The End Of Absence

Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection

Michael Harris

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781443426282
• eBook ISBN:
  9781443426299
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Only one generation in history (ours) will experience life both with and without the Internet. For everyone who follows us, online life will simply be the air they breathe. Today, we revel in ubiquitous information and constant connection, rarely stopping to consider the implications for our logged-on lives.

Michael Harris chronicles this massive shift, exploring what we've gained—and lost—in the bargain. In this eloquent and thought-provoking book, Harris argues that our greatest loss has been that of absence itself—of silence, wonder and solitude. It's a surprisingly precious commodity, and one we have less of every year. Drawing on a vast trove of research and scores of interviews with global experts, Harris explores this "loss of lack" in chapters devoted to every corner of our lives, from sex and commerce to memory and attention span. The book's message is urgent: once we've lost the gift of absence, we may never remember its value.

PART 1
Gathering

We think we have discovered a grotto that is stored with bewildering treasure; we come back to the light of day, and the gems we have brought are false—mere pieces of glass—and yet does the treasure shine on, unceasingly, in the darkness.

—Maurice Maeterlinck

CHAPTER 1
This Kills That

Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral.

—Melvin Kranzberg

SOON enough, nobody will remember life before the Internet. What does this unavoidable fact mean?

For those billions who come next, of course, it won’t mean anything very obvious. Our online technologies, taken as a whole, will have become a kind of foundational myth—a story people are barely conscious of, something natural and, therefore, unnoticed. Just as previous generations were charmed by televisions until their sets were left always on, murmuring as consolingly as the radios before them, future generations will be so immersed in the Internet that questions about its basic purpose or meaning will have faded from notice. Something tremendous will be missing from their lives—a mind-set that their ancestors took entirely for granted—but they will hardly be able to notice its disappearance. Nor can we blame them.

However, we have in this brief historical moment, this moment in between two modes of being, a very rare opportunity. For those of us who have lived both with and without the vast, crowded connectivity the Internet provides, these are the few days when we can still notice the difference between Before and After.

This is the moment. Our awareness of this singular position pops up every now and again. We catch ourselves idly reaching for our phones at the bus stop. Or we notice how, midconversation, a fumbling friend dives into the perfect recall of Google. We can still catch ourselves. We say, Wait. …

I think that within the mess of changes we’re experiencing, there’s a single difference that we feel most keenly; and it’s also the difference that future generations will find hardest to grasp. That is the end of absence—the loss of lack. The daydreaming silences in our lives are filled; the burning solitudes are extinguished.

Before all memory of those absences is shuttered, though, there is this brief time when we might record what came before. We might do something with those small, barely noticeable instances when we’re reminded of our love for absence. They flash at us amid the rush of our experience and seem to signal: Wait, wasn’t there something …?

I was shaken by one of these moments, one not-so-special day, at the offices of Vancouver magazine. I was employed there for years as an editor and staff writer. I was, to use the stultifying phrase we were offered, a “content creator.”

I presume I’m late for work as I trundle over the Granville Street Bridge on the #10 bus toward the magazine offices. Out the window, I can monitor the gunmetal sky while licking at my knuckles where Starbucks dribbles down my hand. I wonder whether I’m (a) ten minutes late, which is acceptable, even advised; or (b) twenty minutes late, at which point one invites passive-aggressive comments.

Alas. It is (b). A jockish intern smiles—“So, you decided to join us”—as I move by his gray cubicle toward my own. I give a quick laugh to avoid seeming rude, but I don’t slow my pace. Stopping leaves one open to requests for “coffee,” which means career advice. These talks only depress me, since the interns tote such fierce and poorly researched ambitions. They stream from journalism schools, expecting internships to lead to jobs at magazines and newspapers, never quite believing the truth of our haggard faces.

Our business is ailing. Each magazine, like a freighter, groans in its effort to turn, to adapt to online life—but too slow, too slow. Some publications shutter; others collapse their international bureaus; all grow anorexic; sales departments, empowered by the desperation of publishers, are able to blur the lines between advertisements and editorial further and further. (When I brought up the old concept of church and state with a senior sales associate at one magazine, she chirped, “Oh, we are church and state. But, you know, ish.”)

We aren’t quite willing to see the writing on the wall. I took an editing job at Vancouver magazine in 2008, immediately before the global recession added dynamite to our industry’s collapse. Corporate overlords in Montreal slashed a third of the jobs in the office. Meanwhile, the advent of digital technologies brought new responsibilities that we remaining few grudgingly took on each year. Ten years ago, no magazine editor imagined spending half the day maintaining Twitter feeds or refereeing comment trails on Facebook. But there we were, managing content instead of creating it. We spent most of our lives pushing electronic nothings around while staring at a glowing rectangle.

After an editorial meeting (where we’re informed that our Twitter avatar lacks “punch”), I retreat to my cubicle and begin opening windows within windows on the two monitors that are always lit atop my desk. I begin to work on a small item about the Cirque du Soleil but am derailed seventy-five words in by a video of Anderson Cooper coming out of the closet that the art director has sent me via iChat. Another iChat window opens while I’m watching the video, this time a question from the editor in chief, which requires that I open my in-box to dig up an old e-mail. My mother, meanwhile, has e-mailed me on a separate account, asking me to bring that salad she likes to dinner tomorrow night. And so on. Within ten minutes I am partway through a dozen digital interactions, but none are complete. The jockish intern drifts by with a question of his own and I give him a clipped response, because at that moment he’s just another window that I want to shut. Back in 1998, the writer Linda Stone coined the phrase that describes the state I’m in: “continuous partial attention.” It’s an impoverished state, but one I seem to welcome into my life every day.

Most of us at the magazine would actually become distraught if forced to complete a task before a new one was presented. I never ignore my computer’s alerts; every ping from my phone is seen to. Dr. Gary Small, a researcher at UCLA, writes that “once people get used to this state, they tend to thrive on the perpetual connectivity. It feeds their egos and sense of self-worth, and it becomes irresistible.” And I do, I suppose, feel a certain importance with all these pings, all these requests for connection hailing down on me. I must be very, very important. I must be needed, necessary, crucial. But something has changed since my initial few years at the magazine, something in my attitude toward the pings. What has changed?

Dr. Small points out that this atmosphere of manic disruption makes my adrenal gland pump up production of cortisol and adrenaline.

In the short run, these stress hormones boost energy levels and augment memory, but over time they actually impair cognition, lead to depression, and alter the neural circuitry in the hippocampus, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex—the brain regions that control mood and thought. Chronic and prolonged techno-brain burnout can even reshape the underlying brain structure.

Techno-brain burnout. That sounds about it. At one point that harried afternoon, I stop and count the number of windows open on my two monitors. Fourteen. As I count them up, my phone pings again and I look down at the text message glowing there:

Dude, are you alive or what?

The text is just a flick from an impatient friend, but in my distracted state I read it as a sincere question. Are you alive or what?

And that was the moment. I picked up the phone and, ignoring the message, switched on its camera function. I photographed my monitors, plastered over with e-mails and instant messages and Word files and .pdfs. Never forget that you don’t want this, I thought. Never forget that you live in an ecosystem designed to disrupt you and it will take you for a ride if you let it.

Just before the magazine forfeited half its office space—a bid to consolidate ranks and bring in some money by subletting—I quit my job.

This left me with a distressing amount of free time—time I filled, initially, by reading about a moment weirdly similar to our own: the year 1450, when a German patrician called Johannes Gutenberg, after decades of tinkering and some very sketchy loans, managed to invent a printing press with movable type.

Like the Internet, Gutenberg’s machine made certain jobs either ridiculous or redundant (so long, scriptoria). But much more was dismantled by Gutenberg’s invention than the employment of a few recalcitrant scribes. As the fidelity and speed of copying was ratcheted way up, there was a boom in what we’d now call data transfer: A great sermon delivered in Paris might be perfectly replicated in Lyon. (Branding improved, too: for the first time subjects knew what their king looked like.) Such uniformity laid the groundwork for massive leaps in knowledge and scientific understanding as a scholastic world that was initially scattered began to cohere into a consistent international conversation, one where academics and authorities could build on one another’s work rather than repeat it.¹ As its influence unfurled across Europe, the press would flatten entire monopolies of knowledge, even enabling Martin Luther to shake the foundations of the Catholic Church; next it jump-started the Enlightenment. And the printing press had its victims; its cheap and plentiful product undid whole swaths of life, from the recitation of epic poetry² to the authority of those few who could afford handmade manuscripts. In Blake Morrison’s novel The Justification of Johann Gutenberg, he has the inventor arguing with an abbot not about the content his printing press creates, but about the way text can now be read. The abbot exclaims: “The word of God needs to be interpreted by priests, not spread about like dung.”³ The very fecundity of the press, its ability to free up content and make it cheaply available to the masses, made it a danger to the established powerhouse of the Catholic Church and a serious destabilizer of culture at large. Yet for decades after its invention in 1450, the press produced only a quantitative change (more books); limited marketplaces, limited travel, and limited literacy all conspired to thwart the invention’s true potential. By contrast, we are immediately experiencing a qualitative difference in our lives. Our fate is instantly and comprehensively reimagined by online technology.

For any single human to live through such a change is extraordinary. After all, the original Gutenberg shift in 1450 was not a moment that one person could have witnessed, but a slow-blooming era that took centuries before it was fully unpacked. Literacy in England was not common until the nineteenth century, so most folk until then had little direct contact with the printed book. And the printing machine itself was not fundamentally improved upon for the first 350 years of its existence.

But today: How quickly, how irrevocably, this kills that. Since ours is truly a single moment and not an era, scholars who specialize in fifteenth-century history may be able to make only partial comparisons with the landscape we’re trekking through. While writing this book, I found it necessary to consult also with neuroscientists, psychiatrists, psychologists, technology gurus, literature professors, librarians, computer scientists, and more than a few random acquaintances who were willing to share their war stories. And all these folk, moving down their various roads, at last crossed paths—in that place called Absence. It was an idea of absence that seemed to come up time and again. Every expert, every scientist, and every friend I spoke with had a device in his or her pocket that could funnel a planet’s worth of unabridged, incomprehensible clamor. Yet it was absence that unified the elegies I heard.

We may never comprehend just what was subsumed beneath the influence of Gutenberg’s machine because the change was so total that it even became the screen through which we view the world. The gains the press yielded are mammoth and essential to our lives. But we forget: Every revolution in communication technology—from papyrus to the printing press to Twitter—is as much an opportunity to be drawn away from something as it is to be drawn toward something.

Marshall McLuhan wrote in Understanding Media that “a new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace.” The successful new medium actively subjugates the older ones. It “never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.” So the dismantling of magazine and newspaper offices, the vast fields of lost writers and editors now blogging and bitching from cafés around the world, are not just employment casualties; they’re a symptom of a more profound wreckage.

As we embrace a technology’s gifts, we usually fail to consider what they ask from us in return—the subtle, hardly noticeable payments we make in exchange for their marvelous service. We don’t notice, for example, that the gaps in our schedules have disappeared because we’re too busy delighting in the amusements that fill them. We forget the games that childhood boredom forged because boredom itself has been outlawed. Why would we bother to register the end of solitude, of ignorance, of lack? Why would we care that an absence has disappeared?

The more I thought about this seismic shift in our lives—our rapid movement toward online experience and away from rarer, concrete things—the more I wanted to understand the nature of the experience itself. How does it feel to live through our own Gutenberg moment? How does it feel to be the only people in history to know life with and without the Internet?

And if we work hard enough to understand this massive game changer, and then name the parts of the new game we want to go along with and the parts we don’t, can we then pack along some critical aspect of our earlier lives that those technologies would otherwise strip from us? Or will we forget forever the value of that lack and instead see only a collection of gains? It’s hard to remember what we loved about absence; we never ask for our deprivation back.

To understand our unique predicament, and understand how to win ourselves those best possible lives, we need to root out answers in every corner of our experience. But the questions we need to ask at each juncture remain as simple as they are urgent:

What will we carry forward?

And what worthy things might we thoughtlessly leave behind?

The answer to that second question was painfully clear as I sat at my little beige desk in the offices of Vancouver magazine. What I’d left behind was absence. As a storm of digital dispatches hammered at the wall of my computer screen, I found myself desperate for sanctuary. There was a revulsion against these patterns imposed on me. I wanted a long and empty wooden desk where I could get some real work done. I wanted a walk in the woods with nobody to meet. I wanted release from the migraine-scale pressure of constant communication, the ping-ping-ping of perma-messaging, the dominance of communication over experience.

Somehow I’d left behind my old quiet life. And now I wanted it back.

If you were born before 1985, then you know what life is like both with the Internet and without. You are making the pilgrimage from Before to After. (Any younger and you haven’t lived as an adult in a pre-Internet landscape.) Those of us in this straddle generation, with one foot in the digital pond and the other on the shore, are experiencing a strange suffering as we acclimatize. We are the digital immigrants, and like all immigrants, we don’t always find the new world welcoming. The term itself—“digital immigrant”—isn’t a perfect one: It’s often assumed that the immigrant is somehow upgrading his or her citizenship or fleeing persecution. As for me and my peers, we may prefer to keep a pied-à-terre in the homeland of our youth.

Seen in a prudential light, our circumstances are also a tremendous gift. If we’re the last people in history to know life before the Internet, we are also the only ones who will ever speak, as it were, both languages. We are the only fluent translators of Before and After. Our children will no more be able to see online life for what it is than we can comprehend the changes wrought by Gutenberg’s printing press in the fifteenth century (or, for that matter, the changes our ancestors experienced when transitioning from an oral to a written culture). Some inventions are more than discreet gadgets; they dissolve into the very atmosphere of our lives. And who can notice the air?

Early on in my research for this book, I spoke with the celebrated cultural historian Alberto Manguel, who at the age of sixty-five largely eschews the bother of digital immigration. I wanted to hear in particular how this man, who wrote A History of Reading, felt about the movement toward di...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Prologue: This Can Show You Everything
• PART 1: Gathering
• PART 2: Breaking Away
• Epilogue: What Comes Across, What Stays Behind
• Glossary
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author
• More praise for The End of Absence
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher