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GOING WALDEN

What it feels like to be the last

generation to remember life before
the internet

Michael Harris, the author of "The End of Absence." Hudson Hayden

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Technologyhas a lot to answer for: killing old businesses, destroying the middle class,
Buzzfeed.Technology in the form of the internet is especially villainous, having been
accused of everything from making us dumber (paywall) to aiding dictatorships.
ButMichael Harris, riffing on the observations of Melvin Kranzberg, argues that
technology is neither good nor evil. The most we can say about it is this: It has come.

WRITTEN BY

Leo Mirani
@lmirani

Harris is the author of The End of Absence: Reclaiming What Weve Lost in a World of
Constant Connection, a new book about how technology affectssociety. Itfollows in the
footsteps of Nicholas Carr, whose The Shallows is a modern classic of internet

August 21, 2014

criticism.But Harris takes a differentpath from those that have come before. Instead ofa
broad investigation into the effects of constant connectivity on human behaviour, Harris
looks at a very specific demographic: people born before 1985, or the very opposite of the
millennial demographic coveted by advertisers andtargeted by new media outlets.
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These people, says Harris, are the last of a dying

breed. If you were born before 1985,then you know

what life is like bothwith the internet and without.
You are making the pilgrimage from Before to After,
he writes. It is a nice conceit. Harris, like your
correspondent, grew up in a very different world, one
withlimited channels of communication, fewer forms
of entertainment, and less public scrutiny of
quotidianactionsorfleeting thoughts. It was neither
better nor worse than the world we live in today.Like
technology, it just was.

Being in this situation puts us in a privileged

position.If were the last people in history to know
life before the internet, we are also the only ones who will ever speak, as it were, both
languages. We are the only fluent translators of Before and After.

That means being able to notice things like thereduction of interactions to numbers, and
how that translates into quantifications of human worth.I think it has to do with
thisnotionof online accountability. That is,noticing that you actually count seems to be
related to a sense of self worth, he says over the phone from Toronto, where he is based.
So its like if a tweet getsretweeteda couple of hundred times, that must meanthat
mythoughts are worthy. If my Facebook photo is liked, that must mean I am good
looking. One of the things that concerns me about a media diet that is overly online, is
that we lose theabilityto decide for ourselves what we think about who we are.

Not yet a Luddite

Harris isnt railing against these things, though. He doesnt prescribe fewer internet hours
or complain much about kids these days. Instead he acknowledges that his worries stem
mainly from hisanxieties about his own behavior. Like many of us, Harris checks his email
on his phone first thing in the morning. When you wake up, you have this gift of a
blankbrain. You could fill it with anything. But for most of us, we have this kind ofpanic.
Instead of wondering what should I do, we wonder what did I miss. Its almost like our
unconsciousness is a kind of failure and we cant believe weve
beenofflineforeighthours, he says. It is habits like this that are insidious, not the
internet itself. It is a personal thing.

Analog August
Toward the end of the book, after havinginvestigatedour penchant for online
confessionals, the perils of public opinion, and technologys impact on everything from sex
to memories to attention spans, Harris writes about his decision to take a month off from
the internet.In the hands of a less talented writer or a shallower thinker, this might have
been a bit of stunt journalism, and not a particularly original one either.

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But Harris emerges unrepentantfrom his month in the wilds. Did he experience
anepiphany? Not really. But its the break itself thats the thing. Its the breakthat is,
the questioningthat snaps us out of the spell, that can convince us that it was a spell in
the first place, he writes. I asked Harris if he would recommend an analog August to
others, as his publishers are doing to publicize the bookalbeit only for a weekend rather
than a whole monthwith a free Penguin Classic thrown in for good measure. A full
month off is a huge luxury which I was able to take because I was writing a book. For most
people, taking a month off would mean losing your job, he says.
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What it feels like to be the last

generation to remember life
before the internet

Still, Harris says anoccasional break can be helpful. I think what you get is a richer
interior light and the ability to see yourself in a criticallight, living online. Because if
youre in the middle of something you can never see it properly.

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