We’ve learned that to
be perpetually connected is to be perpetually distracted: Rabbi David B. Cohen, Congregation Sinai, Yom
Kippur 2010
Two lifelong
buddies have traveled together, apart from their wives, every year for more
than half a century of increasingly exotic outings. For their latest adventure,
they decide on an ice-fishing trip to the Upper Peninsula. Late one very cold
winter night, the two men tromp out onto the ice, loaded with gear. Just as
they start to cut a hole for fishing, a voice booms out in the dark, “Don’t cut
the ice!” Startled, one guy says to the other, “We’ve had too much to drink.”
As they bend over to resume, the voice commands a second time, “Don’t cut the
ice!” Once again they decide their imaginations are playing tricks on them. So
they take up the saw, but for the third time the voice thunders, “Don’t cut the
ice!” At that, one of the men peers up into the darkness and asks, “Is that
you, God?” “No,” comes the reply, “It’s the rink manager.” Personally, I prefer
to spend my time in Northern climes during the summer. My location of choice is
Mount Desert Island, Maine, home of Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park. It’s a
pristine setting, rocks meeting the sea, inland lakes surrounded by tall fir
trees and mountains sculpted during the last ice age. What Mount Desert Island doesn’t have is
decent cell phone coverage or broadband Internet access. Well, that’s not
entirely true; there’s WIFI at the public library, but it’s not close by. For
us, going to Maine is a time to spend time differently, to read books, ride
bicycles, play cards, go hiking, in short, to explore and experience. I don’t want to over romanticize – we do, in
fact, recreate some of the chaos of our lives here – our kids are
overprogrammed and require lots of driving around; we’re constantly make plans
with family and friends; but still, we try to live life without the electronic
screen. In a sense it’s a lot of what we don’t get here. Here we have no time
to ourselves, no time to think, to contemplate, to regroup. There we do. The promise of technology was that it would
save us time by automating routine tasks, like paying bills. It would keep us
better connected with friends and loved ones. And it has done those things –
just ask any grandparent who Skypes with grandchildren across the country.
Without recent advances in technology our lives would be impoverished in many
ways. Yet, as technology kept its
promise to keep us connected to each other, to our workplaces, to libraries,
data banks, e-commerce, there were some unanticipated costs. The problem of
technology is summed up in a television ad with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates.
Jerry says, “Bill, you’ve connected over a billion people. What’s next?” The
screen goes black and two words stand out in brilliant white: “Perpetually
Connected.” Being perpetually connected must have sounded like a good idea, at
least in some ad agency, but we have come to learn being perpetually connected
comes with some very real human costs.
• An opinion piece in
the Wall Street Journal decries the loss of productivity as workers are
distracted on average every three minutes by texts and email. With no small
irony, this article appears on the web site flanked by an advertisement for the
Journal’s newest electronic feature: STAY CONNECTED 24/7VIA EMAIL NEWSLETTERS
AND ALERTS... FREE REGISTRATION SIGN UP TODAY • How many text messages do you
think teenagers send a month? Those of you who made the mistake of not getting
unlimited texting plans can probably answer. Teenagers now send an average of
2272 texts a month, twice the amount they sent last year. • It’s hard for parents to convince their
children to stay away from the screen when we ourselves can't go 20 minutes
without checking our smart phones. • Author Stephen King said it was when he
realized he was spending "almost half of each day's consciousness"
facing screens that he decided to cut back. He said: "I don't think any
man or woman on his or her death bed ever wished he or she had spent more time
sending instant messages.” • And what about the content of those instant
messages? Television writer and producer Bill Persky wrote an Op-Ed piece
entitled “We’re Killing Communication” in which he complained that the new
technology had brought him friends he didn't need and updates about their lives
be didn't want, such as, "eating leftover lasagna" and "getting
a colonoscopy.”
Perpetually
connected. Does this describe you? Do
you need to have the cell phone at arms reach? Do you automatically check email
every five minutes? Do you respond to
email, even when you are on vacation, even when the recipient has already
gotten a message saying you are on vacation and cant return the call? When
you’re on vacation, is hotel WIFI access a deal breaker? You, my friend, are perpetually
connected. Forget about wasting time – after all faddish pursuits have always
been with us – but consider the glut of information you receive that you don’t
need or want. Think about it: Fifteen years ago, did anyone use the phrase,
“TMI”, too much information? Don’t get
me wrong. I am no luddite; I love technology, I am what they call an early
adopter, acquiring the latest gadgets and refusing to read to manual. Yet, in
the embrace of technology, I recognize a very real dilemma. What we have gained
in broad-band’s breadth, we have lost in human depth. Our connected lives
ensnare us so completely that we rarely have time to think, to contemplate, to
reflect. We are losing depth in thought and feeling and relationships. And
there’s the irony: we may be perpetually connected to the crowd, but the closer
we get to the crowd, the further we recede from those closest to us, the more
we lose touch with our own souls.
In short, being perpetually connected means
our public life with the crowd overshadows our interior, private lives. We may
have hundreds of facebook friends, but not many know us well. We are not the first generation to deal with
this crisis. Over the past few thousand years, periods of rapid technological
change have upset the balance between people’s public social lives and their
private, interior lives. What’s more, in every generation, seminal figures
arose to provide strategies for reasserting the balance between public and
private lives. In his book, “Hamlet’s
Blackberry”, William Powers describes the way influential thinkers negotiated
periods of rapid technological change. I want to share some of their stories
with you today, that we might glean from both western historical models, as
well as Jewish models, a way to balance our public and our private lives. Powers begins with the assumption that by
virtue of our being perpetually connected, we are always in the midst of a
crowd. From a Jewish perspective, being in the crowd has its advantages; after
all, it is through relationships that we affect change in the world, and even
come to know God. But when does the
crowd become too big? For Plato, twenty five hundred years ago, the growth of
Athens as an urban center was a boon to philosophers who enjoyed the rhetorical
give and take. Yet, he found that the crowd was oppressive, robbing him of time
to think and reflect. He increasingly sought to be outside of the city,
eventually establishing his academy in the country. Imposing distance allowed
Plato to make the most of life in an increasingly, crowded, busy society. It
allowed him to fulfill his teacher Socrates’ goal: Give me beauty in my inner
soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one.” Plato’s dilemma remains
with us today in our perpetual connectedness; no matter where we go, if there’s
a cell phone in our pocket, the crowd is always with us. A Jewish teacher
suggests a way to escape. Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav was a practioner of
hitbodedut, of wandering outside in the country, thinking, meditating,
reflecting, deliberating. Like the Biblical Isaac, who conversed with God in
his late afternoon walks in the fields, Nachman found a different kind of
connectedness, not with his fellow man, but with the heart of the
Universe. Five hundred years after
Plato, the poet and Roman statesman Seneca encountered a different imbalance
between the public and private spheres. Leaving the city, as Plato had, didn’t
solve Seneca’s problem. As Seneca himself put it: “The man who spends his time
choosing one resort after another in a hunt for peace and quiet, will in every
place he visits find something to prevent him from relaxing.” The solution for
Seneca was to narrow his focus from the crowd to the individual. He
accomplished this most often through writing letters. Seneca found the writing
of a letter as a place to have a private, reflective, moment. Through this he found “inner distance” a way
to remove himself from his surroundings, to have an audience of one.
In his own way,
Seneca was creating the conditions for what Martin Buber, two thousand years
later, would call an “I-Thou” relationship. Rather than relating to those
around us as instruments to fulfill our own needs, Buber suggested that beyond
such utilitarian relationships are truer, more authentic, relationships that
obtain when two souls connect, through the medium of God. Like Buber, Seneca
aimed to reclaim a quality of presence in the world. And he wanted to do it
through relationships with others.
Fifteen hundred years later, Gutenberg ushered in a period of
transformative technological change, the creation of the printing press. We most
often think of his invention as the beginning of an information revolution, the
widespread dissemination of information that had heretofore been held by a
chosen few. Yet, the printing press was an essential technology of inwardness.
Before its invention, reading was a public activity. People didn’t read to
themselves. Instead, public readings were the norm. Now, however, people could
have a personal relationship with a text Reading became an immersive
experience. As Poet Willliam Stafford put it: “Closing the book, I find I have
left my head inside.” Our era of perpetual connectedness has made reading a
complicated business. It began with the hyperlinking of text, when certain
words in electronic documents appear in the color blue, indicating that if you
click on that work, you’ll be instantly transported elsewhere to learn more in
depth about that topic. As a research tool, hyperlinks are a Godsend, making
quick work of what used to take hours of research. But it also makes reading a
less linear experience. Endless diversions appear in the text. What’s more, the
recent batch of e-readers, like the Kindle or the Ipad increasingly are bundled
with software that enables users to surf the web during the course of reading,
toggling between sports, weather, news, email, and oh yes, the book they were
reading. Why is this a problem? There’s a difference between access to
information and the experience of it. Technology that encourages multitasking
while reading encourages access to the detriment of experience. For Jews, reading Torah is the way we commune
with God, learn from our people’s experience, and access their wisdom. the
concept of hyperlinking text derives directly from the rabbis’ habit of
comparing words and phrases from one holy book to the next. Yet, experiencing
the life of literature requires uninterrupted attention to narrative. Sports
scores and weather maps can only detract from that experience. Society, has on occasion, resisted
technological advances. Author William Powers describes his own recent
infatuation with moleskin writing pads, a decidedly low tech way to take notes.
In his book, Hamlet’s Blackberry, he describes how Shakespeare gave his
character a set of tables, which were erasable writing pads on which Hamlet
took notes – in one case to remember to avenge his father’s murder most foul.
An advance over the wax tablets that had been in vogue for centuries, Hamlet’s
table was a small notebook of specially coated paper that could be erased and
reused. The technology was so popular even Thomas Jefferson owned one. It was
portable, and allowed the used to preserve just the information she needed, and
nothing more. Hamlet’s table undercuts a
widely held assumption: that when new technology comes along it immediately
supersedes what came before. In fact, some times the opposite occurs. Older
technology enjoys a resurgence. When Gutenberg’s press made books commonplace,
the common man was inspired to write, but lacking a printing press of his own,
turned to older technology – handwriting. Enthusiasm for writing led to the
creation of pencils and fountain pens. Witness the more current locovore and
slow food movement, both of which eschew modern food production for more
traditional methods. And sometimes, it
turns out the older methods are better than the latest technology. A few
winters ago, Conde Nast Traveler magazine sent out three reporters to Moscow,
one equipped with a blackberry, one with an iphone, and one with a hard copy
guidebook. They were given a series of tourist challenges to complete in the
frigid metropolis, such as finding a great cheap restaurant, and locating a
pharmacy open at midnight. The low-tech contestant won. After the article ran,
one reader wrote in: “I have traveled successfully around the world armed with
nothing more than a dog eared guidebook and a friendly smile… As any seasoned
traveler will tell you, the kindness of strangers can be relied upon anywhere.
Just don’t be too absorbed in your blackberry to notice.” The promise and problems
of technology: • Plato’s retreat from the city of Athens enabled him to balance
his public and private lives, so that the outward and inward might be at one.”
• Rabbi Nachman of
Bratzlav’s practiced hitbodedut, wandering in the field, reflecting, meditating,
deliberating, renewing his inner dialogue;
• Seneca realized
that writing was a way to establish an authentic relationship with another;
• Martin Buber’s identified the ideal I-Thou
relationship. His aim, like Senecas’s,
to reclaim a quality of presence in the world.
• Gutenberg brought the interior experience of reading to
the masses;
• Shakespeare illustrated how the old tools are sometimes
the best;
And what about today?
How can we overcome technology’s persistent tendency to throw our public and
private lives into imbalance? The
answer is found in the oldest Jewish practice, Shabbat. Shabbat is the Jewish
antidote to civilization. It is the insistence that to be fully human, we have
to regularly break our routine and concentrate on the essentials.
• To rediscover
Solitude – establish distance between ourselves and the bustling world.
• To restore
Mindfulness – pay attention to the world around us.
• To restore interior life – pay attention to the world
within us.
• And to restore relationships – Reclaim a quality of
presence in the world.
So try an experiment
this week. Pick one day, perhaps even the Jewish Sabbath, and unplug your modem
for 24 hours. If you need to, put a message on your email saying you’re
unavailable for a day. See what happens. Tdell people you’re taking a facebook
fast. I promise Shabbat will surprise
you. Mark Bittman, food columnist for the NYTimes, wrote about a secular
Sabbath he took after he checked his email while on an airplane and realized he
was a techno addict. He swore off one day a week and was amazed at the
transformation. He wrote: " this achievement is unlike any other in my
life." At first, not having access
to google to look up needed information will be annoying. Not being able to
check email will be an inconvenience. But little by little, you should notice a
change in atmosphere. You’ll be living in the present, able to just be in one
place, doing one thing, and enjoying it. Remember, even God needed to take a day for
Shabbat. The Torah tells us that after six days of creation, shavat vayinafash,
God took a break. VaYinafash means, and God took a breath. Pretty food advice
for us, as well. Ans Vayinafash means something more. The word nefesh means
soul. That God, shavat vayinafash means that in taking a breath, in breaking
routine, God’s soul was strengthened and enriched. In this new year, 5771, may we be inscribed
for a year of spiritual renewal, perhaps by:
• Unplugging just one day a week;
• Rediscovering Solitude • Restoring Mindfulness
• Reinvigorating our interior life
• And restoring our relationships That our presence might be
a source of enduring blessing to the world.
Amen
