The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection Read Free

changed since my initial few years at the magazine, something in my attitude toward the pings. What has changed?
    Dr. Small points out that this atmosphere of manic disruption makes my adrenal gland pump up production of cortisol and adrenaline.
In the short run , these stress hormones boost energy levels and augment memory, but over time they actually impair cognition, lead to depression, and alter the neural circuitry in the hippocampus, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex—the brain regions that control mood and thought. Chronic and prolonged techno-brain burnout can even reshape the underlying brain structure.
     
    Techno-brain burnout.
That sounds about it. At one point that harried afternoon, I stop and count the number of windows open on my two monitors. Fourteen. As I count them up, my phone pings again and I look down at the text message glowing there:
Dude, are you alive or what?
     
    The text is just a flick from an impatient friend, but in my distracted state I read it as a sincere question.
Are you alive or what?
    And that was the moment. I picked up the phone and, ignoring the message, switched on its camera function. I photographed my monitors, plastered over with e-mails and instant messages and Word files and .pdfs. Never forget that you don’t
want
this, I thought. Never forget that you live in an ecosystem designed to disrupt you and it will take you for a ride if you let it.
    Just before the magazine forfeited half its office space—a bid to consolidate ranks and bring in some money by subletting—I quit my job.
    This left me with a distressing amount of free time—time I filled, initially, by reading about a moment weirdly similar to our own: the year 1450, when a German patrician called Johannes Gutenberg, after decades of tinkering and some very sketchy loans, managed to invent a printing press with movable type.
    Like the Internet, Gutenberg’s machine made certain jobs either ridiculous or redundant (so long, scriptoria). But much more was dismantled by Gutenberg’s invention than the employment of a few recalcitrant scribes. As the fidelity and speed of copying was ratcheted way up, there was a boom in what we’d now call data transfer: A great sermon delivered in Paris might be perfectly replicated in Lyon. (Branding improved, too: for the first time subjects knew what their king looked like.) Such uniformity laid the groundwork for massive leaps in knowledge and scientific understanding as a scholastic world that was initially scattered began to cohere into a consistent international conversation, one where academics and authorities could build on one another’s work rather than repeat it. 1 As its influence unfurled across Europe, the press would flatten entire monopolies of knowledge, even enabling Martin Luther to shake the foundations of the Catholic Church; next it jump-started the Enlightenment. And the printing press had its victims; its cheap and plentiful product undid whole swaths of life, from the recitation of epic poetry 2 to the authority of those few who could afford handmade manuscripts. In Blake Morrison’s novel
The Justification of Johann Gutenberg,
he has the inventor arguing with an abbot not about the content his printing press creates, but about the
way
text can now be read. The abbot exclaims: “The word of God needs to be interpreted by priests, not spread about like dung.” 3 The very fecundity of the press, its ability to free up content and make it cheaply available to the masses, made it a danger to the established powerhouse of the Catholic Church and a serious destabilizer of culture at large. Yet for decades after its invention in 1450, the press produced only a quantitative change (more books); limited marketplaces, limited travel, and limited literacy all conspired to thwart the invention’s true potential. By contrast, we are immediately experiencing a
qualitative
difference in our lives. Our fate is instantly and comprehensively reimagined by online