Earlier this week the writer Pico Iyer wrote a thoughtful essay for the New York Times on ‘The Joy of Quiet.‘ He noted the complaints of several friends whose constant exposure to televisions, smartphones, computers and other devices has consumed their free time, forcing some to pay for software that blocks their computers’ internet access for several hours at a time. Wealthier Americans can take refuge in resorts that purposely avoid technology, such as the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur, whose clients pay $2,285 a night “for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms.”
Iyer also mentions “Internet rescue camps” in China and South Korea to help children end their addiction to screen-based entertainment. Alluding to the American naturalist Henry David Thoreau, best known as the author of Walden, a classic meditation on living in harmony nature, Iyer observes that “We have more and more ways to communicate but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating.”
The consequences of this incessant electronic chatter have been widely debated. In The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, the writer Nicholas Carr suggests that collectively we are losing the ability to focus on difficult texts, or other problems that require longform thinking. Because personal computers excel at multi-tasking – of which, despite the convictions of popular culture, the human brain is incapable – people who constantly switch between word processors, email, spreadsheets, and the thousand other electronic distractions in a modern office, seem to gradually develop, through ‘neuroplasticity’, noticeably different brain processes. Over time their brains are literally rewired to be good at scanning large amounts of information but poor at extended contemplation.
Carr himself has written that “Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” This remark is reminiscent of the media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s famous distinction between hot and cold media – print was a cold medium since words needed to be warmed up in a reader’s brain, unlike television whose images came with their own fire. Others have persuasively argued that the fear of new media is overblown and that in every form technology has changed our brains – the acquisition of reading, for example, colonises parts of the brain that would otherwise help us to pay more attention to visual detail in the wider world.
Whether or not we have become slaves to what the science fiction writer and blogger Cory Doctorow calls an “ecosystem of interruption technologies,” most of us have come to depend on filters for the news – blogs that cover a particular country or region, a favourite sports team, or the Twitter accounts of particular celebrities. These have had the unintended consequence of narrowing our knowledge of the world rather than expanding it, so that many of us now know more and more about less and less. During the last few days, for example, nearly everyone in America will have had the opportunity to read, hear or watch a news item on the Iowa caucus for the Republican candidates, but only a small fraction of those will have received information about the carnage which has followed the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. And yet, an objective observer might well conclude that the long term value of knowledge about Iraq’s political instability easily outweighs the relatively parochial information about the Republicans in Iowa.
By North American and European standards – London has just announced plans to offer free Wifi during the Olympics – Guyana is a haven from the intrusions of the wired world. But how many of us get the chance to appreciate this? Almost everywhere in Georgetown there is noise pollution from minibuses, overloud televisions, radios and personal stereos. But instead of insisting on a quieter city, too many of us simply console ourselves with turning up our own radios and televisions until they drown out the competition. Perhaps this is no different to the current hyper-individualism of the iPod generation in the developed world, walled away in a sonic cloud of its own making, but it does seem a shame that we haven’t managed to make more out of our relative tranquillity. Instead of relishing the Joy of Quiet that Iyer longs for in his essay, too many of us seem intent on replicating the developed world’s frenzy of endless noise.
