Pico Iyer’s “The Joy of Quiet” is the latest in a long series of missives decrying the overwhelming onslaught of social media and the virtue of the disconnect. It’s a perfectly fine article and I don’t disagree with him on any particular point, in fact it puts me in mind of a quote by David Bowie where, in the 90′s, he spoke of a friend who predicted that in the future to avoid the virtual and synthetic chaos of the world around them, people would come home and touch a piece of wood just to feel connected to something real. The retreats Iyer speaks of seem to resonate with that idea.
That having been said, there are certain issues that come up again and again in these sorts of articles that always seem a bit jarring to me. First of all, there’s the obvious question, which I’ve yet to hear adequately answered, which is the question of self-discipline. These articles usually mention some extreme disconnect solution of going someplace without internet access or locking one’s cellphone in the trunk during long drives or using software that prevents internet access for a period of time. The implication is that many people simply cannot just not use a tool if it’s available to them. They have to cut themselves off from it somehow. It seems like the digital equivalent of stomach stapling.
I wonder, however, how much of this is a problem of discipline versus a problem of new technology. When we’re presented with a new option which we never had before, we tend to opt into treating it like it’s scarce, whether it is or not. When we get a new toy, we use it all the time, behaving as if it won’t be there forever, even if it will be. So when we have the option to use e-mail, we use it as often as possible, which is always. Ditto texting, rss, Facebook, Twitter, etc. These technologies offer the double-whammy of not just being new(ish) but also of always having something new to offer. And somehow we decide that new equals urgent.
But that’s the philosophical mistake, isn’t it? New doesn’t equal urgent. New equals new. (And usually not all that new. Usually a reiteration of something we’ve seen before.) But with a new technology that we haven’t quite wrapped our heads around how to use efficiently, we tend to default to more use and not less (granted, this is in the case of technologies that are easy to use; we easily default to less use with new technologies that are intimidating to use, which is why no one ever programmed their VCR clocks).
And here is where I agree quite strongly with Iyer, who writes:
The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual.
And that’s just it. It’s not so much a question of self-discipline as it is a question of education. How do we actually use these tools? What are they actually good at? Just because we can check for new messages every second doesn’t mean we have to. But what if that’s actually something that needs to be taught? What if it’s not inherently obvious? It doesn’t seem to be obvious with other forms of consumption; why would it be so here?
At least, what if this needs to be taught to a generation that did not grow up with the technology in the first place? I wonder if the next generation, who has the ability to take this technology for granted, will actually achieve a greater balance between their social media life and all other aspects of their life. Something more seamless and without distraction (or, more to the point, where distraction is redefined altogether). Simply because for them, these technologies will be what the phone was for us. A part of the landscape.
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