Always Connected

  Writing this blog has alerted me to some of my internal contradictions.  For example, I yearn for equanimity, yet crave a faster connection to the Internet.  There's the rub: equanimity and torrents of data don't co-exist well, or at all.

  I guess I was vaguely aware of this contradiction before my blogging highlighted it, for in retrospect I realize I've been trying to sort it out.  I've persistently resisted replacing my antique voice-only cellphone with a smartphone, I suppose fearing that my tether to the Internet would be reinforced by mobile texting, browsing, email and apps.  At home I've come down to opening fewer than 1 in 4 of the emails in my already spam-free inbox.  I'm not active on social networks and I don't tweet.  Tilting the balance the other way, I've started blogging.  I think I've been searching all along for a sustainable equilibrium between the frenzy of technology and the stillness of self.  It's a hard struggle, but I think it essential for sanity in the Internet age.

  Many of us, particularly the young, are feeling the effects of not having such a balance.  Those effects are well analyzed by Sherry Turkle in her recent book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.  Turkle makes a compelling case that our expanding connectivity has had the perverse result of distancing us.  She has spent three decades as an MIT professor studying the issue, so I find no reason to challenge her credibility.

  Here are a few of the symptoms Turkle gives of an "alone together" syndrome: emailing or texting while in a meeting or dining with others; replacing intimate, spontaneous and hard-to-break-off telephone calls with less-demanding texts and emails; sidestepping the complexities of face-to-face friendships in favor of the less-stressful "friending" on Facebook or fantasy relationships with other avatars on Second Life. Today's young people, she says, are the first generation that does not take the simulation of closeness as second best to closeness itself.

  Turkle also has much to say about another symptom: multitasking.  By engaging in it, we enjoy the illusion that we are becoming more efficient, squeezing extra time into our already compressed schedules; we get high on that illusion.  What we have really done, she notes, is learned how to put others on hold as we switch among tasks, for we are actually capable of handling just one task at a time.  We now spend much of our time with family and friends distracted from giving them the full attention they deserve.  And all for naught, because research has shown that when we multitask our efficiency and the quality of our work are degraded. 

  I add two additional concerns to Turkle's, informed by my posting on creativity.  Being "alone together" in a crowd may prevent the random, impromptu interactions needed for communal creativity.  And having little or no down time for daydreaming may frustrate the Aha! part of individual creativity.

  For all the undisputed benefits of having a world of knowledge at our fingertips, this is a disheartening picture.  As a society we suffer from an Internet-driven obsessive-compulsive disorder.  Internal pressure assails us with withdrawal symptoms when our connection is broken, as if we had a substance addiction. (We do, although the "substance" is connectivity.)  External pressure adds to the malady, for employers are increasingly demanding 24x7 connectivity of their employees, even when on vacation.  Teenagers complain about like demands from their parents, who are newly empowered to keep track of them all the time.  I can't see how this can be good for any of us.

  Wait, it gets worse!  So far I've drawn just from the second part of Turkle's book, which is about always-connected networking.  The book's first part is about the growing impact of robots on our lives.  Today's young people, taken as they are with simulation, are more accepting of robots than the rest of us.  They grew up cherishing robotic toys like Furbies, which sold 40 million of their first generation from 1998-2000.  A third-generation will be introduced this year. 

  Those who are Furby-deprived might appreciate a description of the first Furby generation.  They were programmed to gradually speak English as they interacted with their owners, instead of their native "Furbish."  They demanded attention and responded lovingly when they got it with phrases like "I love you."  They could even communicate with other Furbies.  Like humans, they were always on—no switch—so the sole way to stop their sometimes annoying demands and chatter was to open them up with a screw driver and remove their batteries, in effect killing them.  Replacing the batteries reset them to their initial state, reincarnating them with no memory of what they came to "know" in their previous life.  Children actually mourned their death.  I can't imagine what the third-generation Furbies, fourteen years later, will be able to do, but their pretence of intelligent behavior will certainly be greater.

  Turkle's research shows that our youngest generation, primed by interaction with Furbies and other robotic toys, is quite open to the likely advent in a decade or two of widespread "intelligent" humanoid robots that could be lifelike and caring companions— even lovers and spouses (see a New York Times review of a 2007 book on that frightening reminder of Stepford Wives!).  I won't go there further, although Turkle does. My 20^th-century mind rebels.  I fear that the shards of human togetherness remaining in "alone together" will shatter further as togetherness with robots increases.  

  I flee back to the lesser dislocation of society occasioned only by the Internet's connectivity.   An eerily apt poem by Wordsworth from two centuries ago still rings true with its original words.  It becomes all the more pertinent to today's topic by deleting a single letter.  Try replacing "spending" with "sending."

The world is too much with us; late and soon,


Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;


Little we see in Nature that is ours;


We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!


This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,


The winds that will be howling at all hours,


And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,


For this, for everything, we are out of tune;



It moves us not. --Great God! I'd rather be


A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;


So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,


Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;


Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;


Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Thus did Wordsworth bemoan the societal costs of the industrial revolution.  We should listen to him as we reckon the costs of the information revolution.