When I was 16 years old, I have a vivid memory of a thunderstorm. It was probably a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. The storm clouds started to roll in, and the thunder rumbled in the distance. I was outside, climbed on top of an old school bus and lied on my back. From that vantage point, all I could see was the gathering and darkening storm clouds framed by the leaves of old tulip poplar trees. I remember the leaves revealing their lighter side in the wind, and the tactile sensation as the thunder crept progressively closer, until the rumble became more of a visceral sensation than a sound.
I do not know why I retained this memory, and lost so many others. I also do not know if this experience was formative in some way. Did it alter the way I saw and appreciated nature? Did it awaken some latent creative impulse? Did it help to form my metaphysical view of the universe? Honestly, probably not. But it was significant enough that my brain saw fit to establish synapses to encode this memory, and allow me to retrieve it decades later. Furthermore, there is one thing of which I am fairly certain. Were I sixteen years old today, and a similar storm rolled through town, instead of being caught up in the wonder of the moment I would more likely be texting my friends, playing Halo on my X-Box 360 or interacting with a social media site.
This is the fundamental premise of Michael Harris' The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connections. That is, we now live in a fundamentally different world of constant electronic connectivity, and like most transformational societal change, the transition brings great benefit, but at some cost. This book addresses this important issue through a well defined truism, an underdeveloped hypothesis and an interesting observation.
First, the truism. The rapid integration of information and communication technologies into our lives has occurred at a stunning pace. The world has changed, and if you had any doubt of this fact, Mr. Harris’ book does an admirable job of chronicling the sweeping nature of the change. The first few chapters are chock full of great factoids to fuel your cocktail party banter. In 2012, the world performed one trillion Google searches in 146 languages. During that same year we sent each other 144 billion emails every day. It took 38 years for the new technology of radio to garner 50 million adopters. Television: 13 years. Twitter: 3 years. Google + : 88 days. The ubiquitous onslaught of communication technologies into our daily lives is consuming time that used to be spent doing something else. In Mr. Harris’ view, that something else is unstructured time, free of distraction. His case is compelling, and presented in a clear and concise fashion. Still, what he has done is document a truism, albeit in a compelling and entertaining manner. I doubt there is any adult in the developed world today who would disagree with his premise.
Second, an underdeveloped hypothesis. The unstructured time we have lost is important, as we form cognitive associations in our brains during times free of distraction. Ideas tend to come to us in the shower. There is an element of serendipity to discovery. The story of Sir Isaac Newton and the apple is not a myth, but is actually fairly well corroborated. He was sitting in a garden and was struck by a falling apple. He had the sudden inspiration that all objects fall directly towards the center of the earth. Had Newton been working on his iPad, Googling current theories of attraction and crowdsourcing his thoughts across his social networks, would he have still made the cognitive leaps to the theory of gravity and differential calculus? The fact is, we do not know. Maybe the intuitive creative connection of his brain would have never made the needed association to look at the world differently. Maybe he would have gotten there more quickly (his theory was not published for another 20 years). Harris does a good job documenting a list of dangers from our hyper-connected state; however, the book leaves underdeveloped the evidence that the loss of our unstructured time is having actual negative consequences. We are evolving cognitively into beings that do not remember actual knowledge. We remember paths to access actual knowledge. For example, I know I can Google "Prologue Canterbury Tales" and immediately access the text in the original Middle English. I can also recite the first 10 lines from memory (Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote…) because I was required to memorize the prologue by my 10th grade English teacher. Was that act of memorization important to my neuro-cognitive development? Was a moment of quiet contemplation of nature on top of a school bus somehow formative? I think they were somehow important. Intuitively, I agree with Harris’ premise, and I wanted to be convinced. However, I am not sure the objective case was adequately made that we have lost something critical in moments of absence. The transition from a horse-driven to auto-driven economy and culture brought with it bane and boon. Few of us would choose to go back.
Finally, the interesting observation. The concept of “digital natives” (those born into the digital technology culture) and “digital immigrants” (older people who have adopted technologies) is well plowed ground. Harris proposes we have a micro-generation of people born in the in the mid-1980’s. This is a generation that were children prior to the information revolution, and experienced unstructured and uncluttered time, but were subsequently raised as part of the revolution. He postulates this is the only group who can really have any sense of loss in this transition. The “loss of absence” will be imperceptible to those born in the 1990s and beyond.
Harris clearly believes (and I agree) “…the brightest moments of human discovery are those unplanned and random instants when you thumb through a strange book in a foreign library or talk auto maintenance with a neuroanatomist. We need our searches to include cross-wiring and dumb accidents, too, not just algorithmic surety”. In the world of The End of Absence we will need to find a way to manufacture moments of isolation and serendipity.