The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection (32 page)

6
. To “an hero” is a synonym for committing suicide that is used by 4chan communities.

7
. The gold medal has not been won yet. Smaller prizes are given each year for the “most human computer” in the bunch.

8
. Such content will almost definitely be managed more tightly in the future than it is now—perhaps by the government. To paraphrase Microsoft researcher danah boyd: Facebook is a utility; utilities get regulated.

9
. Governments and corporations may use such programs to keep tabs on the whereabouts of “unfriendly” persons. For example,
The Guardian
reported on February 10, 2013, that “defense giant Raytheon has created software capable of tracking people based on information posted to social networks. Its capabilities are impressively creepy.” Raytheon’s software, called Riot, extracts location information from Facebook or the location tags on uploaded photos, joining a long list of technologies that make mass surveillance (of “terrorists” and “innocents” alike) more feasible.

10
. Mostly, Dinakar’s vision is a cheerful, hopeful one. I ask him how he imagines the future, and he begins to describe the talking paintings that J. K. Rowling included in her Harry Potter
books. “Thirty or fifty years from now,” he says, “the paintings will talk to you. If I have a picture of my mom, who lives back in India, and she’s happy, then the picture in my home will look happy. I will know how she feels in the moment she feels it.”

11
. Uhls’s research indicates that there is, not surprisingly, a relationship between valuing fame and usage of social media.

12
. As early as 1370, King Charles V ordered the citizens of Paris to conform their daily activities to the ding-dong of France’s first public clock, which he had installed on the facade of the royal palace (the present-day La Conciergerie).

13
. This appalled me briefly before I realized the behavior was no different from paying money to watch a pro athlete play hockey.

14
. But the silent reader becomes responsible for the text and, thus, forms an intimate, exclusionary relationship with it. This silent relationship with the text is an invention, not a given: Alberto Manguel describes how, around the year AD 380, the future St. Augustine was astonished, on meeting the future St. Ambrose, to find him reading without moving his lips.

15
. That said, eye-tracking software may be useful in keeping long-haul drivers from falling asleep at the wheel. See Olivia Solon’s “Eye-Tracking System Monitors Driver Fatigue, Prevents Sleeping at Wheel,” in
Wired,
May 28, 2013, http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-05/28/eye -tracking-mining-system.

16
. As Elizabeth Eisenstein points out, indexes, tables of contents, and the like were not natural to printed books, but evolved over time. Even alphabetical order (
a
to
z
) is of course an invention and a direct result of the printing revolution. (See Eisenstein’s
The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
,
71.)

17
. Tim Berners-Lee indulges in this recall-as-memory fallacy in a coauthored 2012 paper titled “Defend the Web,” where he tells the story of Deacon Patrick Jones, who found succor in “memory aids” after a traumatic brain injury. “His very memory is extended into the Internet,” the authors enthuse; but this is clearly not so.

18
. Associations will come into play that shape and strengthen this memory. For example, the “ingle” part of “Inglenook” might be associated in your brain with “ingots,” a building material that might be used to build such a cozy corner; “angle,” which sounds like “ingle,” might be called up, too. And “nook,” which the brain already knows, would be activated in order to form the new word; and so on.

19
. Without a “Pandora’s box” technology, we are required to engage in an active
scrubbing
of digital memory—we must delete contact info from phones, untag ourselves from photos online. Even then, stray digital flotsam seems inevitable. The perfection of silicon recall may now require perfect deletion, too.

20
. Even the in-name platonic Web site Friendster.com was founded (in 2002) by a man who later admitted to doing all the work in order to find good-looking girls: Gary Rivlin, “Wallflower at the Web Party,”
New York Times,
October 15, 2006.

21
. More than a century later, Thoreau’s words seem reflected in the work of poet Anne Carson: “When I think of you reading this I do not want you to be taken captive, separated by a wire mesh lined with glass from your life itself, like some Elektra.”