Author Archives: David Pierce

Paul Ford wonders where the ending has gone, whether Facebook, Twitter and the like have upended the way we understand time and space and structure. We need, he argues, to have a beginning, middle and end, to have context and understanding, and we’re not getting it anymore:

Social media has no understanding of anything aside from the connections between individuals and the ceaseless flow of time: No beginnings, and no endings. These disparate threads of human existence alternately fascinate and horrify that part of the media world that grew up on topic sentences and strong conclusions. This world of old media is like a giant steampunk machine that organizes time into stories. I call it the Epiphanator, and it has always known the value of a meaningful conclusion. The Epiphanator sits in midtown Manhattan and clunks along, at Condé Nast and at the Times and in Rockefeller Center. Once a day it makes a terrible grinding noise and spits out newspapers and TV shows. Once a week it spits out weeklies and more TV shows. Once a month it produces glossy magazines. All too often it makes movies, and novels.

At the end of every magazine article, before the “■,” is the quote from the general in Afghanistan that ties everything together. The evening news segment concludes by showing the secretary of State getting back onto her helicopter. There’s the kiss, the kicker, the snappy comeback, the defused bomb. The Epiphanator transmits them all. It promises that things are orderly. It insists that life makes sense, that there is an underlying logic.

I’ve been wondering a lot recently about the shelf life of emails. I typically have a few week-to-month-old emails sitting in my Inbox, waiting for me to get over what weird neuroses prevented me from taking the three minutes to respond. Most of the time, though, it’s not even relevant after a few hours or days. After a week, is it even worth responding? What about after a month?

Henry Alford wonders the same thing in the NYT, and gets some help to answer the question:

The British linguist David Crystal said that his wife recently got a reply to an e-mail she sent in 2006. “It was like getting a postcard from the Second World War,” he said.

The roaring silence. The pause that does not refresh. The world is full of examples of how the anonymity and remove of the Internet cause us to write and post things that we later regret. But what of the way that anonymity and remove sometimes leave us dangling like a cartoon character that has run off a cliff?

Jenn Vargas, over the 4th of July, was determined to turn off, sign out, and ignore technology for the weekend. And she did, barely:

Sure there were some points that drove me NUTS. I really just wanted to send a text message. JUST ONE. Or sometimes the quiet would drive me up a wall. There were times where Jimelle was sleeping in or taking a nap or something and I would run out ways to keep myself entertained and would contemplate sneaking a peek at my iPad, but I was determined to actually make it the whole time.

And I did! Over 100 hours, in fact!

The trip really made me realize a few things. Mostly that I’m far too dependent upon having constant internet access. There were times where Jimelle and I would be talking about something and a certain fact slipped our minds or we were curious about the answer to something and normally I would have hopped on my phone right in the middle of that conversation and would have found out the answer once and for all. With our self-imposed rules, we had to accept not knowing the answer and look it up in a few days. Not easy for 2 pretty smart gals who have to know the answer to everything.

I continue to love this idea, and love the idea of making it a regular (if not frequent) habit.

Jonah Lehrer responds to the “Google is Ruining our Brains” hype around a recent study. He focuses particularly on transactive memory, an idea focused on the notion that part of how we “know” anything is knowing who to trust on what. We can’t know everything, so we figure out who’s an expert on a given subject and we rely on them:

And this is where the internet comes in. One of the virtues of transactive memory is that it acts like a fact-check, helping ensure we don’t all descend into selfish solipsism. By sharing and comparing our memories, we can ensure that we still have some facts in common, that we all haven’t disappeared down the private rabbit hole of our own reconsolidations. In this sense, instinctually wanting to Google information – to not entrust trivia to the fallible brain – is a perfectly healthy impulse. (I’ve used Google to correct my errant memories thousands of times.) I don’t think it’s a sign that technology is rotting our cortex – I think it shows that we’re wise enough to outsource a skill we’re not very good at. Because while the web enables all sorts of other biases – it lets us filter news, for instance, to confirm what we already believe – the use of the web as a vessel of transactive memory is mostly virtuous. We save hard drive space for what matters, while at the same time improving the accuracy of recall.

It’s a clever point, and gets at the heart of what’s really going on in this debate. The fundamental question being asked here is, “is trivial, fact-based knowledge valuable in and of itself?” In other words, is there a compelling reason for me to know that Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President, or can we forget those things because they’re so easy to look up?

Some things, as Susan Orlean smartly described, we can’t Google. But why not fill our heads with that stuff, and leave what’s Google-able to Google? The end of Jonah’s piece quotes Nicholas Carr, the most vocal proponent of the “Google is ruining our brains” notion, and he makes a good point, but I’m not sure I buy it.