Back in 2006, when I was trying to make a living as an adjunct instructor teaching composition and literature classes at a small pile of Boston-area colleges, I spent an awful lot of time rushing around. My 13-mile commute in to Boston took about an hour, and the 5-mile train ride from one college to another took about another 45 minutes. I had no office, just a common area for meeting with students. I had no money–anyone who’s done adjunct work knows why–and I eventually snagged a part-time job on top of my full time course load. The money was nice, but I spent so much of my life running around, you know?
Also in 2006, I stood opposed to new technologies. I refused to get a cellphone. A friend gave me an iPod as a holiday gift and I worried about whether I would use it. In fact, I worried about whether even owning an iPod would degrade my life. Out of the mouths of babes, right?
That year, I required all of my students to read a NYTimes opinion piece bemoaning humanity’s move toward constant technological stimulation. The piece, called Feet and minds need a chance to wander, argues that creativity, powerful ideas, and genius of all sorts require silence, time for daydreaming, and an unplugged mind. The author, Clyde Haberman, offers the insights of several MacArthur Genius Fellowship winners:
If you ask MacArthur fellows about creativity, you find near-unanimity on the importance of staying unwired.
It is not always easy to do so, said Dorothy Q. Thomas, a human-rights consultant in New York and a 1998 winner. Work requires her to be on her cellphone ”even while walking, even while eating.” She accomplishes a great deal that way. But no doubt, Ms. Thomas said, it ”drains a lot away from reflection.”
Christopher Chyba, an astrophysicist and a 2001 fellow, recalled a light-bulb moment that came some years ago while he was taking a walk. The thought struck him that water from comets played a role in creating the earth’s oceans. ”It is probably true,” Mr. Chyba said, ”that if I had been listening to music or to Books on Tape, it wouldn’t have occurred to me.”
”The thing that is so precious, which becomes so hard to get, is uninterrupted time,” he said.
AND cellphones are, if nothing else, time thieves.
”Nonconnectivity becomes a commodity, something to cherish,” said Jonathan Lethem, a Brooklyn novelist and a new MacArthur fellow. ”You won’t hear different, particularly from novelists. You need so much ruminative time to build these elaborate alternate realities. Every novelist is running away from the telephone. Has been for 100 years.”
It troubles Majora Carter, another 2005 winner and founder of a group called Sustainable South Bronx, that many young people are wired all the time. ”They don’t have the ability anymore to create things in their own head, to create fantasies, to create dreams for themselves,” she said.
For that matter, young or old, people seem also to have lost the ability to whistle melodically. When was the last time that you heard someone whistling sweetly on the street?
In 2006, I agreed wholeheartedly with Haberman and his MacArthur Geniuses that feet and minds need a chance to wander.
By 2009, I had changed my tune.
I had acquired my first cellphone, then my second: a smartphone with unlimited data and messaging to best accommodate my mobile technology needs. I was on my third laptop, for which I purchased extra memory and two external hard drives–necessary for holding the videos, music, and creative work I was generating. I was on my second iPod, one with more memory (but that still was unable to hold all of the media content I wanted to carry with me). You get the idea, right?
Now it’s 2012. My awesome mom gave me a Kindle Fire for Christmas and I immediately purchased insurance for my Kindle because I carry all my technology with me all the time, and I’m so hard on my stuff that I bust basically all of it. I’m reorganizing my house this week, partially around my need for a charging station near my desk, partially around the chaotic nest of plugs and chargers and cords that stretch around every seat in my apartment.
And recently, I talked to my pal Nick, a doctoral candidate who’s serious about finishing up his dissertation right nao, about his productivity strategies. He purchased the software tool Freedom, which blocks your laptop’s connectivity for a time period that you set. The only way to disable Freedom once you turn it on, he said, is to restart your computer–”which is just humiliating.”
When Nick sits down to write, he turns on Freedom and puts his cellphone in a closet on the other side of his apartment. In 2006 I would have admired him for his self-discipline. In 2009 I would have scoffed at him for hiding from his technology. And now, in 2012, I admire him for his self-discipline.
Here’s a NYTimes article I ran into this morning: The joy of quiet. The author, Pico Iyer, explains that
[i]n barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.
It’s a new year, and I want nothing more this year than to rein myself in. I want to shed my distractions and up my productivity. I want to find ways to separate my professional and personal lives, intertwined primarily because of my constant connectivity.
And I’m considering buying Freedom, even though I could easily just turn off my internet connection. (Though if it was “easy,” wouldn’t I already have done it?) I’m considering leaving my technologies at home, docking my laptop to my desk. (Making it a desktop computer?) I often shut off my phone’s email app, and when I charge my phone at bedtime, I like to do it across the room from my bed to stop myself from checking it when I wake up during the night.
Nothing feels better than productivity. And there’s a lot that I’m willing to do to get the good feeling back.
No related posts.
dan bloom
January 3rd, 2012
THE CONSTANT DIN – “the CD”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c34UGXlYEwA
In a recent interview, the writer George Steiner spoke about “the constant din” that surrounds us 24/7 now in this postmodern
high-tech world we have created. He was speaking of the need to find silence from time to time, to get away from the constant din
of life. And then Time magazine essayist Pico Iyer wrote a splendid oped commentary in the New York Times the other day
titled “The Joy of Quiet.”
Things come together. After reading the Steiner interview last week, I took the way he spoke of “the constant din” to have an extra
meaning, and I put some quotation marks around the phrase and shortened it to “the CD.” And by CD I mean “constant din” and by “the CD” I mean
“the constant din.”
I sent the new coinage over to the folks at Urban Dictionary, and 23 hours later, in the midst of the constant din, the editors there accepted it and
“the CD” is now part of the online dictionary. In addition, I sent the link over to Facebook, I blogged it and then I made a YouTube piece about
it as well. And then I sent the entire linkage event by email to both Mr Steiner and Mr Iyer.
A new meme is born.
Steiner was asked in a recent interview conducted by a young woman: “You have argued that new technologies are a threat to the “silence” and “intimacy” necessary for an encounter with great works.”
Steiner, now 82, replied: ”People are living in a constant din. There is no more night in cities. Young people are afraid of silence. What will become of serious and difficult reading? Is it possible to read Plato while wearing a Walkman? I find this very worrying.”
Iyer, for his part, spoke about how how had read an interview with cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? Iyer asked himself, and then he asked Starck the same question:
“I never read any magazines or watch TV,” Starck told Iyer. “Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied to Iyer, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.”
Iyer also thinks that silence is golden.
“In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time,” he opedded in the Times. “The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.”
Pico Iyer knows what the CD is all about and why it is bad for us. George Steiner has known this all his life.
The average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen, Nicholas Carr wrote in “The Shallows.”
Mr. Carr also knows what the CD is all about and how damaging it can be. So do important thinkers and writers such as William Powers, Edward Tenner
and Emily Bazelon.
“The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, although one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month,”
Pico Iyer tells us in the Times piece. “The urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context.”
“Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.”
Pascal also once said that “all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Ouch! Oi. He knew about the CD, too.
Iyer notes: “We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And — as he might also have said — we’re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines.”
The CD, the CD, the CD threatens to do us in! That damn constant din.
So what to do?
Iyer observes that two of his journalist pals observe an “Internet sabbath” every weekend, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning, “so as to try to revive those ancient customs known as family meals and conversation.”
Iyer also says he friends who try to go on long walks on Sundays, or conveniently “forget” their cellphones at home.
For Iyer, who lives in Japan now with his Japanese wife and her two children, he has never once in his life used a cellphone and he’s never Tweeted or entered Facebook.
He does use email, however, although for some reason he does not reply to my polite questions by email.
I try not to go online till my day’s writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event.
Iyer says he’s looking for a kind of postmodern joy that goes beyond the CD, which a monk named David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”
Me, I’m looking for a way to put the CD its place and keep it on a tight leash. We do not need “a constant din.” We need a constant peace. Iyer says it well, and Professor
Steiner knows it all too well. We are doomed, doomed, if we don’t keep the CD at bay.
It will only get worse, no?