On a spring day 41 years ago, I climbed on a Honda CD750 and headed west. After a winter living in the Northeast, I was ready to embrace the wide-open spaces. The farthest west I’d been was New Mexico. I wanted to see California, swim in the Pacific.
My sister, just married, was living in Vancouver where her husband was playing professional football. That was my general destination. Along the way I had friends to visit in Texas, New Mexico and Oregon.
The motorcycle had no windshield. My biker gear consisted of two canvas duffel bags secured by bungee cords and an olive green rain suit purchased from Gibson’s, a discount store in the building that now houses the Palmer Home Thrift Store. I was 23 years old and blessed with an abundance of time and few responsibilities.
For navigation I had a handful of gas station road maps. There were, of course, no cell phones, Internet, GPS or double shot lattes; only truck stops, diners and the kindness of strangers. And pay phones.
I was reminded of that road trip after reading two recent columns in The New York Times, one by Timothy Egan, the other by Roger Cohen. Egan cited a Microsoft study that found our average attention span is now eight seconds, down from 12 in the year 2000. We now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish, Egan writes.
Included with the study is a quote from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: “The scarce commodity of the future will be human attention.”
The future may already be here. What percentage of the people we pass on the street are lost in the small blue universe of their smartphones? It’s difficult, maybe impossible, to have a satisfying conversation with someone with a “live” phone in their hand.
Sherry Turkle is MIT professor whose studies how new technologies are changing our conversations. Before a recent interview with NPR’s Scott Simon, Turkle handed her iPhone to someone out of her line of vision. “Because,” said Turkle, “research shows that the very sight of the iPhone anywhere in your line of vision actually changes the conversation.”
Cohen in his column, “Ways to be free” writes: “Like debt, it (technology) never sleeps. It confines you. It distracts you. It binds you. It depoliticizes you through isolation and through the blurring, in the cacophony it delivers, of fantasy with fact. …
“Yet minds feel more crimped, fear more pervasive, possibility more limited, adventure more choreographed, politics more stale, economics more skewed, pressure more crushing, escape more elusive.”
Where was my mind during those long hours with scenery blurring past? I remember more than once thinking, even while being pelted with hail in northern California, there could be no better way to experience this vast continent than riding through it on a motorcycle.
As Cohen observes, the Internet has had a profound affect on the way we live our lives and perceive the world. We’re substituting YouTube videos for real-life experiences.
We now spend almost three hours a day on mobile devices, according to a recent study by Flurry, an analytics arm of Yahoo.
On Friday a colleague said about a former coworker I’d asked about: “I finally got an email from W. He said he gave up emailing for a month.”
Desperate times, desperate measures.
The writer Zadie Smith in a list of “10 Good Writing Habits,” found on a webpage titled “Writer’s Toolbox” urges writers to work on a computer disconnected from the Internet.
Egan offers two antidotes to our 21st century malady of ever decreasing attention spans: gardening and deep reading. Plant something and you are subject to nature’s rhythms. In nature the clatter of the day-to-day fades to insignificance. Disappear into a book you’ve always wanted to read. Better yet, turn off your cellphone and be with someone you love.
Resolved: to spend less time staring at screens, more time out in the world talking with people, actually doing stuff, even if it means getting pelted with hail stones.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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