The End of Absence Quotes

“we aren’t lonely because we are alone; we are lonely because we have failed in our solitude.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“When we grip our phones and tablets, we’re holding the kind of information resource that governments would have killed for just a generation ago. And is it that experience of everyday information miracles, perhaps, that makes us all feel as though our own opinions are so worth sharing? After all, aren’t we—in an abstracted sense, at least—just as smart as everyone else in the room, as long as we’re sharing the same Wi-Fi connection? And therefore (goes the bullish leap in thinking) aren’t my opinions just as worthy of trumpeting?”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“At the end of that Roger Ebert essay, he says he decided to force himself to do the reading that he knew, deep down, his brain wanted and needed. When he gave himself the proper literary diet (and found a room in the house where his Wi-Fi connection failed), “I felt a kind of peace. This wasn’t hectic. I wasn’t skittering around here and there. I wasn’t scanning headlines and skimming pages and tweeting links. I was reading. . . . Maybe I can rewire my brain, budge it back a little in the old direction.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“As we embrace a technology’s gifts, we usually fail to consider what they ask from us in return—the subtle, hardly noticeable payments we make in exchange for their marvelous service. We don’t notice, for example, that the gaps in our schedules have disappeared because we’re too busy delighting in the amusements that fill them. We forget the games that childhood boredom forged because boredom itself has been outlawed. Why would we bother to register the end of solitude, of ignorance, of lack? Why would we care that an absence has disappeared?”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“In reality, life outside of orderly institutions like schools, jobs, and prisons is lacking in “gold star” moments; it passes by in a not-so-dignified way, and nobody tells us whether we’re getting it right or wrong. But publish your experience online and an institutional approval system rises to meet it—your photo is “liked,” your status is gilded with commentary. It’s even a way to gain some sense of immortality, since online publishing creates a lasting record, a living scrapbook. This furthers our enjoyable sense of an ordered life. We become consistent, we are approved, we are a known and sanctioned quantity.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“If you believe that some opinions are in fact better than others, then you, too, are an elitist of sorts.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“Despite the universality of this change, which we’re all buffeted by, there is a single, seemingly small change that I’ll be most sorry about. It will sound meaningless, but: One doesn’t see teenagers staring into space anymore. Gone is the idle mind of the adolescent.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“Our generation seems to be facing a crisis of critique. We want to know what’s best, we want to know where to eat and what movie to see, but we’ve begun to forget that real opinion, real critique, must always come out of an absence of voices—from a singular subjective viewpoint. You”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“No two generations in history have experienced such a highlighted cognitive dissonance, because never has change occurred at so rapid a pace. Look at the rate of penetration—the amount of time it takes for a new technology to be adopted by fifty million people. Radio took thirty-eight years to reach that mark; the telephone took twenty years; and television took thirteen. More recently, the World Wide Web took four years, Facebook took 3.6, Twitter took three, and the iPad took only two. Google Plus, which nobody even finds useful, took only eighty-eight days to be adopted by fifty million.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“What a lovely thing, to shut up and listen and not broadcast anything back. There’s a certain serenity in it and even a kind of light grace.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“It is, however, necessary to combine the two things, solitude and the crowd, and to have recourse to them alternately: the former will make us long for people, the latter for ourselves, and the one will be a cure for the other: our distaste for the crowd will be cured by solitude, our boredom with solitude by the crowd.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“Here’s how a filter bubble works: Since 2009, Google has been anticipating the search results that you’d personally find most interesting and has been promoting those results each time you search, exposing you to a narrower and narrower vision of the universe. In 2013, Google announced that Google Maps would do the same, making it easier to find things Google thinks you’d like and harder to find things you haven’t encountered before. Facebook follows suit, presenting a curated view of your “friends’” activities in your feed. Eventually, the information you’re dealing with absolutely feels more personalized; it confirms your beliefs, your biases, your experiences. And it does this to the detriment of your personal evolution. Personalization—the glorification of your own taste, your own opinion—can be deadly to real learning. Only”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“It’s hard to remember what we loved about absence; we never ask for our deprivation back.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“The psychologist Geoffrey Miller, when pondering why we haven’t come across any alien species as yet, decided that they were probably all addicted to video games and are thus brought to an extreme state of apathy—the exploratory opposite of the heroes in Star Trek who spend all their time seeking out “new life and new civilizations.” The aliens “forget to send radio signals or colonize space,” he wrote in Seed magazine, because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissim. They don’t need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. . . . They become like a self-stimulating rat, pressing a bar to deliver electricity to its brain’s ventral tegmental area, which stimulates its nucleus accumbens to release dopamine, which feels . . . ever so good.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“Eventually, the information you’re dealing with absolutely feels more personalized; it confirms your beliefs, your biases, your experiences. And it does this to the detriment of your personal evolution. Personalization—the glorification of your own taste, your own opinion—can be deadly to real learning.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“access to everything encourages exploration of nothing”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“Montaigne once wrote, “We must reserve a back shop, all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude.” But where will tomorrow’s children set up such a shop, when the world seems to conspire against the absentee soul?”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“to dwell on a work created by my own imagination, and to live in a world altogether outside the world of my own material life.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“Still, if solitude feels painful it’s only because we don’t know how to be alone.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“Like my entire generation, I seem to be drawn toward the Internet’s fluttering promise of connections, and then repulsed by it, in equal measure. And I feel that, in the end, the Internet will win. On”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“we have in this brief historical moment, this moment in between two modes of being, a very rare opportunity. For those of us who have lived both with and without the vast, crowded connectivity the Internet provides, these are the few days when we can still notice the difference between Before and After.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“to Picasso, computers were useless since “they can only give you answers”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“Arguably, the larger and more productive world that our technologies deliver is simultaneously an impoverished version of the older one—a version that rejects direct experience and therefore rejects an earlier conception of reality that had its own value. We see more, yet our vision is blurred; we feel more things, yet we are numbed.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“We are now becoming, by Blackmore’s estimation, teme machines—servants to the evolution of our own technologies.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“Every revolution in communication technology—from papyrus to the printing press to Twitter—is as much an opportunity to be drawn away from something as it is to be drawn toward something.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“those of us alive today—we in the straddle generation—have a secret bit of understanding they can never have: We know what it felt like Before.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“when I see teenage girls burrowed into their phones on the sidewalk I think of monkeys picking lice out of each other’s hair.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“But the “Luddite” tag left me wondering . . . who were the Luddites, really? It turns out that the original nineteenth-century Luddites were hardly “Luddites” in our contemporary sense at all. We think of such people as being rabidly and unthinkingly anti-technology. But in fact the Luddites of Nottingham, and Lancashire, and Yorkshire—the textile workers who attacked the “power loom” in 1811 and beyond—were socialist revolutionaries, a group of workers who fought against crippling pay cuts, child labor, and changes to laws that had protected their livelihoods. They were fighting not against technology, but for fair treatment at the hands of a manufacturing elite.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“Software engineers are delivering programs like Freedom, Anti-Social, and Pomodoro, all designed to shield you from a maelstrom of computer-derived distraction.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection