The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection (28 page)

“good enough for all practical purposes”
:
E. M. Forster, “The Machine Stops,”
Oxford and Cambridge Review
(November 1909).

“At the end of the story”
: Jaron
Lanier,
Who Owns the Future? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013),
129.

“Humanity has learned its lesson”
:
Forster, “The Machine Stops.”

By one report, the aurorae lit up so brightly
:
Sten F. Odenwald and James L. Green, “Bracing the Satellite Infrastructure for a Solar Superstorm,”
Scientific American
, accessed January 16, 2014, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bracing-for-a-solar-superstorm.

Pete Riley, a scientist at Predictive Science
:
Pete Riley, “On the Probability of Occurrence of Extreme Space Weather Events,”
Space Weather
10, no. 2 (2012), http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2011SW000734/abstract.

Great Britain’s Royal Academy of Engineering
:
“Extreme Space Weather,” Royal Academy of Engineering, http://www.raeng.org.uk/news/publications/list/reports/space_weather_full_report_final.pdf.

Such an event almost took place
:
Pete Riley, e-mail message to author, June 25, 2013.

“much of the modern industrialized and militarized world”
: Joseph
Weizenbaum,
Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation (New York: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1976).

108 $
2.6 trillion in damage
:
“Solar Storm Risk to the North American Electric Grid,” Lloyd’s, accessed January 16, 2014, http://www.aer.com//sites/default/files/Solar_Storm_Risk_to_the_North_American_Electric_Grid_0.pdf, and “Severe Space Weather Events: Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts,” National Academies Press, http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12507.

Part 2 : Breaking Away

111 “
When from our better selves”
:
William Wordsworth, “The Prelude,” in M. H. Abrams, gen. ed.,
The Norton Anthology of English Literature
,
v
ol. 2
(New York: Norton, 1993), 241.

Chapter 6: Attention!

“In proportion as our inward life fails”
:
Brooks
Atkinson, ed.,
Walden and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau
(New York: Modern Library, 1992), 723–24.

“And none will hear the postman’s knock”
:
W. H. Auden, “Night Mail,”
The English Auden
(London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1977).

Animals, including humans, become obsessed
: Gary
Small and Gigi Vorgan,
iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind (New York: HarperCollins, 2008),
54–55.

I’m not sure I’m as far gone
:
Laura Vanderkam, “Stop Checking Your Email, Now,”
Fortune
, October 8, 2012, http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2012/10/08/stop-checking-your-email-now/.

“a minor fit of hysterics”
:
R. W. B. Lewis,
Edith Wharton: A Biography
(New York: Harper & Row, 1975).

“fortify the wavering mind”
:
Seneca,
Dialogues and Essays
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 139.

“when it comes to the combination”
:
Tom Chatfield,
How to Thrive in the Digital Age
(London: Macmillan, 2012), 32.

“whenever kids exceed the one to two hours”
:
“Media and Children,” American Academy of Pediatrics, AAP Policy, http://www.aap.org/en-us/advocacy-and-policy/aap-health-initiatives/pages/media-and-children.aspx.

Curiously, the largest hit
:
“The Rise of E-Reading,” Pew Research Center, April 5, 2012, http://libraries.pewinternet.org/files/legacy-pdf/The%20rise%20of%20e-reading%204.5.12.pdf.

the National Endowment for the Arts
(NEA) released a massive and scathing report:
“To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence,” Research Report no. 47, November 2007, National Endowment for the Arts, http://arts.gov/sites/default/files/ToRead.pdf.

123 “
Anna Mikhailovna was already embracing her”
:
Leo Tolstoy,
War and Peace
(New York: Vintage Classics, 2008), 58.

126 “
At first she could not read”
:
Leo Tolstoy,
Anna Karenina
(New York: Knopf, 1992), 118.

“Anna read and understood”
:
Ibid., 118.

“The gaze-sensitive intervention”
:
Sidney D’Mello et al., “Gaze Tutor: A Gaze-Reactive Intelligent Tutoring System,”
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
70, no. 5 (2012): 377–98.

“To kill me?”
:
Tolstoy,
War and Peace,
189.

132 “
not with his intellect, but with his whole being”
:
Ibid., 1060.

“a causeless springtime feeling of joy”
:
Ibid., 423.

“the so-called great men”
:
Ibid., 606.

Milton sat down at his parents’ home
:
Thomas N. Corns, ed.,
A Companion to Milton
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 487.

In the first draft of this letter
:
David Masson,
Life of John Milton,
vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1859), 290–92.

“None of this had even a hope”
:
“Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address,” YouTube, accessed March 21, 2014, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc.

Chapter 7: Memory (The Good Error)

“Forgetting used to be a failing”
:
James Gleick,
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
(New York: Pantheon, 2011), 407.

“That’s surprising. I thought this was going to be difficult”
:
“Dr. Brenda Milner,” CBC News, accessed January 16, 2014, http://www.cbc.ca/player/News/Health/ID/2323340807/.

“The Internet allows us to know”
: 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),
239.

Perhaps we should side with philosopher Lewis Mumford
:
Lewis Mumford,
The Myth of the Machine
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 182.

Author Clive Thompson wondered
:
Clive Thompson, “Your Outboard Brain Knows All,”
Wired,
September 25, 2007,
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-10/st_thompson.

A team of psychologists has reported in
Science
:
Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, and Daniel M. Wegner, “Google Effects on Memory,”
Science
333, no. 6043 (2011): 776–78.

“Having thus made up his family”
:
Seneca,
The Epistles of Lucius Annæus Seneca,
vol. 1 (London: W. Woodfall, 1786), 102–03.

“Every dog-eared page”
:
Brockman,
Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?,
300.

146 “
As the Web grew”
: Ibid., 300.

“I consider that a man’s brain”
:
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
The Complete Sherlock Holmes
, vol. 1 (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003), 14.

“are created in the present”
:
Charles Fernyhough, “What Our Memories Tell Us About Ourselves,” ideas.time.com, accessed March 21, 2014, http://ideas.time.com/2013/03/20/what-our-memories-tell-us-about-ourselves/.

“Every time you recall a memory”
:
“Scientists Explore the Illusion of Memory,” CBC News, accessed January 16, 2014, http://www .cbc.ca/news/health/story/2013/01/03/health-inside-your-brain-memory-illusion.html.

“Memory changes things”
:
Achy Obejas, “My Interview with Jorge Luis Borges,” accessed January 16, 2014, http://www.wbez.org/blog/achy-obejas/2011-08-24/my-interview-jorge-luis-borges-90978.

In a 2013 paper
:
Corina Sas and Steve Whittaker, “Design for Forgetting: Disposing of Digital Possessions After a Breakup,” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York, 2013, http://people.ucsc.edu/~swhittak/papers/design_for_forgetting_chi_2013.pdf.

In Manguel’s
A History of Reading
:
Alberto Manguel,
A History of Reading
(Toronto: Vintage, 1998), 60–61.

“The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine”
:
Marcel Proust,
In Search of Lost Time,
vol. 1 (New York: Random House, 2003),
63–64.

Chapter 8: Hooking Up

On a single Sunday
:
“Grindr Sets Records,” Grindr.com/blog, October 2, 2012.

Meanwhile, Chatroulette links strangers
:
Robert J. Moore, “Chatroulette Is 89 Percent Male, 47 Percent American, and 13 Percent Perverts,” TechCrunch, accessed January 7, 2014, http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/16/chatroulette-stats-male-perverts/.

Youths send homemade porn to one another
:
“Snapchat’s Expired Snaps Are Not Deleted, Just Hidden,”
The Guardian,
accessed January 7, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/partner-zone-infosecurity/snapchat-photos-not-deleted-hidden.

Surveys conducted in 1980
:
Eli J. Finkel et al., “Online Dating: A Critical Analysis from the Perspective of Psychological Science,”
Psychological Science in the Public Interest
13, no. 1 (2012): 3–66.

Today, at least one in five
:
“Online Dating Statistics,” Statistic Brain, accessed January 16, 2014, http://www.statisticbrain.com/online-dating-statistics/.

According to a massive 2010 BBC World Service report
:
“New Global Poll Suggests Wide Enthusiasm for Online Dating,” BBC World Service, accessed January 16, 2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2010/02_february/13/poll.shtml.

similar Pew Research Center work
:
“Dating Digitally,” Pew Internet & American Life Project, accessed March 21, 2014, http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/10/21/online-dating-relationships/.

83 percent of us
:
I-Mei Lin and Erik Peper, “Psychophysiological Patterns During Cell Phone Text Messaging: A Preliminary Study,”
Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback
34, no. 1 (2009): 53–57.

“as long as a guy can keep clicking”
:
Gary Wilson, “The Great Porn Experiment,” TEDxGlasgow, accessed March 24, 2014, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSF82AwSDiU.

According to Trussler’s report
:
“Pride, Prejudice, & Determinants of Health,” Community-Based Research Centre, 2012, accessed January 16, 2014, http://cbrc.net/sites/default/files/PPDYouthF%20-AC.pdf.

When 606 students were canvassed
:
Donald S. Strassberg et al., “Sexting by High School Students: An Exploratory and Descriptive Study,”
Archives of Sexual Behavior
42, no. 1 (2013): 15–21.

On Grindr, too, it is the digital natives
:
“Happy Birthday Grindr!,” Grindr Blog for March 25, 2013, http://grindr.com/blog/2013/03.

Comparison of the two shows
:
Michelle Rotermann, “Trends in Teen Sexual Behaviour and Condom Use,” Statistics Canada,
Health Reports
19, no. 3 (September 2008), http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/82-003-x/2008003/article/10664-eng.pdf.

In fact, the only significant change
:
Michelle Rotermann, “Sexual Behaviour and Condom Use of 15- to 24-Year-Olds in 2003 and 2009/2010,” Statistics Canada,
Health Reports
23, no. 1 (March 2012), accessed January 16, 2014, http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/82-003-x/2012001/article/11632-eng.htm.