100 Things We've Lost to the Internet

by Pamela Paul

Not so long ago, Motorola coined the term “micro-boredom” to describe those scattered, small moments that might bedevil us but could be solved in an instant by the smartphone—no sooner was the term coined than the problem was eliminated.

A novelist acquaintance told me how chagrined she was by her capacity to procrastinate online in lieu of working on her next book. (Join us, do.) After spending an entire afternoon on Instagram, to the point where she’d seen every last post on her timeline, she was gripped by the sudden fear that one day she’d arrive at a point where there was nothing more to see. The message on her phone would simply say, “That’s it. You’re done. You’ve reached the end of the Internet.” I mentioned this to one of my children and he said, “That joke is everywhere.”

There’s a reason people have their most exciting and original thoughts in the shower. Our minds start to wander and we follow. You have to turn off the input in order to generate output. But the input never stops.

But, as the novelist Neil Gaiman put it, “Google can bring you back a hundred thousand answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.”

In the seventies, kids had nothing to do in the way back of the station wagon, the carbon monoxide seeping through the floor into cigarette smoke–laced air, uncut by air conditioning. Forcibly exposed to whatever terrible music your parents were into at the time, you looked out the window to remind yourself there was somewhere else. You looked out the window to watch the scenery. You counted mile indicators or wove your eyes in and out of the dashes between lanes while you thought about where you were going.

Wherever you were was where you were, and no one outside of science fiction or a comic book could be in several places at once. That was impossible.

One of the strangest phenomena to witness from outside was the way that during the January 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol by pro-Trump rioters, members of the mob regularly paused in the middle of the violent action to document and share the experience; will soldiers on the fields of the future stop to share wartime casualties as they occur? Imagine the trenches of World War I with selfies.

Full immersion doesn’t happen in a group and it doesn’t happen alone because while we are digitally present all the time, we are hardly ever fully present in the moment. Sure, there were always people who stopped in the middle of something to take a picture, at least those who had cameras on them. But now we all stop to take pictures. We stop to document with a text, a post, a short video, a story. We’ve learned how to fake that “wow, amazing” face. It’s like we’re all taking what are now called “plandids” or planned candid photos, if you can accept that such a concept exists.

Roughly one in five Americans use a fitness band of one sort or another and an additional 14 percent wear a smartwatch, devices that keep track of us as we keep track with them. With their help, you notice the start time, the progress, the goal, the end. Do you notice the trees?

We combat the effects of this inability to disengage with attempts at wellness and mindfulness, all of us desperately trying to reclaim some small portion of our own goddamn minds.

You’d use your treasured album collection to make a mixtape, which took time and effort, curating a soundtrack that sent your crush the message, “This is who I am, and this is what I see you in.” To give someone a mixtape was a genuine act of courtship, devotion, or friendship, and now it’s gone.