The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection (26 page)

Prologue: This Can Show You Everything

The settlement called Batu Lima
:
Linda Jimi, interview with author, January 17, 2013. (The town in question is Kampung Kibbas.)

One daughter
:
Linda Jimi, interview with and e-mail message to author, January 17, 2013.

Part 1: Gathering

“We think we have discovered”
:
Maurice Maeterlinck, “La morale mystique,” in
The Treasure of the Humble
, trans. Alfred Sutro
(New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1903), 61–62.

Chapter 1: This Kills That

“Technology is neither good nor bad”
:
Melvin Kranzberg, “Technology and History: ‘Kranzberg’s Laws,’”
Technology and Culture
27, no. 3 (1986): 544–60.

a kind of foundational myth
:
I’m using the broader sense of “myth” here, as defined by Roland Barthes in his 1957 book
Mythologies
(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957).

“once people get used”
:
Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan,
iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind
(New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 18.

“In the short run”
:
Ibid., 19.

the printing machine itself
:
Stephan Füssel, “Gutenberg and Today’s Media Change,”
Publishing Research Quarterly
16, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 3–10.

“a new medium is never”
:
Marshall McLuhan,
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
(Berkeley, Calif.: Gingko Press, 2003), 237.

“I can only describe it personally”
:
Alberto Manguel, interview with author, April 29, 2013.

“faucet of foolishness”
:
Jean Cocteau,
Past Tense: The Cocteau Diaries
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 75.

“every time someone switches it on”
:
Groucho Marx,
Groucho Marx and Other Short Stories and Tall Tales: Selected Writings of Groucho Marx
(New York: Faber & Faber, 1993), xxix.

“they can only give you answers”
:
William Fifield, “Pablo Picasso: A Composite Interview,”
Paris Review
32 (Summer–Fall 1964): 62.

we “liked” 4.5 billion items
:
“Facebook’s Growth in the Past Year,” Facebook, accessed January 17, 2014, https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151908376831729&set=a.10151908376636729 .1073741825.20531316728&type=1&theater.

one hundred hours of video
:
“Statistics,” YouTube, accessed January 17, 2014, http://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html.

637 photos to Instagram
:
“Press Page,” Instagram, accessed January 17, 2014, http://instagram.com/press/#.

40 percent of all people
:
“The World in 2013,”
ICT Facts and Figures,
International Telecommunication Union, accessed January 17, 2014, http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFactsFigures2013-e.pdf.

Social media trains our behavior
:
Jeff Bullas published reports from the Global Web Index in “12 Awesome Social Media Facts and Statistics for 2013,” accessed January 17, 2014, http://www.jeffbullas.com/2013/09/20/12-awesome-social-media-facts-and-statistics-for-2013/.

93 percent of college students
:
Merry J. Sleigh, Aimee W. Smith, and Jason Laboe, “Professors’ Facebook Content Affects Students’ Perceptions and Expectations,”
Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking
16, no. 7 (2013): 489–96.

In Malaysia
:
Lim Yung-Hui
,
“Facebook in Asia,”
Forbes
.
com
, accessed January 6, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/limyunghui/2012/07/16/facebook-in-asia-growth-deceleration-continues-latest-stats/.

Americans spent 520 billion
:
“State of the Media: The Social Media Report 2012,” Nielsen Company, accessed January 7, 2014, http://www.nielsen.com/content/dam/corporate/us/en/reports-downloads/2012-Reports/The-Social-Media-Report-2012.pdf.

“A car or a plane enabled you”
:
Susan Greenfield, “Are We Becoming Cyborgs?,”
New York Times,
November 30, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/30/opinion/global/maria-popova-evgeny-morozov-susan-greenfield-are-we-becoming-cyborgs.html?_r=0.

“the great handwriting of the human race”
:
Victor Hugo,
Notre-Dame de Paris
(New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1888)
, 194.

“Not till we are lost”
:
Henry David Thoreau,
Walden
(New York: Everyman’s Library, 1992), 153.

According to research by Nielsen
:
“New Mobile Obsession U.S. Teens Triple Data Usage,” Nielsen Company, accessed January 6, 2014, http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/newswire/2011/new-mobile-obsession-u-s-teens-triple-data-usage.html.

Chapter 2: Kids These Days

“Human brains are exquisitely evolved”
:
Susan
Greenfield, “Are We Becoming Cyborgs?,”
New York Times
, November 30, 2012.

As early as 2010
:
“Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds,” Kaiser Family Foundation, accessed January 7, 2014, http://www.kff.org/entmedia/mh012010pkg.cfm.

Of course those youths, expert multitaskers
:
Ibid.

764 text messages each month
:
“The Mobile Consumer: A Global Snapshot,” Nielsen Company, accessed January 7, 2014, http://www.nielsen.com/content/dam/corporate/us/en/reports-downloads/2013%20Reports/Mobile-Consumer-Report-2013.pdf.

“It may become what we expect”
:
Sherry Turkle,
Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
(New York: Basic Books, 2012),
295.

A University of Michigan metastudy
:
“Empathy: College Students Don’t Have as Much as They Used To,” University of Michigan News, accessed January 7, 2014, http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/7724.

increased levels of narcissism
:
Jean M. Twenge, “The Evidence for Generation Me and Against Generation We,”
Emerging Adulthood
1, no. 1 (2013): 11–16.

Radio took thirty-eight years
:
Jay N. Giedd, “The Digital Revolution and Adolescent Brain Evolution,”
Journal of Adolescent Health
51, no. 2 (2012):
101–5.

6.8 billion cell phone subscriptions
:
“The World in 2013,”
ICT Facts and Figures,
International Telecommunication Union.

a sobering 99 percent saturation
:
“The Mobile Consumer Report,” Nielsen Company, accessed January 7, 2014, http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/reports/2013/mobile-consumer-report-february-2013.html.

in China
 . . . a committed 6 percent:
Ibid.

“O most ingenious Theuth”
:
Plato,
The Essential Plato
(New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1999), 844–45.

The Florentine book merchant
:
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein,
The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe,
2nd ed
.
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 48.

“Cortical areas that once”
:
John Brockman, ed.,
Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net’s Impact on Our Minds and Future
(New York: Harper Perennial, 2011),
271.

“For the most obvious character of print”
:
Marshall McLuhan,
The Gutenberg Galaxy
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 40.

“The eye speeded up”
:
Ibid., 50.

“shrill and expansive individualism”
:
Ibid., 18.

On returning to the MRI machine
:
Gary Small et al., “Your Brain on Google,”
American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry
17, no. 2 (2009): 116–26.

Your brain’s ability to empathize
:
Gary Small, interview with author, March 26, 2013.

“the brighter the software”
:
Nicholas Carr,
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
(New York: Norton, 2011), 216.

The most startling example
:
Kazuhisa Shibata et al., “Perceptual Learning Incepted by Decoded fMRI Neurofeedback Without Stimulus Presentation,”
Science
334, no. 6061 (December 9, 2011): 1413–15.

“Think of a person watching a computer screen”
:
“Vision Scientists Demonstrate Innovative Learning Method,” National Science Foundation, accessed January 10, 2014, http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=122523&org=NSF&preview=false.

Their boiled-down message
:
“The Future of Higher Education,” Pew Research Internet Project, accessed January 10, 2014, http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Future-of-Higher-Education.aspx.

Price promises that the young
:
Ibid.

40 “
Some said they are already witnessing
”
:
“Elon Studies the Future of ‘Generation Always-On,’” Elon University, accessed January 10, 2014, http://www.elon.edu/e-net/Note.aspx?id=958393&board_ids=5%2C58&max=50.

“design out of chaos”
:
Daniel C. Dennett,
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
(New York: Simon & Schuster,
1995), 50.

A 2013 study from the University of Michigan
:
“The Generation X Report,” University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, Winter 2013, accessed January 9, 2014, http://home.isr.umich.edu/files/2013/01/GenX_Vol2Iss2_print.pdf.

“Other boys would not play with me”
:
Anthony Trollope,
An Autobiography
(London: Penguin Classics, 1996), 32–33.

“We must reserve a back shop”
:
Michel de Montaigne,
The Complete Essays of Montaigne
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1958), 177.

Chapter 3: Confession

“The highest and most beautiful things”
:
Søren Kierkegaard,
Either/Or
(Copenhagen: University Bookshop Reitzel, 1843), 89.

The girl’s name was Amanda Todd
:
“Zeitgeist 2012,” Google, accessed January 10, 2014, http://www.google.ca/zeitgeist/2012/#-the-world/people. (Whitney Houston and Kate Middleton held the two top spots that year.)

She did not look into the camera
:
“Amanda Todd’s Mother Speaks Out,” YouTube, accessed January 10, 2014, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6dk9moSUqA.

“it was something that needed to be watched by many”
:
Carol Todd, e-mail message to author, January 13, 2014.

seventeen million times
:
Carol Todd, interview with author, April 19, 2013.

Singapore children who were bullied online
:
Thomas J. Holt, Grace Chee, and Esther Ng, “Exploring the Consequences of Bullying Victimization in a Sample of Singapore Youth,”
International Criminal Justice Review
23, no. 1 (2013): 5–24.

22 percent of students
:
Ibid.

“every possible social and political problem”
:
Evgeny Morozov,
The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom
(New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), 312.

“regardless of what you are looking at”
:
Evgeny Morozov,
To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
(New York: PublicAffairs, 2013), 357.