Hamlet's BlackBerry (20 page)

There's a long-standing awareness in architecture and design of the value of domestic zoning, to ensure that a home
serves all the needs of those who live there. In the late 1930s, an influential book called
The Human House
by Dorothy J. Field made the case that every house should have zones designated for various degrees of solitude and togetherness, privacy and activity. In other words, a house should offer its occupants the opportunity to move back and forth along the continuum of connectedness. Focusing on the family dwelling, Field wrote, “All thoroughly satisfactory family houses
are
zoned. In any such house you can find a room which is always a quiet room, a room where you can always enjoy a romp, noise, or any activity without shushing or nagging, and a private cubbyhole for yourself to retire to.” Her ideas influenced Frank Lloyd Wright and other thinkers.

Zoning is way overdue for a comeback, a digital revival, and it's surprising it hasn't happened yet. Thoreau could be the model. Our situation is different from his, in that the crowd is no longer just nearby—it's right in the home, wherever there's a screen. So our zoning has to be interior. Every home could have at least one Walden Zone, a room where no screens of any kind are allowed. Households that take their tranquillity seriously, and have sufficient room, might designate such a space for each person. There could be a shelf or cabinet outside the doorway where, upon entering, all smart phones and laptops are turned off and put away.

The wireless signals in those rooms won't go away, of course, and that's a problem. But as with Thoreau, the point of the zone is to use an idea as a constraint on behavior. For a Walden Zone to work, you first have to
believe
it's a good idea; once you do, it's a lot easier to resist temptation. The mind puts up an invisible wall, which blocks the invisible signal. Technology could help, too. Perhaps a canny entrepreneur with an eye to the Thoreauvian future will come up with a device that scrambles wireless signals in any designated space.

The opposite of a Walden Zone would be a Crowd Zone, any room specifically designated for screen life. Home offices would be automatic Crowd Zones for most people. Since the kitchen is a natural gathering place in many homes, it's a good Crowd Zone candidate. In a thoughtfully zoned house, a kitchen with floor-to-ceiling wall screens begins to make sense. Connectedness is much more appealing and rewarding when you know there's a place nearby to get away to.

Another option is whole-house zoning, in which the entire dwelling becomes a Walden Zone during certain times of the day or certain days of the week. This requires more commitment, as it means truly swearing off screens during designated times. The advantage of this approach is that it creates a genuine refuge, as Thoreau's house must have been on quiet winter nights when the town seemed a thousand miles away. My family has had great success with a regimen of this kind, which I describe in detail in part III.

The point is not to withdraw
from
the world but
within
the world. It's funny that Thoreau, of all people, should be the source of this wisdom. But remember, Walden was just a two-year experiment. When it was done, he returned to society and lived the rest of his life there. But he took a valuable piece of knowledge with him: you
can
go home again, whenever you need sanctuary, so long as you have a home that serves this purpose. It doesn't have to be far off in the woods or up in the mountains or anywhere special. It's not the place that matters, it's the philosophy. To be happy in the crowd, everyone needs a little Walden.

“You think that I am impoverishing myself by withdrawing from men,” Thoreau once wrote in his journal, “but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or
chrysalis
, and, nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature, fitted for a higher society.”

McLuhan and the Thermostat of Happiness

“How are we to get out of the maelstrom created by our own ingenuity?”

 

A
t the end of an e-mail, a friend mentions how crazy her life has become, particularly at the office. She has a good job at a prestigious university, the kind of place I like to imagine as being somewhat insulated from the chaos. I ask what she means by crazy.

“The i.m.'ing knows no bounds,” she replies. “It feels like my central nervous system is interlinked with all my colleagues'.”

A brief description, less than twenty words. But I know just what she's talking about, and she knows that I know. We're both interlinked to more people than it's possible to hold in the mind at one time. Everyone is. And the panicky feeling behind her words, the sense of being plugged into an infinite crowd from which there's no unplugging, is the characteristic sensation of this era.

So far, the ideas explored in this part of the book have come from the distant past. There have been all kinds of striking parallels between past and present, ways in which people of
previous eras felt much as we feel now. But the fact is, none of them experienced exactly what we're experiencing.

Thoreau walked under telegraph wires and heard them sing, but he never watched an event unfold on the other side of the world in real time. He never typed in a search term and instantly got back 25 million results. He never woke up in the morning to find that 150 new messages had arrived overnight, silently, inside a waferlike object glowing on the nightstand—an object that really
does
seem to have a direct line into the nervous system. Yet there is a way to pull the good ideas from the past into the reality that surrounds us. Marshall McLuhan, the only philosopher in this survey who lived in the age of screens, provides the missing piece.

Today McLuhan is known primarily for two catchphrases that he coined, “the global village” and “The medium is the message.” They weren't just slogans, they were prophecies, and astonishingly good ones. He saw this digital world of ours coming, and he wrote a great deal more about it than two phrases. He left behind a sprawling, penetrating, idiosyncratic body of work, a whole philosophy aimed at making sense of life in a world made much smaller and busier by electronic technology. His overriding theme was that, even in a hyperconnected world, everyone has the ability to regulate his or her own experience.

At the time it was widely feared that mass media were turning people into helpless automatons. The crowd was on the rise again, and McLuhan wanted people to know that if they felt overwhelmed by technology—“involuntarily altered in their inmost lives,” as he put it—it didn't have to be that way. They could take control of the situation, just by living more consciously.

It's the same theme that great thinkers have struck time after time over the last two thousand years, but it keeps getting
forgotten. The answer to our dilemma is hiding in the last place we tend to look: our own minds. McLuhan believed that even at a time when technology, and the crowd it delivers, has direct access to the mind, the best tool for fighting back is
still
the mind itself. His mission was to update the mind's arsenal for the new challenges of the future. That future has come, and though McLuhan died thirty years ago, his message couldn't be more timely.

 

M
C
L
UHAN WAS A
Canadian academic, a scholar of English literature with a passionate interest in mass media and popular culture. In his early writings, he examined the content of media, particularly advertising. At the time, this was the standard way of thinking about technology: it was ideas and messages that mattered, not the devices that delivered them.

This is not to say the technology was ignored. Radio and television pulled huge new crowds together in the 1950s and early '60s, giving birth to mass society, and there was enormous concern that individuals were losing the ability to think for themselves. It was in 1950 that sociologist David Riesman's book
The Lonely Crowd
came out, garnering wide attention with its argument that human beings were becoming less “inner-directed,” or guided by their own values and beliefs, and more “other-directed,” or shaped by those of society. Outwardness was replacing inwardness.

Numerous other books and movies of this period grappled with the meaning of the crowd and its impact on people's minds and behavior. Some, such as
The Organization Man
and
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
, focused on the soul-killing conformity of life in the corporate world. Others saw demagoguery in politics as a growing threat. World War II was a fresh memory, and Hitler and other fascist leaders had been
skillful manipulators of mass opinion. The fear was that new rabble-rousers could use the electronic media to spread poisonous messages. In his influential book
The True Believer
, a San Francisco longshoreman turned philosopher named Eric Hoffer examined why individuals willingly surrender their freedom and individuality to mass movements. In the 1957 movie
A Face in the Crowd
, Andy Griffith played a simpleminded country singer who becomes a media celebrity and political demagogue. But it was the messages themselves, and the charismatic personalities of the people sending them, that were thought to be the real source of power. Technology was basically a conduit.

Meanwhile, the burdens of this new life in the crowd were being felt in the ordinary comings and goings of daily existence. In
Gift from the Sea
, Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote in 1955 about the crushing load of obligations bearing down on the modern self:

Lindbergh's book reads like a prequel to the digital age. Connectedness had ramped up dramatically, and, as today, it was turning life into a slog. But notice that she, too, focused on the content of her busyness—the various “demands” that arrive “through” media and other sources—rather than the technologies themselves.

Thus, on two different planes—the macro (sociopolitical life) and the micro (private life)—there was a broad sense that, in an increasingly crowded world, people were less free to be themselves. Whether they were surrendering their minds to a charismatic ideologue on the radio or simply unable to keep up with everyday demands and distractions, the effect was the same: they were losing their autonomy, becoming creatures of the outward world. And, the thinking went, this was all the result of incoming messages and ideas, of content.

Few stopped to consider the gadgets that connected everyone in the first place—radio, television, and so on—and what role those might be playing, quite apart from the content they conveyed. That's where McLuhan came in. In 1962, with his groundbreaking book
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
, he proposed a completely new way of thinking about this question. He argued that the technologies themselves have a more powerful impact on human beings than the content they carry. This, he explained, is because our tools are really extensions of our bodies.

Written language, for example, is an extension of our sense of sight: it extends our vision out into the world, allowing us to pull back information in the form of letters and words. Whenever a new connective device is added to the toolbox, it extends another part of us outward. The telephone gave our ears global reach, while television extended both eyes and ears in a new way. According to McLuhan, every time this happens it alters how we perceive and process reality, in effect creating a new environment for the mind and for our lives. We inhabit a reality shaped fundamentally by our tools. Thus the medium is the message, far more than the content it carries.

This outward extension of the self through tools had been going on since the dawn of human history, and because it involved a fundamental rearrangement of one's mental life—the
old expression “rock my world” neatly sums up the effect—it was always stressful. “Man the tool-making animal, whether in speech or in writing or in radio, has long been engaged in extending one or another of his sense organs in such a manner as to disturb all of his other senses and faculties,” McLuhan wrote.

He took it a step further, contending that when a truly momentous new device appears, such as the printing press, the inner environmental change is so dramatic that it produces a new kind of human being. So, in addition to the medium being the message,
the user is the content
. We ourselves are changed by our devices, and because we're changed, society changes, too. Gutenberg's invention had created what McLuhan called Typographic Man, whose mind operated in a linear, objective fashion that fostered individualism. Equipped with this left-brain way of thinking, this being had thrived for centuries and built up Western civilization.

But McLuhan said he was about to be replaced. Because mass electronic media work on us in a different way from print, those technologies were creating a new person whose mind was less linear and individualistic, more group-oriented. In the future, he predicted, our minds would operate more like the oral mind of Socrates' era. In fact, he said, this new age had already arrived, which was why everyone was feeling so anxious and full of doubt. Print had given human beings the “inner direction” that Riesman had talked about in
The Lonely Crowd
, and now they felt it slipping away. The old boundary between the inward self and the outward world had been permanently breached by electronic technology. Inner direction would now be much harder to come by.

He traced this shift back to the nineteenth century, when, he said, the telegraph had, in effect, extended the entire central nervous system, including the brain, out into the world.
Suddenly, human beings were immersed in what he called “a total field of interacting events in which all men participate,” i.e., everything happening at any given moment on the planet. By the mid–twentieth century, telephones, radio, and television had made this brain-taxing environment all the more intense. According to McLuhan, this was the true source of the stress and unhappiness people were feeling, the sense of the mind being under siege and paralyzed. His biographer W. Terrence Gordon summarized McLuhan's view: “Technologies create new environments, the new environments create pain, and the body's nervous system shuts down to block the pain.”

However, there was a way to avoid the pain and thrive in the global village. McLuhan said it was a matter of understanding that you were living in this new world and then adjusting to it. Though he believed that the new gadgets were the source of our trouble, he didn't
blame
them. He placed the ultimate responsibility with human beings. If our technologies are driving us nuts, it's our fault for not paying attention to what they're doing to us. Why should we allow tools that are supposed to be making us happy to make us miserable? We should take control of the new technologies “instead of being pushed around by them.”

His next book opened with the motto “The medium is the message,” and it made him an authentic pop-culture icon. It was an unlikely fate for a fifty-two-year-old brainiac given to quoting James Joyce and Charles Baudelaire. But it was a moment when people were desperate to make sense of a crowded world, and he offered a fresh approach. To promote it, he deftly used the technologies he wrote about, appearing widely in the media, including on TV talk shows. Sometimes he would discuss his theories, but often he was just another famous-for-being-famous celebrity. On the kooky comedy
show
Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In
, the question “Marshall McLuhan, what are ya' doin'?” became a running gag.

Unfortunately, though his catchphrases caught on, most people never fully grasped the concepts behind them. And that was really McLuhan's fault. His writing was too theoretical and maddeningly circular. His books were structured as collections of short stand-alone essays presented in what he called “mosaic” fashion, meaning they could be read in any order. It was his effort to break out of the linear thinking he believed was a thing of the past. For readers raised in a left-brain culture, however, it wasn't a helpful approach, particularly since it was delivered in a medium designed to be read from start to finish, the book. The abstruseness of his work eventually became part of his shtick and the theme of a funny moment in the Woody Allen movie
Annie Hall
, in which McLuhan plays himself. Even today, with the global village in full swing, reading him, one often feels like Alice in Wonderland trying to decode a barrage of seemingly random statements.

He was not a neuroscientist, and when he tries to describe the workings of the central nervous system, his language can be particularly inscrutable: “My suggestion is that cultural ecology has a reasonably stable base in the human sensorium, and that any extension of the sensorium by technological dilation has a quite appreciable effect in setting up new ratios or proportions among all the senses.” If he'd written more plainly, his theories might be as well known today as his maxims.

Despite these obstacles, McLuhan has endured into this century, for a couple of reasons. First, in the early digital years his work was rediscovered and embraced by fervent fans of the new gadgets, who translated “The medium is the message” to mean “Technology rules!”—the exact opposite of how McLuhan believed the world should work. But this leads to the second reason he's endured and why he's so relevant today:
he placed human freedom and happiness before technology. Though our devices do have a tremendous influence on us,
we
should rule.