Falling in the Fountain
The woman in the dark coat and pants strides purposefully through the indoor mall, a shopping bag in her right hand and a cell phone in her left. Oblivious to the fountain immediately in front of her, she trips on its rim and flips over, landing in the water headfirst, having executed a graceful somersault. She rises immediately, without missing a beat, and with the same purposeful demeanor climbs out of the fountain and walks away. The whole drama has taken fifteen seconds.
Even if you haven’t seen this particular event, which was captured on the mall’s in-house video and posted to the Web, you have no doubt witnessed other incidents of its kind. It is commonplace to see people bumping into objects or people as they walk down the street, their eyes glued to their cell phone screens. You may even have done it yourself. To be sure, it can be funny to observe such events, a moment of slapstick humor (provided, of course, that no one was hurt). But it can also be sad, as well as embarrassing (especially when it happens to us), to witness or participate in this kind of distracted behavior.1
Indeed, when I first happened upon the video of the woman falling into the fountain, I reacted in all these ways, finding it funny, sad, and embarrassing. But my main reaction was simply to feel the truth of the incident. For the video managed to capture and illustrate the struggle we are all now engaged in, as individuals and as a society, as we figure out how to incorporate digital devices into our lives in healthy and effective ways. The incident “speaks to our condition,” as the Quakers would say.
Yes, we’ve come to realize that our digital devices can at times be overly engrossing, distracting, and perhaps even addictive. (Not so long ago, Blackberrys were called Crackberrys.) But if this is all they were, we’d assign them to the same category as illegal drugs and spend billions of dollars to hunt them down and destroy them. Whatever their problematic side, they are undeniably powerful and useful—and in today’s world increasingly necessary. Surely, it is a remarkable thing to carry a device in our pockets that allows us to communicate instantaneously with loved ones, to read the news as it is unfolding in real time, to listen to music, and to play games. Not long ago, such possibilities lay only in the realm of science fiction, or magic. What makes these tools so powerful is how they allow us to connect: to extend ourselves across space and time, to project ourselves beyond our immediate circumstances. They are the latest developments in a five thousand–year–long trend, beginning with the invention of writing, which has made it possible for us to create forms of external memory and to speak to one another at a distance.
Yet it is exactly these rich and powerful capacities that are so problematic, even dangerous, today. For the more often we are somewhere else (texting with a distant friend, say), the more likely it is that we will end up in the fountain, literally or figuratively. And the greater the range of opportunities to extend ourselves, the more challenging it becomes to choose what to pay attention to at this very moment.
Using Our Attention Wisely
The challenge we now face boils down to this: Our devices have vastly extended our attentional choices, but the human attentional capacity remains unchanged. (Some would even argue that it has actually shrunk.) And so we must figure out how to make wise choices, and to figure out what constitutes a wise choice, so we can use our digital tools to their best advantage, and to ours.
But how can we go about doing this? My answer in this book is a simple one: You yourself are the source of these answers—many of them, at any rate. By paying attention to how you use your cell phone, how you handle email, how you feel when you are on Facebook or Pinterest, or when you multitask, you will be able to see which aspects of your current online practices are working well and which aren’t. And seeing these clearly will allow you to make constructive changes.
A central premise of this book is that we function more effectively and more healthfully online when we are more attentive, relaxed, and emotionally balanced. This can also be stated in the negative: We operate less effectively and less healthfully when we are distracted, physically uncomfortable, and emotionally upset. And many of us now are often distracted and stressed out when we’re online. The good news, though, is that we can actually do something about it. For we are all capable of becoming aware of these states of mind and body, and becoming more self-aware can lead us to greater attentiveness, physical well-being, and emotional balance.
Attention is the key. Through the exercises in this book, you will be learning to engage and strengthen two forms of attention, which I will call task focus and self-observation. Task focus is the ability to remain focused on whatever you are doing at the moment. It is the ability to maintain that focus in the face of the seemingly endless opportunities to wander somewhere else. Self-observation (or self-awareness—I will use these two terms interchangeably) is the ability to notice how you are feeling—what is going on in your mind and body—when you are doing whatever you’re doing. As this kind of attention grows, you will be able to notice when your task attention has wandered, or when you are stressed out in ways that are compromising your desired outcomes or your well-being. Seeing this will allow you to take corrective action. And over longer periods of observation, you will be able to notice repeating patterns of unhelpful behavior that you can change.
While it should be obvious why having stronger task focus matters, it may seem odd to work on increasing your self-awareness. We have a strong tendency to focus outward when we’re online—to focus on the email message we’re composing and the task it addresses, on our latest Facebook posts and the people they connect us to, on our Google search for hotels in the Denver area. In this outer-directed focus, we are often impatient and rushing ahead. If a page fails to load in our Web browser quickly enough, we will quickly switch to another application. Operating in this way, there is no room to notice what is happening in our mind and body—no room to see, for example, that our left foot has fallen asleep, that our shoulders are tight and our breathing shallow, or that we’re feeling anxious and distracted. Yet noticing such things, as we will see, can provide a great deal of useful information—information that may increase our understanding of our current online tendencies and habits, and can serve as the basis for making valuable changes.
But I don’t expect you to take my word on this. Nor would I want you to. The only way to find out if this method of self-observation and reflection actually works is to try it for yourself.
Improving Our Digital Craft
Becoming more attentive, relaxed, and emotionally stable: It should hardly be surprising if this is a prescription for living a better online life. After all, these qualities generally contribute to greater effectiveness, and to a better quality of life, no matter what we’re doing. In fact, in some areas of human life, people are explicitly trained to operate this way. Take sports, for example: To play well, the batter or the tennis player needs to be focused, not distracted. She needs a relaxed, not a tense, body to respond fluidly to the position of the ball. And she needs to be in a stable, positive state of mind, minimizing emotional disturbance. Similarly, in the handcrafts and the martial arts, the practitioner learns to approach the task at hand with a well-tuned mind and body.
Why shouldn’t we approach our online activities with the same orientation to training and wholehearted engagement? Douglas Engelbart, one of the central figures in the development of personal computing, thought so. The inventor of the mouse as well as the first operational hypertext system, Engelbart used to argue that working on a computer should be likened to playing a musical instrument. And he expressed dissatisfaction with some of the ways that his ideas were taken up (and, he felt, misunderstood) in Silicon Valley.
Some of his engineers moved from SRI, where Engelbart’s lab was located, to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the early 1970s. And there they contributed to the creation of the Alto, the first networked personal computer, and its “user-friendly” graphical user interface. For years afterward, Engelbart argued against user-friendliness as a central design goal. Musical instruments, he claimed, weren’t user-friendly. They weren’t designed, first and foremost, for ease of use. Rather, they were designed for peak performance. They were designed to be played by skilled craftspeople who were intent upon improving their skills. From his point of view, a low entry cost to use was much less important than creating a powerful instrument that one could master over time.
Most of us have acquired our digital skills through a gradual process of experimentation and adaptation. And in many ways this has served us well. But we may not have imagined that it is possible to further improve these skills through a process that parallels the kind of learning we have done in sports or craftwork. Skills are learned or acquired behaviors, which can be improved through practice, observation, and reflection. I experienced this for myself in the two years I studied Western calligraphy intensively in London. I spent many hours practicing the craft—writing with a broad-edged pen or a quill, practicing the letter shapes and developing a rhythmical flow—in preparation for those times when I would produce a finished piece of work. And throughout my studies, my teachers critiqued my work, helping me not only to see more clearly what I had produced (the letters, the space between them, the overall design of the piece), but calling my attention to how I held the pen, how I breathed, how I sat and moved my body.
You may never have done calligraphy (and may never want to), but my guess is that you have engaged in just this kind of learning to improve your performance in a sport or a craft, or in playing a musical instrument. You have improved your skill not only by practicing, but by observing and reflecting upon your performance, either alone or with others. When it comes to email (or texting, or using Facebook, or any of the other myriad activities we engage in online), we are in a sense practicing all the time: we are spending lots of time doing it. But despite the well-known maxim, practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect, at least not by itself. If our email game isn’t improving, it may be because we haven’t been actively learning how to do better, through observation and reflection. It is one of the central aims of the exercises in this book to bring these missing elements into the picture.
You may not have thought of using email or playing tennis as a craft. So allow me to explain how and why I’ve chosen to use this word. In English, we sometimes talk about “crafting” something, as when I say that I’m crafting a response to someone’s message. Crafting here basically means “making or doing something skillfully.” When I suggest we think of our online activity as craft, I certainly mean to call attention to the skill involved. But I also mean to highlight three additional dimensions of craftwork, making four in all: intention, care, skill, and learning.
Intention: When we craft something, we set out purposefully to make or do something. We have a direction and perhaps even an outcome in mind—to construct a bookcase, to play a certain piece of music or a game of tennis. But all too often do we click around aimlessly online. By clarifying our intention, and by reminding ourselves of it (or consciously changing it, when appropriate) we increase our chances of arriving successfully at our destination.
Care: When we craft something, we also care about what we are creating or performing. Care, of course, goes hand in hand with intention. We care enough to clarify our intention, and then to make sure that we are realizing it to the best of our ability.
Skill: While having a caring attitude and the best of intentions is necessary, it isn’t sufficient. We also need the appropriate skills to realize our intention, including the ability to maintain and use our tools well, and to bring the best of our mind and body to the task at hand. If we pay attention to our online craft, we will be able to notice when we are proceeding skillfully, and when we’re not.
Learning: Finally, if we care enough for the quality of our outcome to bring our best skills to bear, then we will want to improve these skills. This requires a commitment of time and attention, to engage in an ongoing process of learning, which is what the exercises in this book are all about.
Craft played an important role in everything Steve Jobs accomplished, and he too was introduced to it through calligraphy. In his 2005 commencement address at Stanford, he talked about his discovery of the practice in college. “Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. . . . I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.” This exposure to calligraphy directly affected the design of the Macintosh computer—“If I had never dropped in on that single course in college,” Jobs said, “the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.” But beyond the specifics of letterforms and spacing, Jobs clearly absorbed the craft perspective. Through his leadership, Apple applied this perspective to its devices and their user interfaces, creating not just highly functional but beautiful products. Similarly, I believe that we can craft online practices and experiences that are more functional and artful, if not beautiful.2
Does this sound like I’m suggesting we all become as obsessively perfectionistic as Steve Jobs famously was, that we become Olympic-level email and Facebook users? This is by no means my intention. Rather, these four dimensions of craft—intention, care, skill, and learning—point us in a direction, not to a final outcome. By being more intentional in our online activities, by caring enough to spend that time well, by engaging mind, body, tools, and materials skillfully, and by spending time in learning through observation and reflection, we can avoid a certain amount of the mindless and stressful behavior that is now so common in our online lives. Ultimately, you will decide how much of this work you do, and when. Even small increments in your learning can have significant, positive consequences.
I once heard a talk by someone who’d helped found the macrobiotics movement, which promoted a lean, grain-and-local-vegetable-based diet. He complained that later adherents had taken the diet too strictly and seriously. “Sometimes,” I recall him saying, “you just have to eat a Snickers bar.” As one of my students exclaimed: “Aren’t we allowed twenty minutes a day to let our mind and clicking hand wander and not judge the way in which our time is spent?” We certainly are, in my opinion. The challenge and the opportunity is to decide for ourselves when to engage with intention and care, and when to eat the Snickers bar (and when, sometimes, to eat the Snickers bar with intention and care). And when we decide to act intentionally and carefully, we ought to feel confident that our craft skills are up to the task.
Your Discoveries and Insights Are Central
What makes this approach unique is that it aims to give you the tools to make your own discoveries. If you want to learn how to manage your email more productively, you can find endless Web sites offering you the three rules of good email usage, or the five principles for coping with email overload. Or you can find sites that will teach you particular techniques—how to limit the number of messages in your inbox, for example. You can also find a variety of software tools that will help you manage your email. (To see for yourself, do a Web search on a phrase like “email overload.”) There’s no question that many of these approaches have value. But why are there so many different choices? The answer, quite simply, is that no single approach works well for everyone. One size does not fit all. You can certainly learn valuable lessons by observing what other people do (as you will see in the pages ahead), but in the end it is up to you to craft an approach that satisfies your own unique needs, and your own cognitive and emotional makeup. And you can’t do that without a clear sense of your needs, your makeup, and your habitual patterns of behavior.
But there is another reason why making our own discoveries is a valuable strategy. Throughout our lives, most of us have been regularly told what to do, how to behave, and what to believe by parents, teachers, and other authority figures. Stand up straight, come to class on time, don’t speak with your mouth full. But for the most part, being told “I know what’s best for you” simply doesn’t work. While such statements may point us to areas of our lives that we should investigate, they can’t substitute for the discoveries that we ourselves make, and therefore come to own. When we see our habits and patterns for ourselves, we are in a better position to make meaningful changes.
Beyond Individual Change
So this book will focus on what you, as an individual, can discover and change. This is the arena where each of us has the greatest leverage. But it is not the only place where change can happen. Meaningful changes can, and sometimes must, also happen in the realm of the social and political (through collective action) and in the realm of the technological (by making changes to the technologies we use).
To see this, let’s return to the use of cell phones. On the individual level, each of us can make choices about when and how we use our cell phones—whether or not we answer our phone during a meeting or text while we’re walking. But on the social and political level, we come together as groups, and at times as an entire society, to establish norms, ethical principles, and laws to place limits on what we can and can’t do. Thus in recent years there has been a growing consensus in the United States that some uses of cell phones are too dangerous to be left up to individual choice, and an increasing number of states have enacted legislation setting limits on what drivers can do with their phones. Drivers, of course, are still free to break the law (and many do), but the risk of a moving violation is meant to serve as a warning and a deterrent. Changes to the technologies we use, much like shared agreements and legislation, also aim to effect collective change. But unlike normative or legal forms of regulation, they sometimes contain within themselves the means of enforcement and thus limit individual choice. A recent New York Times story, for example, describes a technological system that would block texts and prevent phone calls from reaching a driver.3
Although the focus in this book is squarely on the individual—on what you yourself can do—it is my hope that the work done at this level will also provide insights that are useful for making broader social and technological changes. Ultimately, these three levels can’t be fully separated. As you come to better understand your own behavior, you are likely to see how it is affected by and in turn affects the behavior of others (the social level), and how it has been shaped by the decisions that the designers of the tools have made (the technological level).
Why do I say this? Beyond enabling you to make better use of your digital tools, it is my hope that this book will help you to be a more informed consumer, and perhaps even a better citizen. So many of the discussions we are now having about the digital world tend to be based around simplistic dualisms. We ask whether texting is good or bad for us, or whether the Internet is making us smart or stupid. But when we can look at the richness of our own experience online, we have the chance to discover when and how texting is helpful and when it isn’t, or when being online is productive and illuminating and when it isn’t. And especially if we are doing this work with others (in a classroom or a work group setting), we can see that the choices others make for the skillful use of their tools aren’t necessarily the same as our own. Seeing our similarities and differences, and noticing the complexities (and even contradictions) within ourselves, will make us better partners in the collective conversation we ought to have about social and technological change.
How to Use This Book
The book is meant to be used both by individuals working alone and by groups of people working together. Because the contents emerged from classroom (and therefore group) use, I am most familiar with the kinds of learning that are possible in group settings. While one of the strengths of this approach is that it allows people to come to their own, unique understanding of their online behavior and to craft their own unique changes, I have seen again and again how the learning is greatly amplified when people share their insights with one another. So even if you decide to work alone, I hope you will find a way to engage others in your process, perhaps sharing your written reflections with them, or talking with them about the discoveries you are making.
It is also possible to read through the entire book without performing any of the exercises (performing some of the exercises later, or not at all). Toward the end of each of the exercise chapters, I describe the kinds of discoveries that others have made and quote from my students’ reflections. So even if you don’t do the exercises, you may find that reading other people’s insights suggests changes that you might make.
All of my teaching experience is with undergraduates and with adults (both graduate students and working adults). But I suspect that the exercises are usable or adaptable for younger students as well—students in high school and possibly earlier. If you are a K–12 teacher interested in making use of the book in your class (or a parent wanting to use it with your children), I suggest you first do the exercises yourself—all the better if you can do them collaboratively with other teachers or parents.
All of the quotations from students are real, not paraphrases. I have obtained my students’ permission to quote them, and have changed their names and obscured their identities. Although most of them (roughly 80 percent) were enrolled in the course on Information and Contemplation I teach at the University of Washington Information School, their ages range from late teens to fifties, and many of them have had real jobs in the world, or were holding down real jobs while in school. Thus thinking of these people simply as students misrepresents their various stages in life. When referring to them, I have chosen not to distinguish between those officially enrolled in UW courses and those who took informal (noncredit) courses with me, either online or in person.
A Word About Language
A word too about my use of language. Throughout the book, I talk about making changes to our digital practices that are “healthy and effective.” Nowhere, however, do I explicitly say what I mean by these words. In fact, I leave it up to you, as an integral part of the exploration you will be doing, to decide for yourself what constitutes healthy and effective behavior. This strategy works quite well, I’ve found, in my courses. Just by paying attention to what we are doing and how it makes us feel, we can discover how to operate more skillfully and in the service of greater well-being.
Throughout the book I also use phrases like “being online” and “our online lives.” But what exactly does it mean to be online these days—and what does it mean to be offline? The extremes seem clear enough: When you are on your laptop (as I am now), and working on multiple applications with an Internet connection, we can probably all agree that you are online. And when you are sitting at the beach reading a physical book with no cell phone or Internet coverage, you are definitely offline. But suppose that you are working on a laptop without an Internet connection, or you are listening to music stored on your smart phone? Does “online” simply mean using a digital device, technology, or application, or does it perhaps mean using it in a certain mode?
There are no definitive answers to such questions, because “online” and “offline” are terms of art in our current cultural conversation, and they lack absolute or clear boundaries. I choose to use them here in exactly this way—as rough and inexact pointers to certain activities and behaviors we are all now engaged in. In the end what matters isn’t how I or you use these words, but what you discover when you look carefully at the specific behaviors and practices that constitute your online and offline life.
My guess is that notions of being online and offline will become less significant as the digital revolution matures and digital connectivity is increasingly woven into more and more aspects of our daily lives. What will become more important is how well or poorly we are engaged with whatever we’re doing. And it is just this—the quality of our engagement—that we will be exploring in this book.
And a Word About Attitude
Finally, I want to say a few words about the attitude with which I hope you will approach the exercises. I think of them as experiments—certainly not scientific experiments in the classical sense but rather personal investigations in which you get to play a double role: as the performer (the experimental subject) and the observer. You are first and foremost the performer, in each exercise engaging in your primary practice: using email or checking Facebook, switching among multiple tasks and applications, or abstaining from one or more digital practices. But you are also the observer, the investigator, whose job it is to closely study what the performer is doing.
To play the role of observer well, it will help to be curious, honest, and nonjudgmental. To be curious is to be genuinely interested in what you’re seeing. To be honest is to care enough to see things as they are. And to be nonjudgmental is to be willing to suspend judgment—especially, in this case, self-judgment—which can make it hard to accept what you are seeing. For in paying close attention to your online behavior, you are likely to observe yourself doing unskillful and unhelpful things. And this may well provoke self-criticism, which can reduce your ability to investigate clearly and honestly. The challenge in allowing your curiosity full rein is to look honestly at things you don’t like without being too hard on yourself. Keep in mind: if you weren’t sometimes engaging online in counterproductive ways, there would be little to improve.