By: Brian Lam
The Wirecutter, January 25, 2012

There’s a whole laundry list of disclaimers attached to it, but my pal (and Pulitzer winner) Matt Richtel wrote about a Stanford research report suggesting that spending considerable amounts of time on multimedia/technology can make us unhappy.

In his words: “The answer, in the peer-reviewed study of the online habits of girls aged 8 to 12, finds that those who say they spend considerable amounts of time using multimedia describe themselves in ways that suggest they are less happy and less socially comfortable than peers who say they spend less time on screens.” 

I owe my livelihood to technology and I love the raw capability it offers us as a tool, but I fear it a bit more than most people do. It’s a tool, but it’s not quite a hammer, because a hammer doesn’t seduce you into sitting around lonely in your underwear for 6 hours at a stretch clicking on youtube videos and refreshing Twitter. I fear technology because I fear that bad feeling I get after a three day XBox binge I go through every year around the holidays. I fear technology not because I think it’s evil, but because it’s too easy to start clicking and never stop, even if the stream of data starts to go from meaningful to useless after the top 5%.

I am fascinated by this study because everything I have been doing in the last year professionally and personally has been to reduce the overage of technology and noise in my life and it has increased my happiness by many fold.

Happiness is the most important metric in personal tech. If it improves lives, it is important. I’ve always suspected that sitting around on the internet was a sort of rot, but I had no proof until I read this piece on the Stanford study. I just don’t know why this research isn’t getting as much attention from reporters as new iPads, CEO changes, earnings reports, acquisitions, and other bullshit that only affects the greedy. People think I’m crazy for complaining about tech news and how stupid and boring the mass media internet has become, but I think they’re wrong. And I think most are writing about the wrong things.

It’s the perfect time, with this abundance of pages to read and videos to watch, to consider Clay Johnson’s book, The Information Diet. In his words, the book is about “How the new, information-abundant society is suffering consequences from poor information consumption habits” The book also outlines a plan for metering the kinds of content that we consume, as we do with food diets that need to be balanced between junk food and healthier food that initially taste worse but will make us healthier and happier. (For every milkshake, I average out a glass of green kale juice.)

Informationally, we are becoming lard-asses. In the pageview and ratings driven media economy, too much of the content these days is designed to be just like junk food to quickly boost quantifiable viewership. If you make content that is the intellectual equivalent of gummy bears, your site will appear to grow quickly. Advertisers reward size, and growing fast is expected in most places I’ve seen. Last month I visited Xeni Jardin, my blog-sister from Boing Boing and she said to me, “Only cancer and bullshit websites grow fast.” It’s happened to TV with reality shows, radio with clear channel, and it’s happening to words online. I’ve never seen a world-class sized publication that was founded in the past decade do world class quality work. It’s not because the people running them are dumb–it’s because they don’t have enough time to think their work through because there’s no short term incentive to. There’s an excuse there aren’t enough resources to go around, but that’s bullshit. It just takes a little confidence in the long game.

Read on.

(Editor’s note: Brian has asked me to write an article or two for The Wirecutter in the past, but writing with heart and soul. Reading this, I just might.)

With Search Plus Your World, Google is undermining itself as the most trusted source of all the world’s information. The artificial algorithm was objective, he explained, but SPYW is not only self-serving but will inevitably serve up biased results. So with SPYW, he suggests, Google goes from being the core of the Web 2.0 economy to just another social play in today’s Web 3.0 world of ubiquitous personal data.

(Editor’s note: Also important to note: Google Consolidates Privacy Policy; Will Combine User Data Across Services)

Hollywood appears to have peaked. If it were an ordinary industry (film cameras, say, or typewriters), it could look forward to a couple decades of peaceful decline. But this is not an ordinary industry. The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise.

That’s one reason we want to fund startups that will compete with movies and TV, but not the main reason. The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they’re resorting to such tactics. If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention. When a striker is fouled in the penalty area, he doesn’t stop as long as he still has control of the ball; it’s only when he’s beaten that he turns to appeal to the ref. SOPA shows Hollywood is beaten. And yet the audiences to be captured from movies and TV are still huge. There is a lot of potential energy to be liberated there.

How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What’s going to kill movies and TV is what’s already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?

There will be several answers, ranging from new ways to produce and distribute shows, through new media (e.g. games) that look a lot like shows but are more interactive, to things (e.g. social sites and apps) that have little in common with movies and TV except competing with them for finite audience attention. Some of the best ideas may initially look like they’re serving the movie and TV industries. Microsoft seemed like a technology supplier to IBM before eating their lunch, and Google did the same thing to Yahoo.

It would be great if what people did instead of watching shows was exercise more and spend more time with their friends and families. Maybe they will. All other things being equal, we’d prefer to hear about ideas like that. But all other things are decidedly not equal. Whatever people are going to do for fun in 20 years is probably predetermined. Winning is more a matter of discovering it than making it happen. In this respect at least, you can’t push history off its course. You can, however, accelerate it.

What’s the most entertaining thing you can build?

The ethical questions surrounding building consumers into commercial advertising.

By Evan Selinger and Shaun Foster
Slate, Jan. 4, 2012, at 7:10 AM ET

Ray Bradbury would have made a great “Revenge of the Nerds” character alongside Gilbert, Lewis, Poindexter, Wormser, and Lamar Latrell, had he not been such a caricature. A four-eyed, zit-faced, bully bull’s-eye gliding through Los Angeles on steel-wheeled rollerskates, Bradbury was a fanboy who forcefully demanded autographs and pictures from Hollywood’s most glamorous stars. Nobody told the uncouth teenaged transplant from the Midwest that he was staring at his opposites when he cornered Marlene Dietrich, Clark Gable, and Judy Garland. The stargazer dared to become the star. His life is the ultimate revenge of the nerd.

The writer once rebelled against his nerd designation. Now he rebels against nerds themselves. Technology, the plaything of geeks, is Bradbury’s punching bag. Seventy years and more of his short stories have taken readers from Nowheresville, Middle America to the ancient ruins of Mars, meeting along the way big, beautiful, tattooed women; Mexicans time-sharing a $59 vanilla leisure suit; and midgets achieving vertical liberation through funhouse mirrors. Within that gigantic oeuvre no theme is more, well, Bradburian than that of contraptions designed to make life better actually making it worse.

“I,” three-centuries-dead William Lantry announces in 1948’s “Pillar of Fire,” “am an anachronism.” Bradbury might well have been talking about himself. Science fiction’s greatest living writer never bothered with a driver’s license, regards video games as time wasters, refuses to unbind his books for electronic readers, and dismisses the computer as a highfalutin typewriter. In 1968 he missed receiving the Aviation-Space Writers’ Robert Ball Memorial Award in person because fear of flying prevented him from arriving at Cape Canaveral from Los Angeles in time. The bard of Martian civilization didn’t make it above the Earth’s clouds until his seventh decade.

Even the emailed correspondence for this article reached Bradbury only through a human intermediary. Seeing “Ray Bradbury” appear in my inbox produced a momentary letdown akin to learning that Ted Nugent is a vegan or A.J. Foyt rides a bicycle. But the pay-no-attention-to-that-man-behind-the-curtain feeling evaporated with the comforting discovery that his daughter handles such modern communications for him.

For H.G. Wells and Edward Bellamy, utopia was the far future. Bradbury looks in the other direction. He sets his wayback machine to Green Town, America circa 1920. The son of a Swedish immigrant mother and a power lineman father, Bradbury cherishes a nostalgia for boyhood along Lake Michigan that would seem odd given the mama’s boy wimpiness that made him a target for his peers. His family’s poverty limited his opportunities; so hard up were the Bradburys that one older brother taken by 1918’s influenza epidemic lies in an unmarked grave, while another older brother shared a bed with Ray in the makeshift living room/bedroom well into adulthood.

This time and place is nevertheless the Eden of Bradbury’s fiction. This is perhaps most loudly pronounced in “Mars Is Heaven” (1948)—redubbed “The Third Expedition” in The Martian Chronicles (1950)—in which the red planet turning out to be heaven is overshadowed by the fact that heaven turns out to be small-town America.

The colonization of Mars is nothing new: it’s the conquest of the North American continent all over again. Martians play the role of Indians; disease wipes out the original inhabitants; St. Joseph’s, Missouri becomes a launch pad; adventurers go native; boom towns yield to ghost towns; and Earthlings go up instead of west to start anew. The Martian future is the American past.

And the American past that Bradbury most longs for is his own. Uprooted from Waukegan, Illinois as a teenager, the Tinseltown-transplant developed career aspirations higher than the Hollywood sign. Bradbury stayed in California, but his imagination frequently journeyed back to northern Illinois. What do they know of Waukegan who only Waukegan know?

Bradbury’s retro heaven meshes with his skepticism of progress, science, and technology. His life exhibits throwback tendencies; his fiction, all the more.

Two miners arise from the subterranean darkness into sunlight in “Almost the End of the World” (1957). They discover that solar emissions have turned off television and turned on people. Instead of watching, people do. They jam on instruments, hold neighborhood beer bashes, go bowling. People talk to one another rather than absorb the idiot box’s monologue. The town barber, unaware that he has never had it so good, tells the miners that screens going blank “was like a good friend who talks to you in your front room and suddenly shuts up and lies there, pale, and you know he’s dead and you begin to turn cold yourself.”

In “The Ghost in the Machine” (1996), an enthusiastic 1850s inventor sees in his contraption a means to eradicate the scourge of horse manure and more quickly propel men to their destinations. Bewildered villagers surrounding the farmhouse laboratory see a “lunatic device, the insane machine that goes nowhere but in going might run down a child, a lamb, a priest, a nun, or an old blind dog.” The villagers petition to take the creator of the automobile to the insane asylum.

Before “Kill Your Television” became a rallying cry, Albert Brock employed a pistol to do the deed in “The Murderer” (1953). An equal-opportunity technocutioner, Brock assassinates cell phones, GPS systems, and other gadgets of today’s reality that then existed only in Bradbury’s imagination. Appearing crazy to his captors, Brock tells of his one-man revolution against invasive communications to the prison psychiatrist, whose wrist phone he promptly bites to death. The protagonist employs chocolate ice cream to assassinate his dashboard navigator/phone/radio. “That car radio cackling all day, Brock go here, Brock go there, Brock check in, Brock check out, okay Brock, hour lunch, Brock, lunch over, Brock, Brock, Brock. Well, that silence was like putting ice cream in my ears.”

He rationalized destroying his telephone: “The telephone’s such a convenient thing; it just sits there and demandsyou call someone who doesn’t want to be called. Friends were always calling, calling, calling me.” On the bus, he interferes with the transmission of the various electronic gizmos used by his fellow riders. “The bus inhabitants faced with having to converse with each other. Panic! Sheer, animal panic!” Albert Brock just wanted some peace and quiet in a loud world.

It turns out that the most insightful commentary on the virtual age of Facebook friends, video-game Olympiads, and online sex was written shortly after University of Pennsylvania scientists developed a 30-ton computer but before the Department of Defense transmitted data over the Internet.

Ray Bradbury loves human beings, and his hatred of the digital devices that divide us from us stems from their dehumanizing influence. Sure, they make us more passive and corrode our mental circuits. But of greatest importance, technology, amidst a million obvious benefits, has the overlooked drawback of making human life less human. Basement Internet porn addictions preventing relationships, video games supplanting sports as an afterschool activity, vicarious social life through reality television, and hundreds of Facebook friends without a single true friend are all manifestations of the way technology helps man dodge his fellow man.

The author of “Marionettes, Inc.” (1949), a story about spouses employing robot duplicates so they don’t have to deal with each other, surely drew a bead on how getting in touch with technology can keep one out of touch with people. Nothing appears so horribly dated to the present as the past’s vision of the future. But for the writer who gets the future more or less right, postdating stories is one way to keep them alive. Reality television, the Walkman, and virtual reality are among the technological developments Bradbury’s fiction anticipated. On the other hand, if his futuristic stories are to be interpreted as predictions, one could as easily say that he wrongly foresaw vacuum tubes delivering our dinners and robot murder becoming a capital crime.

Bradbury’s vision of the future germinated from what he saw in the postwar present: gadgeted distractions, screens separating humans from humans, televisions raising children, the vicarious life replacing life itself, leisure time becoming a waste of time. He sensed in which direction the world spun, and he didn’t want to go there. Alas, from Fahrenheit 451’s televised helicopter fugitive chase to the television-as-babysitter of “The Veldt” (1950), we live in the real world that his fiction had warned us about. Ray Bradbury is the atavist’s futurist.

By PICO IYER
NY Times Published: December 29, 2011

ABOUT a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began — I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign — was stillness.

A few months later, I read an interview with the perennially cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? “I never read any magazines or watch TV,” he said, perhaps a little hyperbolically. “Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.”

Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts,” which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms.

Has it really come to this?

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. 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.

Internet rescue camps in South Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen.

Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to disable (for up to eight hours) the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago. Even Intel (of all companies) experimented in 2007 with conferring four uninterrupted hours of quiet time every Tuesday morning on 300 engineers and managers. (The average office worker today, researchers have found, enjoys no more than three minutes at a time at his or her desk without interruption.) During this period the workers were not allowed to use the phone or send e-mail, but simply had the chance to clear their heads and to hear themselves think. A majority of Intel’s trial group recommended that the policy be extended to others.

THE average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen, Nicholas Carr notes in his eye-opening book “The Shallows,” in part because the number of hours American adults spent online doubled between 2005 and 2009 (and the number of hours spent in front of a TV screen, often simultaneously, is also steadily increasing).

The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month. Since luxury, as any economist will tell you, is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow, I heard myself tell the marketers in Singapore, will crave nothing more than freedom, if only for a short while, from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once.

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.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

When telegraphs and trains brought in the idea that convenience was more important than content — and speedier means could make up for unimproved ends — Henry David Thoreau reminded us that “the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.” Even half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, “When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.” Thomas Merton struck a chord with millions, by not just noting that “Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest,” but by also acting on it, and stepping out of the rat race and into a Cistercian cloister.

Yet few of those voices can be heard these days, precisely because “breaking news” is coming through (perpetually) on CNN and Debbie is just posting images of her summer vacation and the phone is ringing. We barely have enough time to see how little time we have (most Web pages, researchers find, are visited for 10 seconds or less). And the more that floods in on us (the Kardashians, Obamacare, “Dancing with the Stars”), the less of ourselves we have to give to every snippet. All we notice is that the distinctions that used to guide and steady us — between Sunday and Monday, public and private, here and there — are gone.

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.

So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.

MAYBE that’s why more and more people I know, even if they have no religious commitment, seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation, or tai chi; these aren’t New Age fads so much as ways to connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age. Two journalist friends of mine observe an “Internet sabbath” every week, 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. Finding myself at breakfast with a group of lawyers in Oxford four months ago, I noticed that all their talk was of sailing — or riding or bridge: anything that would allow them to get out of radio contact for a few hours.

Other friends try to go on long walks every Sunday, or to “forget” their cellphones at home. A series of tests in recent years has shown, Mr. Carr points out, that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects “exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.” More than that, empathy, as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are “inherently slow.” The very ones our high-speed lives have little time for.

In my own case, I turn to eccentric and often extreme measures to try to keep my sanity and ensure that I have time to do nothing at all (which is the only time when I can see what I should be doing the rest of the time). I’ve yet to use a cellphone and I’ve never Tweeted or entered Facebook. 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.

None of this is a matter of principle or asceticism; it’s just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”

It’s vital, of course, to stay in touch with the world, and to know what’s going on; I took pains this past year to make separate trips to Jerusalem and Hyderabad and Oman and St. Petersburg, to rural Arkansas and Thailand and the stricken nuclear plant in Fukushima and Dubai. But it’s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.

For more than 20 years, therefore, I’ve been going several times a year — often for no longer than three days — to a Benedictine hermitage, 40 minutes down the road, as it happens, from the Post Ranch Inn. I don’t attend services when I’m there, and I’ve never meditated, there or anywhere; I just take walks and read and lose myself in the stillness, recalling that it’s only by stepping briefly away from my wife and bosses and friends that I’ll have anything useful to bring to them. The last time I was in the hermitage, three months ago, I happened to pass, on the monastery road, a youngish-looking man with a 3-year-old around his shoulders.

“You’re Pico, aren’t you?” the man said, and introduced himself as Larry; we’d met, I gathered, 19 years before, when he’d been living in the cloister as an assistant to one of the monks.

“What are you doing now?” I asked.

“I work for MTV. Down in L.A.”

We smiled. No words were necessary.

“I try to bring my kids here as often as I can,” he went on, as he looked out at the great blue expanse of the Pacific on one side of us, the high, brown hills of the Central Coast on the other. “My oldest son” — he pointed at a 7-year-old running along the deserted, radiant mountain road in front of his mother — “this is his third time.”

The child of tomorrow, I realized, may actually be ahead of us, in terms of sensing not what’s new, but what’s essential.