Bob Herbert Joins The War On Flow

Bob Herbert, one of my favorite NY Times columnists, slips on his Cosby sweater and wags his finger at the 21st century; specifically, being connected through high tech devices and flow media:

Bob Herbert, Tweet Less, Kiss More

We’ve got cellphones and BlackBerrys and Kindles and iPads, and we’re e-mailing and text-messaging and chatting and tweeting — I used to call it Twittering until I was corrected by high school kids who patiently explained to me, as if I were the village idiot, that the correct term is tweeting. Twittering, tweeting — whatever it is, it sounds like a nervous disorder.

This is all part of what I think is one of the weirder aspects of our culture: a heightened freneticism that seems to demand that we be doing, at a minimum, two or three things every single moment of every hour that we’re awake. Why is multitasking considered an admirable talent? We could just as easily think of it as a neurotic inability to concentrate for more than three seconds.

Why do we have to check our e-mail so many times a day, or keep our ears constantly attached, as if with Krazy Glue, to our cellphones? When you watch the news on cable television, there are often additional stories being scrolled across the bottom of the screen, stock market results blinking on the right of the screen, and promos for upcoming features on the left. These extras often block significant parts of the main item we’re supposed to be watching.

A friend of mine told me about an engagement party that she had attended. She said it was lovely: a delicious lunch and plenty of Champagne toasts. But all the guests had their cellphones on the luncheon tables and had text-messaged their way through the entire event.

Enough already with this hyperactive behavior, this techno-tyranny and nonstop freneticism. We need to slow down and take a deep breath.

I’m not opposed to the remarkable technological advances of the past several years. I don’t want to go back to typewriters and carbon paper and yellowing clips from the newspaper morgue. I just think that we should treat technology like any other tool. We should control it, bending it to our human purposes.

Let’s put down at least some of these gadgets and spend a little time just being ourselves. One of the essential problems of our society is that we have a tendency, amid all the craziness that surrounds us, to lose sight of what is truly human in ourselves, and that includes our own individual needs — those very special, mostly nonmaterial things that would fulfill us, give meaning to our lives, enlarge us, and enable us to more easily embrace those around us.

Oh, great. Let’s go back to watching televison, Bob, right? That’s what people were doing before the web came along. Have you read Putnum’s Bowling Alone? Where he characterizes pre-Internet America as a culture — in the 80’s and 90’s — headed toward zero social capital?

It might push you out of your comfort zone, Bob, to see people texting at a wedding, telling the folks back home how big the cake is, or whether Joey smooshed Maria with cake before he kissed her, but that’s people valuing being connected, and we now have the tools that make it functionally zero cost to do so.

And the friends we make on Facebook or Twitter aren’t ‘virtual’: they are real people, just people not in the room at the present moment. Don’t equate this with tamagotchi virtual pets, or playing soduko online. This is — at its core — human interaction. And there is never enough connectedness in the world, really.

You say you’d like people to listen to each other, but Twitter and Facebook are for listening too, not just shouting.

And the world hasn’t sped up. It’s still spinning around its axis once per day. Older people seem threatened by an increased frequency of interactions. There is a subtle suggestion that social interaction is cheapened — made ‘common’ — by increased duration or frequency. That that is a cultural bias, though, not some invariant of the universe.

I am sorry to see Herbert, who has such a sure touch when it comes to recounting the injustice of the world, and the ways in which society can run over the average citizen, turn his talents to Sunday supplement preaching on the evils of the sped-up web, texting, and those dag-nabbed mobile phones.

He should see past the superficial, past the activities that seem foreign and threatening to him, to the results: a more connected world, with people more involved and more caring. A deeper world in which human relationships are valued more highly than in the 20th century, and where social media — dominated by social networks — have thankfully displaced soulless mass media like TV, newspapers, and the radio in Herbert’s car.

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