Ask yourself this: if technology is a place where we live, a place that we carry around with us, shouldn't we choose to be in lively and nourishing digital environments?
I'm a designer, but writing is another important part of my practice. Most of what I've written focuses on making the case for a cohesive and generous philosophy for how we design technology: it must not only look good and feel good, it must also be good. Today, I'll be focusing on the other side of how technology gets made. I want to talk about ways to find a clear path through how we use technology and what we expect from it.
This need seems urgent. It has been the central topic of many of my conversations with friends and professional acquaintances for the last year and a half. If you bundle those conversations together, the diagnosis is clear: there is so much convenience, but so little comfort. Everyone is tired. Our attention is over-extended, over-stimulated, and over-commodified, making us twitchy, unfocused, and, in a very crude sense, afraid.
It feels like many of us are in the first stages of untethering, and we can use this situation as an opportunity for reassessment. Blindly chasing after convenience, amusement, and connection wasn't all it was set up to be, and it certainly didn't make life any less complicated. We know that digital technology isn't going anywhere because of its obvious benefits, so the primary question becomes: how do we fix the way technology fits? Is there a way to keep some of the benefits and diminish the damage? What stays? What goes? Why? And how can we begin to change that fit in our own lives?
Let me start by stating something obvious: in the last decade, technology has transformed from a tool that we use to a place where we live. If we're setting out to change the character of technology in our lives, we'd be wise to learn from the character of places.
Place One
Let's take a step back in time. In 1886, Samuel Tilden, the wealthy former governor of New York state, died and left a few million dollars for New York City to establish and maintain a free, public library and reading room. This was an astronomical sum in the late 19th century. After hearing about it a couple years later, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie, decided to splash an additional $5 million on to the pile. Happy days for readers, indeed.
The city eventually settled on a site for the new library at 5th Avenue between 40th and 42nd Street. We now know that area as Bryant Park, but back then it was the defunct Croton Reservoir. The library has a line it likes to use these days when it talks about its construction. They say the pool of water was transformed into a pool of knowledge. Perfection.
Preparations to the site began in 1900 and construction of the building started in 1902.
By 1911, the library was ready for the public. The building is now considered to be a Beaux-Arts classic—its most famous touches being those two lions that flank the front stairs. One is named Patience; the other is Fortitude. We don't name things like that any more, do we?
The location is still open today. In fact, many people who visit New York City put the main branch on their sightseeing list. The tourists are not alone: the NYPL is one of the few tourist stops with just as many visiting locals. I love going to the library, and encourage my friends to visit every time I get the chance. At first, they think this is a very uncool recommendation, but they change their minds when I show them the room at the library where I work.
Step into my office, baby. This is the Rose Reading Room. It's on the top floor of the building. I do a fair amount of my writing here.
I once heard that a library is one of the few remaining places that cares more about you than your wallet. It means that a person can be a person there: not a customer, not a user, not an economic agent, not a pair of eyes to monetize, but a citizen and community-member, a reader and a thinker, a mind and—God, I am going to say it—a soul.
Place Two
Let's step back in time again. As the city was breaking ground for the library, another large construction job began about 8 blocks away.
The Pennsylvania Railroad Company was building a marquee station for New York City. The city was surprised at the sudden announcement, since the lots for the station's 12-block footprint were bought in secret. This mixed with a sense of relief, because the station would simplify a complicated train commute into New York.
There were no direct Pennsylvania Railroad trains into New York City at the time; their passengers commuted by rail to Jersey City, then had to board ferries across the Hudson River to enter Manhattan. The Penn Station project aimed to give the railroad a proper home in America's biggest city by boring a new tunnel under the Hudson River to the west and a second tunnel for the East River to the east, thereby connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn, Long Island, and the mainland.
What a magnificent space: airy, light—inspiring in the same way as many of the train stations you find in Europe. America's premiere city finally had a suitable welcome to those who arrived by rail.
Land Grab
I've shared the story of these two buildings for a few reasons. The first is to emphasize the importance of a good room. What kind of thoughts are possible at the library versus the ones that are had in the current Penn Station? Then ask yourself this: if technology is a place where we live, a place that we carry around with us, shouldn't we choose to be in lively and nourishing digital environments? This reasoning should be enough to encourage you to leave the optional digital places that you don't enjoy.
Another reason for the comparison is to remind you that we have both commercial and non-commercial elements in our lives. Each has their role, but we shouldn't misapply commercial approaches to all our needs. Commercial endeavors, even huge ones, are not necessarily more stable than public ones. Look at Penn Station. And private enterprise can't always provide everything a person requires on good terms. Look at healthcare in America. Life would be miserable if we only spent time in commercial spaces, because not all value can be captured and supported in a commercial context. We all know this, so it is a pity how overfitted and commercialized the internet, our second home, has become.
The market research firm Edelman recently published their 2018 Trust Barometer and it contains some bad news for everyone, especially those platforms that serve billions. It says that trust in social media is quickly eroding worldwide, because social and search platforms like Facebook and Google are no longer seen as technology, but as part of an untrusted media institution—and the least trusted part of the media at that. 63% of people say they can't tell the difference between good journalism and falsehoods. 59% say this processes is becoming more difficult. Even more concerning is that participants expressed the lowest confidence ever recorded in the credibility of “a person like yourself.” We are in a spiral of distrust instigated by our digital environments.
Something must change, and to many of us, it seems that a whole new path is necessary. Can we create one without completely disconnecting? I am here to offer a very loud and exasperated, “I don't know.”
On the bright side, these transformations and re-imaginings happen more frequently than we think. It's part of digital technology's origin story: the web began as military technology co-opted to share scientific knowledge between universities and institutions. The spirit and promise of the early web was captured well by Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of WIRED Magazine, when he wrote: “Out of complete nothingness we were harnessing a virtual commonwealth.”
Kelly is saying that the web is a boundless and shared estate, and we only later learned how to commercialize it. The commercial endeavors that now dominate our digital experience sit on public land, or, should I say, open protocols. (For now, at least. Eliminating net neutrality and selling privileged access to the network is another attempt to turn the public commons into private property.)
The web commercialization project has been the boom of our age, and the commercial yawp has become the dominant tone of our technology. It's loud out there. We're exhausted and over-extended, because everything is vying for nearly boundless amounts of our time and attention. Late last year, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said their biggest competition was sleep. That's a pretty grim statement, joke or not. Biology is always such a nuisance for business.
As companies scaled, more and more of the web became monetized. Interactivity cleared a path for transactional thinking because of their striking resemblance. (Let's remember that pay-per-click is the origin of both Google's and Facebook's fortunes.) Helpful personal sites and informational hubs have been replaced by content marketing. Even in places where no money changes hands, follows and likes act as representations of worth, just like money. That's not to say you can't ask for money, though—even the dogs I follow on Instagram are trying to sell me stuff. No species is safe from salesmanship.
That was a little harsh, wasn't it? Sorry about that. Though dismal and accurate, what I just offered is an incomplete picture of the web. Remember: the web is a marketplace and a commonwealth, so we have both commerce and culture; it's just that the non-commercial bits of the web get more difficult to see in comparison to the outsized presence of the commercial web and all that caters to it. It's a visibility problem that's an inadvertent consequence of values. The commercial parts become more self-contained and link inside themselves to keep you around—after a while, you're looping around their cul-de-sac because attention is money on the web. Non-commercial sites link out and will let you go, which immediately puts them at a disadvantage for mindshare.
Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon aren't going anywhere at this point—nor should we expect them to—so it's best to recalibrate the digital experience by increasing the footprint and mindshare of the kinds of cultural and communal value they can't provide. The web isn't like Manhattan real estate—if we want something, we can make space for it.
Different measuring sticks are also in order. If commercial networks on the web measure success by reach and profit, cultural endeavors need to see their successes in terms of resonance and significance. This is the new game, one that elevates both the people who make the work and those who see, use, and enjoy it.
Choice and will
The digital landscape has an influence on our lives, but we are more directly affected by our personal choices. We must fend for ourselves, whether or not the technology industry chooses to deal with the implications of their work.
Earlier, I said that I felt unfocused and twitchy—too much time in fast-paced places that see me as a bundle of nerves with a wallet, and not enough time in slower, more nourishing places, like the library. The solution seems simple: spend less time in the bad places and more time in the good places!
Okay, but not so fast. First, that's easier to say than to do. Second, there are no practical steps in there. What are other people doing?
Immunization
Reading a book on paper is a simple, easy step to regain some composure and inoculate yourself against hysterics. That's it, that's the whole tip. Books are medicine. This suggestion, of course, is coming from the guy who just spilled a few hundred words on the greatness of libraries. My bias is showing, but follow me here.
A book is useful because it is entertaining and naturally offsets the time you would spend staring into your phone; it's portable and a great sleep aide. It re-calibrates your expectations for rewards, and properly shames us all by showing us how much our attentions have atrophied. That focus improves with practice, but it will take time. Before, we were scrolling through Instagram reading screenshots of tweets. We have to work our way up to Dostoevsky, you know?
A day eventually comes along when a reader's head clicks back into place. It's like something important was realigned and you remembered how to carry yourself, similar to how it feels after having your back popped. There are other ways to achieve this, but reading is my preferred method, and maybe by talking about books, I can help you discover a counter-balancing activity that works for you. These benefits can come from any slow, focused, and deep practice. More on beneficial practices in a moment.
Abstinence
A drastic step I've seen is called “digital detox.” It's sort of like a destination cleanse diet: you go off to the woods outside San Francisco, for instance, and give them your phone, laptop, and any other digital paraphernalia. The purpose of the trip is to disabuse yourself of your screen addiction by staying away from all screens and media for a week. Mysterious things happen at undisclosed locations, then attendees return home pure, with a slightly worrying glint of rapture in their eyes.
Regulation
Most of us can't control our whole technological situation, so it's been fascinating for me to see how people shape it in the one place where they have the most influence: raising their children. I don't have kids, so it's been especially interesting hearing the different standards my friends have set up. Some are laissez-faire with their kids' use of technology, others set up extremely regimented schedules and sets of rules about what is allowed when and where. Other times things are bonkers enough to sound like a psychological experiment: a friend of mine is raising his kid exclusively on Sesame Street clips from his childhood. We'll see how long that lasts.
I have no right to judgements about this, but the situation has shown me that we also create these sets of rules for ourselves—it's just that the ones created for our kids are more evident because they are a mindful construction. The decisions for ourselves are instinctual and individualistic, so there's usually not a cohesive philosophy behind our personal standards. It's easy to see how scattered we can be when it's all spelled out.
My technological profile makes it seem like I skipped the 20th century, and it's not just because I live in a New York City apartment without air conditioning. Let me tell you about my setup:
- Yes to electricity.
- No to microwaves.
- Yes to high-speed internet.
- No to cable television.
- Yes to books.
- No to magazines (with obvious exceptions).
- Yes to movies.
- No to TV.
- Yes to Instagram.
- No to Facebook.
- No to Snapchat.
- Increasingly, no to Twitter.
- Yes to iPads.
- No to Netflix.
- Yes to new iPhones.
- No to doing anything new with them.
- Yes to Amazon Prime.
- No to the creepy wiretap speakers they sell.
Of course my standards are wildly inconsistent and sometimes completely contradictory. So, I hope all of this sounds as weird to you as other people's setups sound strange to me. For instance: most of my friends who own an Amazon Echo also put tape over the cameras on their laptops. Why bother if you're going to sit next to a microphone that listens to you all day? The mind is a funny place.
Here's another quote from Kevin Kelly: “What's missing is the spiritual meaning of technology.”
If technology is increasingly a place where we live, it needs to have space for the soul, like how the library makes room for a healthy, elevated mindset while the current Penn Station inspires despair.
Beauty is an important element, but purpose also matters. I think this is what Kelly is hinting at. Using technology for commerce, efficiency, and ease are not enough of a higher purpose for something that dominates a great part of our lives. The heart demands a bigger dream.
What is it all for? What can we imagine? These questions become critical as we find ourselves in a time where we are confronted with questions about identity, self-worth, community, and citizenship in this connected world.
If technology is not only for profit and ease, what is it for? We must use our soulful imaginations and be specific.
Let's start with the apps people regret: Grindr, Candy Crush, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Tinder, Instagram, Snapchat—generally the apps we resort to out of boredom, desperation, or loneliness. It's shocking to me that the durations average between 40 minutes to over an hour per day for each app. That's downright crazy. People are also very regretful of the time spent. It seems these places make our boredom, desperation, or loneliness worse.
Now let's look at the apps where the participants were pleased with themselves: Calm, Headspace, Insight Timer are three of the top four, and all are apps that help you meditate. I'll repeat: three out of the top four could be considered spiritual technology. The other two in the top five are a calendar app and the weather, which, at this point, might as well be the digital air we breath.
A majority of the remaining apps provide art: Spotify, Kindle, Audible, Amazon Music, Podcasts. And look at the average usage: it tops out at 26 minutes of reading or 20 minutes of meditating, but most times are 10 minutes or less. I find it absolutely fascinating that there are no social or communication apps on this “Most Happy” list. Every app either points inward through personal practice, organization, and art, or points outward to help us navigate the world. It seems our alone time with technology should truly be alone time, and that halfway socializing is a source of disappointment, not pleasure.
Couch to 5K
One example is Couch to 5K, a beginner's program for running. It began as a written routine to follow for a couple months, then some industrious developers came along and wrote apps to help schedule and track your runs. I did a quick search on the app store to check how many apps may be out there, but I lost track at about 20.
The New York Times H.I.I.T. Workout
In a similar vein, the New York Times published their high-impact, seven-minute workout a few years ago, and shortly after, many apps showed up to help people along. I only wrote three sentences on the day I took the photo.