A cartoon by Benjamin Schwartz in the latest issue of The New Yorker shows Patrick Henry, smartphone in hand, addressing Virginia’s House of Burgesses in 1775. “Give me liberty, or give me just one sec,” he says.
For me the scene summons an essay that Andrew Sullivan published in New York magazine recently that describes how an addiction to the bombardment of news and images that vie for our attention drove him into digital detox. Sullivan achieved renown as a writer and blogger at The Atlantic.com and The Daily Beast before starting “The Dish,” a blog that went on to garner tens of thousands of paying subscribers. The site achieved success, but by Sullivan’s own admission the work took its toll.
“For a decade and a half, I’d been a web obsessive, publishing blog posts multiple times a day, seven days a week, and ultimately corralling a team that curated the web every 20 minutes during peak hours,” he writes. “If the internet killed you, I used to joke, then I would be the first to find out.”
All the social media, images and news produce what Sullivan calls “our enslavement to dopamine,” a diagnosis that may resonate with anyone who has been unable to resist checking their phone. Aside from servitude, prolonged use of smartphones can harm your posture and breathing, mess with your vision, hurt your hands and impair your memory, studies show.
Give me liberty, indeed.
Two years ago, I took a summer off from social media to study for the bar exam. Amid the effort, which required willing all my attention to study for hours on end, I felt the burden of distraction fade. I realized it when, after a while, Twitter and Facebook both sent notifications to remind me that I hadn’t visited. One thing social media seems to dislike is our refusing to socialize.
And it wasn’t an age thing. I studied that summer aside millennials who told me of experiencing a similar relief.
That’s not to deny what Sullivan terms “the pleasures of being connected.” If you are someone who, like I do, welcomes a queue at checkout as an excuse to read the news on his or her phone, or who loves tweets like the one below, you know what enjoyment those in-between moments can be.
I love New York pic.twitter.com/tDECidCsoy
— Dorsey Shaw (@dorseyshaw) September 29, 2016
My freshman year in college, I subscribed by mail to my hometown newspaper. Every few days, a bundle of the papers arrived in brown wrapper. Going to my mailbox, I could not imagine that one day I might carry a computer in my pocket that would allow me to read the news from anywhere in the world. In real time. And to comment on and share it with anyone or with everyone.
Sullivan writes that he fears for the cost of a life lived online more than off. “But of course, as I had discovered in my blogging years, the family that is eating together while simultaneously on their phones is not actually together,” he notes. “You are where your attention is.”
True. Though it can be convenient to blame technology for behavior. In a memoir published recently, Robert Gottlieb, who led a storied career as an editor at The New Yorker, Simon & Schuster, and Knopf, recalls his bookishness. Dwight Garner, who reviewed the book for the Times, wrote:
How bookish was Mr. Gottlieb? At summer camp, as a child, he arranged to have The New York Times delivered to him daily. His family — they lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan — read books rather than converse at the dinner table. “Only later did it occur to me that this was not normal,” he writes in “Avid Reader,” his new memoir, “but a symptom of our particular brand of dysfunction.”
Of course, we choose what and whom to pay attention to. A friend told me this week that he deleted the Twitter and Facebook apps on his phone because they had started to cut into his reading.
Mike Murphy recently wrote for Quartz about his decision to stop wearing an Apple Watch after a series of dizzy spells that sent him to see a doctor. The doctor prescribed a vacation without an internet-connected device.
The worrying came from the watch, which sent news alerts, Facebook alerts “or reminders to check-in somewhere or that there was a Starbucks nearby,” Murphy writes. The notifications sent his heart rate skyward. “The Apple Watch is the most anxiety-inducing piece of technology I’ve ever owned,” he says. “It’s a reminder that a worry is like a notification, which left unchecked, can consume you.”