Turned Off

We got rid of cable TV at home a while back. We still have basic cable, but it's on a small TV, the only one in the house, sans cable box. If we switch from the Apple TV to cable channels, it's only to one of the PBS networks for kids' shows.

We didn't stop watching TV shows, though we do watch less. We use Netflix via the Apple TV, or on the iPad or iPhones. We might rent a movie in iTunes, and we have a number of movies on one of the computers that we can stream to the Apple TV. We buy seasons or season passes to some shows in iTunes: Mad Men, The Wire, Top Chef, The Office, Fringe.

When we visit someone else's house and the TV's on, it hits us really hard: How obnoxiously loud, demanding and manipulative the commercials are. They've become a foreign language to us. The same thing happens if we switch the car radio from a CD for the kids to an over-the-air station--The commercials are jarring and offensive to our ears.

We've sought to minimize the role TV plays in our home. I could see us upgrading to a larger TV in the future, to enjoy movies or quality programming as a family, but I cannot see us returning to cable networks running in the background bombarding us with commercial messaging and consumerism.

What hath we wrought?

We watch more programming on Internet-enabled devices. I read more books these days, on Internet-enabled devices. We play games on these devices, catch up on social networks, read blogs, RSS. We're still consumers of media, but our consumption habits have changed. They've become quieter and more personal, but the reality that's emerging is that they're just as bad, if not just as noisome.

And so this week I read Darren Hoyt's blog post, Wireless Void.

My favorite piece of writing from the last year was “Sad as Hell.” Officially it’s a book review for Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story. Unofficially it’s a portrait of the reviewer’s addiction to media and the struggle to prevent it from derailing her life.

As poignant and impactive as Alice Gregory's book review that he cites is, Darren's blog post hits me harder. Alice Gregory is a twentysomething fresh out of college. Darren is my generation.

The visuals could be loud or clumsy, but the experience was “quiet.” The 1998 web never provoked panic or made me feel like I needed to have 20 apps and browser windows running. No one expected my constant presence or feedback or “Likes” of their content. It was not a substitute for my brain; it was a place for my brain to get lost for awhile.

(Was the web ever that quaint? Is anything as quaint as you remember it?)

Almost 15 years later, I go through phases of spending embarrassing amounts of time online. It’s like someone flipped the hourglass and all the contents of the real world trickled down into the virtual world, which is where all the exciting stuff happens now.

On Alice Gregory's lament for a non-Internet life:

There is no mention of limiting the iPhone usage, taking breaks from Twitter, or modulating the anxiety by simply unplugging for awhile. Unplugging isn’t a serious option, not even close. She’s a reluctant internet Lifer like the rest of us. The choice is whether to surrender and accept the permanent changes to your brain and nervous system, or to be the lone defector among your family and friends who unplugs from all their status updates and feels like the most isolated person on earth and the only one who understands what a mixed blessing that is.

Darren's not alone in his assessment. Brian Lam writes about his experience "[reducing] the overage of technology and noise in my life":

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 x-box 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%.

Brian says that the technology isn't evil. But increasingly, the commercial interests behind the technologies that we've latched onto are being evaluated for their capacity to do evil.

Google's Broken Promise: The End of "Don't Be Evil"

Apple's iPad and the Human Costs for Workers in China

Twitter to Censor Tweets in Individual Countries

Consumption: The root of all evil?

One of the most promising aspects of the Internet was its ability to let us unplug and synch up when we plugged back in. To let us collaborate asynchronously with the state of our own interaction preserved between sessions. We would no longer need to occupy the same space for long stretches of time, because our interaction time could be synchronized with what needed to be done. Ease of reconnecting after a disconnect was as valuable as connectivity itself.

What's come to be is in stark contrast to that potential. We're perpetually tethered to devices and screens, compelled not only to respond in real-time over longer portions of our day, but also to fill in every available moment by keeping up. Keeping up with news, with social streams, with new blog posts. In consuming more and more, we do less and less.

Brian Lam:

Technology lets us do things faster and more efficiently; why would we use that newfound free time to do more and more of the same old thing? I'm not just talking about smarter consumption of content...I'm also saying, fuck consumption.

From Alice Gregory's Sad as Hell:

I have the sensation, as do my friends, that to function as a proficient human, you must both “keep up” with the internet and pursue more serious, analog interests. I blog about real life; I talk about the internet. It’s so exhausting to exist on both registers, especially while holding down a job. It feels like tedious work to be merely conversationally competent. I make myself schedules, breaking down my commute to its most elemental parts and assigning each leg of my journey something different to absorb: podcast, Instapaper article, real novel of real worth, real magazine of dubious worth. I’m pretty tired by the time I get to work at 9 AM.

That our definition of activity has to come to include endlessly creating and replying to micro-messages and refreshing feeds, that productivity now means evaluating and adopting the latest-and-greatest app that will let you scan more messages faster, push more bits around or check off more items, is troubling.

It's not enough to say the companies, devices or network are evil, true as it may be. As with an economy in peril, overconsumption is the issue. The challenge on the Internet is that the rate of change and introduction of new services and content is so fast that we confuse overconsumption with "keeping up." The question, to me, is not, "what do we do when we're maxed out on attention?" Rather, it's, "Why are we not leveraging technology to improve our lives in the real world and free our attention for more meaningful pursuits?"