Forswearing Electronic Media

"Things are in the saddle and ride mankind."- Ralph Waldo Emerson

To my readers: Recent medical challenges have for the moment slowed the pace of my writing. I expect that these issues will soon be behind me, and once they, are I look forward to regaining my stride. I want to warmly thank you for your continuing interest.

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Neanderthal. Troglodyte. Philistine. Technophobe. I know I am making myself a target and an outlier. I don't think I will make many friends with this essay, but I do hope that the views and attitudes of some readers will overlap with my own.

I recently turned 77. Now fully retired, I am entering a new, and undoubtedly, the last, phase of my life. This stark reality engenders reflection in the service of planning ahead. I understand the impulse to yearn for eternity. But intellectually I conclude with certainty and some poignancy that such a fate will not be mine. What lies ahead, I submit, will transpire within the empirical realm of human experience.

As my time grows shorter, I am committed to making the most of it. With this in mind, I am committed to limited time spent engaging in electronic media. While I appreciate and do not bemoan what I understand as a productive waste of time, allowing me to purge my mind of overwrought thoughts, I am determined not spend too much times in unproductive idleness.

I have always been goal-oriented. At various milestones, I have set objectives for myself that I seek to fulfill. The ends I pursue emerge from my temperamental proclivities as a humanist. As I have grown older, I have come to appreciate the social nature of human beings with increasing importance and depth. At this stage, my conscious plan is to increase my circle of friends and deepen my relations with them. I greatly value the family bond, and so I also want to spend more time with my children and grandchildren. Out of the depths of sorrow I experienced at the death of my beloved wife, I have found a wonderful new partner who has become the center of my life and with whom I share many joyful and enriching experiences. Increased writing and reading are part of my plan, and the times we are in require that I engage my activism, as I have throughout my career.

These are the experiential pillars of my life. When it comes to my relations with others, as I have written in previous essays, I cherish most being in the presence of, and sharing my thoughts and feelings with, friends with whom I enjoy a relationship of mutual caring and sensitivity. I have found that being in groups does not allow for the emotional depth I most value. Nor is contact mediated by electronic contrivances. Neither the telephone, email, Zooming, or texting comes close to being the experiences I most value. There is no substitute for being in the presence of another. Being present in face-to-face relations with another person allows me to take in his or her emotions and thoughts, perceive their body language, and increasingly identify with them as they express their personal experiences. The sharing of interiorities can evoke a transcendent moment when the distance between myself and the other begins to vanish.

Seeking the experiences I choose to affirm defines those I choose to reject. There are always choices to be made and we remain free to choose those experiences we wish to engage. In great measure who we are is determined by the choices we make. And so, with my days growing shorter, I have made the deliberate choice to disengage myself as much as is practical from time spent gazing at screens and employing the digital media. I know I stand against the prevailing culture. But this doesn't much bother me. I have been a non-conformist since childhood, one who refuses to travel with the herd.

The electronic media are powerfully transforming our culture and our personal lives along with it. It is a brave new world, but as stated, I choose not to go there. When Silicon Valley introduced us to the World Wide Web, and then social media, they were seen as a boon to democracy and the enrichment of human discourse. In the spirit of John Stuart Mill, the expansion of the repository of ideas and their exchange, would create greater opportunity for the best ideas to rise to the top. The internet, and then social mediz,would exponentially widen the ideational universe while enriching our freedom and democracy.

This was the promise, but it has gone unrealized. The employment of algorithms has allowed for the grabbing of attention and the consequent siloing of information. It has narrowed discourse rather than increase it. In the reduction of complex ideas to sound bites, social media appeals to impulse and emotion. It arouses and reinforces the most negative human emotions, anger, fear, resentment, and hatred, among them. Rather than enriching democracy, which requires cooperation, it has sundered it, leaving American society more dangerously divided and tribalized than ever. Donald Trump is a product of social media and its destructive consequences. I remain convinced that he could not have regained the White House without them. It's a grand conclusion, but on balance, I contend that the new media, with their captivating wizardry, leave society worse off than better.

While first universally heralded, the critical tide has begun to turn on the values inherent in digital technologies. There is proliferating literature analyzing and exposing the negative aspects of smartphones and social media in particular. The Anxious Generation, by the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, documents in great detail the fretful increase in the mental health problems suffered by adolescents, inclusive of anxiety, depression, sleeplessness, loneliness, and suicide, that he correlates with the advent of smartphones in the decades subsequent to 2010. According to Haidt, teenagers are spending an extraordinary number of hours on their phones, an engrossment that is resulting in a rewiring of the brains of young people at a critically sensitive period of psychological and social development.

Haidt contrasts what he refers to as the “phone-based” childhood with the “play-based” childhood, which preceded it for all of human history. This shift has occurred in unison with changes in approaches to parenting, creating an unfortunate irony. Looking back several decades, broadly publicized events in which children had been kidnapped or abused in daycare centers, have caused parental supervision to become far more restricting. This, in turn, has placed greater limitations on the freedom of children to explore, take risks, and develop real-time social relations, in short, negotiate the world on their own terms, all of which are necessary for their maturation. Simultaneously, their engagement with their phones, a realm of great harm, Haidt contends, goes prevailingly unsupervised.

I could not read Haidt's descriptions of the value of freedom and play children experienced before recent decades without contrasting it with my own childhood. Among my happiest experiences, after homework was done, was to head to the schoolyard for games of stickball. This would often be followed by freely gallivanting around the neighborhood with friends. While my mother was not a staunch permissivist, she allowed me to travel at age eleven by subway alone or with a friend from our apartment in Queens to romp around the museums of Manhattan, or to journey to the Bronx to take in a game at Yankee Stadium. When slightly older, I took my bicycle on day-long rides around the city, exploring neighborhoods that invoked the magic of discovering foreign lands. I assume that such feelings of joyous freedom are almost unknown to today's middle-class children, whose freedom is cordoned off by play dates, which I have long thought is a contradiction in terms.

I am currently working my way through journalist Chris Hayes The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. It's a passionate study of how the high-tech industries have grabbed and hold our attention. Hayes, making us aware of how central attention is to our existence, states the following:

“Attention is the substance of life. Every moment we are awake we are paying attention to something, whether through our affirmative choice or because something or someone has compelled it. Ultimately, these moments of attention accrue into life. 'My experience,' as William James wrote in The Principles of Psychology in 1890, 'is what I agree to attend to.' Increasingly it feels as if our experience is something we don't fully agree to, and the ubiquity of that sensation represents a kind of rupture. Our dominion over our own minds has been punctured. Our inner lives have been transformed in utterly unprecedented ways.”

But this transformation is not exclusively personal or psychological. It is, as Hayes contends, a product of commodification, resulting in various forms of alienation. He states, “Attention age alienation...has at its core an enduring sensation of isolation and social isolation. This is driven by how attention technologies have developed to individuate exactly what we pay attention to, such that mass culture – the electricity of collective attention-becomes more and more difficult to sustain.” Instead, people spend endless hours gazing at and interacting with screens.

Standing behind and controlling what we pay attention to is the gargantuan power of the high-tech industries who are the dominant players of contemporary competitive capitalism. Like the vortex of a huge planetary tornado, they have swept up the attention of billions of people across the planet and powerfully shape their thoughts, their political views, and how they part with their money.

It is this reality, as encompassing as it is, that I stand against. In its most obvious forms, I am put off by the commanding role of iPhones. On sidewalks, in intersections, and in virtually all places that human beings occupy, I see vast numbers of people gazing down at their phones. Some further isolate themselves by donning earphones. I recall one day waiting for a bus among about a dozen people who had queued up and I was the only one not peering down at a cell phone. Perhaps I am alone, but I conclude that there is something weird in the ubiquity of people looking not at their environment, but affixed to their phone. And I am sure everyone has been to a restaurant for dinner and has noticed a couple at a nearby table for what was most likely a romantic evening, with each of the principals not communing with each other, but attending to their phones. No doubt, this is their choice, but I wonder where is the primacy of human relations?

The world we have created is rushed and frenetic. The electronic media have created a reality in which we are subject to constant interruption, robbing us of the focus and reflection required for deeper and more considered experiences. As noted earlier, in the face of contemporary realities, I have made certain choices. I realize that the train is long out of the station and is not returning. As such, my commitment is not to abandon all use of digital technologies, which would be a virtual impossibility, but to minimize their use. While I can marvel at their wizardry, I refuse to be ensnared by them or become addicted.

Here are some choices I have made:

email

As a former leader of a liberal religious congregation, I found email a marvelous tool for organizing meetings or for brief responses. I find it less useful for long exchanges. And it is progressively frustrating for content-rich conversations involving multiple discussants. They usually veer off target onto tangents that become increasingly painstaking to rope in. Nothing beats face-to-face meetings.

I believe that the medium informs the message. I would not send out a tweet or an email to inform others that my mother has died. When expressing condolences or gratitude, I still deem it appropriate to convey my feelings with a handwritten note, often employing my fountain pen to do so.

When email first emerged with AOL as the service provider, I recall the frisson of delight when the flag on the mailbox would rise along with the announcement “You've got mail.” That was then. Today I feel oppressed by demands that email imposes on me. When I open my laptop, I am now most often confronted by nearly a hundred messages, many commercial, others asking for donations, and only a few of personal or substantive interest. My morning routines now require me to spend up to 20 minutes scrolling through them, deleting most, and tagging those of interest for later review. I find the exercise tedious and not the way I want to spend my time at this stage of life. I have decided not to be incessantly wedded to my email, and to keep the opening of my inbox to a minimum.

cell phones

When with others, I do not answer my cell phone, unless I am expecting a very important call, and I announce as such to my company beforehand. This is what retrieval devices are for. I have long held that the people who are with me take priority over those who are not. To interrupt my communion with others to answer the phone is to give deference to line jumping. Just as I resent it when I'm waiting in line in the bakery, so I do not want to be a perpetrator when summoned by my phone.

I do not take out my phone in social situations. It seems no different than if I would open my newspaper and read it in the presence of others. In short, I see it as a form of rudeness.

I don't use my phone to relieve boredom and I refrain from idly scrolling through the internet.

I don't play video games. (I never liked them).

I haven't been a frequent Facebook user, but a few weeks ago I told my “friends” that this would be my final posting, noting that I didn't want to have complicity in Mark Zuckerberg's behavior. (I am also weaning myself off of Amazon out of similar motives.) As implied, I don't care for social media and don't want to lend complicity to a phenomenon that is cleaving society apart.

the internet

I frequently make use of the internet but am not glued to it and use it with discretion. As an academic teaching human rights at the graduate level, I researched and downloaded background papers and reports that became the mainstay of my syllabi and enriched my teaching overall. Given my interests, I peruse online journals and write for several which are not in printed form. My use of Substack is a testament to my discrete employment of the internet. However, I prefer not to read off of my computer and will often download and print articles that are more than several pages. I still prefer the printed word to pixels on a screen.

My choice to minimize my use of digital technologies is not an act of deprivation, but one that opens the door to greater enrichment. It frees up time, as stated, for greater social engagement, for reading, mostly books and journals of opinions, and for expressing my thoughts through the written word.

I have always been politically invested, and given the great dangers of this political moment I feel a necessary imperative to stay engaged and informed. I still have the newspaper delivered to my door seven days a week and subscribe to more than a dozen magazines and journals. I am continuously in discussion with friends and associates on how we need to comport ourselves to help save American democracy. My intellectual and political life is not wanting for the choices I have made.

The contemporary electronic media are sweeping diversions that do more to keep us apart than bring us together. In my personal philosophy, the end of human life is to flourish. I have long determined that this is best accomplished through real-time communion with others, and in the pursuit of knowledge as it has been expressed by the best minds through the ages.