  According to Brian Christian’s account: Brian Christian, The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive (New York: Anchor Books, 2012), 20.

  Infants at two or three months: Maria Konnikova, “Infants Possess Intermingled Senses,” Scientific American, accessed January 10, 2014, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=infant-kandinskys.

  “This person thinks, ‘I am damaged’”: CNN has posted a transcript of that Anderson Cooper 360° segment here: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1009/30/acd.01.html. A video of the segment can be found on YouTube: http://youtube.com/watch?v=bgxNItGmiC4.

  One Carnegie Mellon researcher: Chloe Albanesius, “Social Security Numbers Revealed . . . with Facial-Recognition Software?,” PCMag.com, August 1, 2011, accessed January 10, 2014, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2389540,00.asp.

  “the male gaze gone viral”: Meghan Murphy, “Putting Selfies Under a Feminist Lens,” Georgia Straight, accessed March 19, 2014, http://www.straight.com/life/368086/putting-selfies-under-feminist-lens.

  “Self-tracking is . . . revelatory”: Nora Young, The Virtual Self: How Our Digital Lives Are Altering the World Around Us (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2012), 45.

  “Community feeling” had been a dominant theme: Yalta T. Uhls and Patricia M. Greenfield, “The Rise of Fame: An Historical Content Analysis,” Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace 5, no. 1 (2011): article 1, http://www.cyberpsychology.eu/view.php?cisloclanku=2011061601.

  British parents confirmed this position: “Children Would Rather Become Popstars Than Teachers or Lawyers,” The Telegraph, October 1, 2009, accessed January 10, 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/6250626/Children-would-rather-become-popstars-than-teachers-or-lawyers.html.

  “that which cannot be articulated”: Young, Virtual Self, 203.

  Chapter 4: Public Opinion


  “We all do no end of feeling”: Mark Twain, Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches (New York: Penguin Classics, 1994), 286–87.

  The world’s arbiter of truth: “Wikipedia: List of Hoaxes on Wikipedia,” accessed January 13, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wikipedia.

  Four years later, I asked: “Who is Erica Feldman . . . ?,” snapshot from January 6, 2014, via Google’s cache, http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Q77Wj1JfErsJ:wiki.answers.com/Q/Who_is_erica_feldman_the_one_that_invented_the_hair_straightnener+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca&client=firefox-a.

  There are even hoaxes about hoaxes: “List of Fictitious People,” Wikipedia.com, accessed January 15, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_fictitious_people&diff=211003619&oldid=205705808.

  I see there are currently: “Wikipedia:Statistics,” Wikipedia, accessed January 17, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics.

  Printing Wikipedia in a book: “Wikipedia:Size in Volumes,” Wikipedia, accessed January 17, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes.

  “I guess we will just have to accept”: Roger C. Schank, Making Minds Less Educated Than Our Own (Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008), vii.

  In 2013, only 12 cases: Dave Craven, e-mail messages to author, June 26, 2013, and January 22, 2014.

  a stunning 91 percent of Wikipedia editors: “Editor Survey 2011,” Wikipedia: Meta-Wiki, accessed January 15, 2014, http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Survey_2011.

  “the actual inventor” of the hair iron: “Hoaxes, or Why Wikipedia Needs Flagged Revisions,” accessed January 15, 2014, http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=647&p=12233.

  She died in New York: “Madame C. J. Walker,” MIT Inventor of the Week Archive, accessed January 15, 2014, http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/cjwalker.html.

  Sadly, and perhaps inevitably: Ibid.

  “Live the questions now”: Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (New York: Vintage, 1986), 34.

  “credentialed to uncredentialed”: David Weinberger, Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 67.

  “Let the wise instruct the wise”: Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 223.

  “the duplication of the hermetic writings”: Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 51.

  By the late 1800s: Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (London: Penguin, 2008), 22–23.

  “the dominant mood of contemporary American culture”: William A. Henry, In Defense of Elitism (New York: Anchor Books, 1995), 177.

  “If market pricing is the only legitimate test”: Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 360.

  “As more journals moved online”: Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: Norton, 2011), 217.

  the number hit 65.8 million: “Yelp Reviewed,” Statista, accessed January 16, 2014, http://socialtimes.com/files/2012/02/yelp-by-the-numbers-972.jpg.

  In 2013, Yelp enticed 117 million unique users per month: “10 Things You Should Know About Yelp,” Yelp: About Us, accessed January 17, 2014, http://www.yelp.ca/about.

  “Yelpers” have written 47 million reviews: Ibid.

  A restaurateur in Ottawa’s famous ByWard Market: “Marisol Simoes Jailed: Co-owner of Kinki and Mambo in Ottawa Gets 90 Days for Defamation,” Huffington Post, accessed January 16, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/11/16/marisol-simoes-jailed_n_2146205.html.

  “Today’s internet is killing our culture”: Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur (New York: Doubleday/Currency, 2007).

  “the filter bubble”: Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think (New York: Penguin Press, 2011).

  Google announced that Google Maps: Evegny Morozov, “My Map or Yours?,” Slate, accessed September 4, 2013, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/05/google_maps_personalization_will_hurt_public_space_and_engagement.html.

  “Bullshit is unavoidable”: Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 63.

  “There I’ve gone and given away the plot”: Dorothy Parker, “Far from Well,” The New Yorker, October 20, 1928.

  Chapter 5: Authenticity

  “But isn’t everything here green?”: L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (New York: Knopf, 1992), 151–52.

  Over the next few years: Author interview with Andrew Ng, July 11, 2013.

  Latest numbers show Coursera hosts: “A Triple Milestone,” Coursera Blog for October 23, 2013, accessed January 17, 2014, http://blog.coursera.org/post/64907189712/a-triple-milestone-107-partners-532-courses-5-2.

  “We don’t educate people as others wished”: Max Chafkin, “Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun, Godfather of Free Online Education, Changes Course,” Fast Company, accessed December 2, 2013, http://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastian-thrun-uphill-climb.

  “school was an invention of the printing press”: Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1993), 10.

  Marshall McLuhan argues that whenever we amplify: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, (Berkeley, Calif.: Ginkgo Press, 2003), 63–70.

  “Welcome to a world through glass”: “What It Does—Google Glass,” accessed September 5, 2013, http://www.google.com/glass/start/what-it-does/.

  “the brightness and glory of the Emerald City”: Baum, Wonderful Wizard of Oz, 88.

  “No more than in any other city”: Ibid., 151–52.

  “a cathedral quits its site”: Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (London: Penguin, 2008), 6.

  “The genuineness of a thing”: Ibid., 7.

  “for the first time . . . a person is placed”: Ibid., 19.

  A prime example is the Google Books project: Robert Darnton, “The National Digital Public Library Is Launched!,” New York Review of Books, accessed February 17, 2014. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/apr/25/national-digital-public-library-launched/.

  “precious old book”: Stephan Füssel, Gutenberg and the Impact of Printing (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2005), 198.

  His Bible’s 1,282 pages: John Man, The Gutenberg Revolution: The Story of a Genius and an Invention That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2010), 146.

  The old “authentic” artifact: Curt F. Bühler, The Fifteenth-Century Book: The Scribes, the Printers, the Decorators (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960), 16.

  our culture of electronic simulation: Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 4.

  “because they’re too busy”: Geoffrey Miller, “Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens,” Seed, accessed January 16, 2014, http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/why_we_havent_met_any_aliens/.

  “good enough for all practical purposes”: E. M. Forster, “The Machine Stops,” Oxford and Cambridge Review (November 1909).

  “At the end of the story”: Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 129.

  “Humanity has learned its lesson”: Forster, “The Machine Stops.”

  By one report, the aurorae lit up so brightly: Sten F. Odenwald and James L. Green, “Bracing the Satellite Infrastructure for a Solar Superstorm,” Scientific American, accessed January 16, 2014, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bracing-for-a-solar-superstorm.

  Pete Riley, a scientist at Predictive Science: Pete Riley, “On the Probability of Occurrence of Extreme Space Weather Events,” Space Weather 10, no. 2 (2012), http://onl
inelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2011SW000734/abstract.

  Great Britain’s Royal Academy of Engineering: “Extreme Space Weather,” Royal Academy of Engineering, http://www.raeng.org.uk/news/publications/list/reports/space_weather_full_report_final.pdf.

  Such an event almost took place: Pete Riley, e-mail message to author, June 25, 2013.

  “much of the modern industrialized and militarized world”: Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation (New York: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1976).