Where Are You? And Other Hard Questions About Life in the 2010s

Editor's Note: As the year draws to a close, we looked back through our archives to pull articles that capture the spirit of our year. Here is one of our favorites!

Where are you?

It’s a question that has gotten a lot harder to answer in recent years.
It used to be that where your body was, there you were. Well, unless your imagination took you to some other place.

There were phones, books, movies and TV, putting you in touch with things far from your physical location. But the constraints of the technologies tended to keep you tethered to a spot – to ground you, in a sense.  

Now that seems quaint. We’re used to the pace of change in our lives becoming ever more rapid, so it is easy to miss how dramatically cell phones, and then smartphones, have changed our way of life over the past decade or so.

The way many of us live is captured well in this recent Washington Post piece by Michael Rosenwald:   "Obsessed with smartphones, oblivious to the here and now."  He opens with an image of a dad bathing his daughter with one hand while playing chess online with the other. The bath doesn’t work out that well (on the other literal hand, maybe he dominated the chess game).

Many have lamented kids who would rather be texting or playing handheld video games than interacting with the actual world around them, but it’s not just the kids who can have a problem. Rosenwald offers a horror show of distracted adults who “live for when they get an alert from their iPhones about new information or a new version of an app. The flow of information never ceases. Neither does the thrill of anticipation.”

Minivans are now built with DVD players to occupy children during those long, boring drives. Increasingly, smartphones play the same function for their parents, entertaining them during life’s long, boring stretches... and let’s be honest, there are a lot of those stretches.

I don’t have an iPhone, but rather a generic, unexciting work-issued Blackberry. Surfing the web on it is a minor ordeal. ‘Apps’ need not apply. Even so, during the right work meeting -- especially if I’m on the periphery of the discussion -- that thing is an escape. I can find a map to where I’m having dinner tonight. I can send some emails while I wait for the conversation to find its way back to me. And look, here’s an incoming message! Someone out there is thinking of me (even if only to say ‘you forgot to exit that document, none of us can get into it’). I’ll read the email now. Maybe it’s important. Or at least more interesting than what’s happening around me.

Two summers ago a friend in our fantasy baseball league texted his co-manager to ask him to pick up a player for their team. Nothing unusual about that… except that he was doing it while at dinner proposing to his future wife. (No word on whether Joachim Soria of the Kansas City Royals, the subject of his message, got the couple a wedding present. But the team did win our league title that year, and the couple is still married.  Let’s file that under ‘successful multitasking.’)

Speaking of marriages, the most disturbing part of the WaPo article is the image of smartphones driving a wedge into them. "This is a real hot topic right now for marriage counselors -- and the complaints are coming from men and women. You hear this a lot: 'I can't reach you. I can't find you. You can be sitting two inches from me, but you are not there. Where are you?' Spouses are checking out at dinner, on vacation. It's really become a 24-7 thing.”

As if to illustrate the point, the wife of the author of the damning Post article posted a reply on the paper’s website saying her husband is one to talk:  “[H]e could have easily written the story in first person, without interviewing a single subject. I believe he may be the single biggest offender of this new digital age.” And then the author replied sheepishly that honey, you’re right, I have a blackberry problem, and here are some (extremely) modest steps I’ll take to do better.  The couple even went on TV to debate it, knowing that’s the best place to resolve conflict.

On a related point, another recent Post article discussed the trend encouraging students to bring laptops into their college classes because of all the helpful material available on the internet... which has been followed by an even newer trend to ban laptops from classes, because of all the distracting material available on the internet. What you can find by surfing is often much more fun than the lecture your parents paid thousands for you to sit through. Of course, as we migrate from laptops to smartphones, will it really be feasible to banish those?

Of course, the point of this reflection can’t be simply that these things are all bad and we should stop using them. While there are many technologies that many people can resist for a while, it’s apparent by now that we’re not going back to using rotary-dial phones the size of toaster ovens (even if they have those cool, extra long 10-foot cords), or carrying the Yellow Pages around with us.

In fact, while these technologies create a risk of being absent even where we’re present, this risk is often outweighed by the value of being able to be present to people far away.

In the era of Facebook (to cite another new technology), it seems like no one ever really moves away. Even if they’re in Sierra Leone or Cambodia, their smiling faces still appear on our computer screens here at home. And think of how much more able the troops serving today in Iraq and Afghanistan are to maintain some semblance of real communication with their families than their predecessors in just the 1990s.

And sometimes being able to be absent from where you are is a real blessing. There’s a Facebook group called “Pretending to text in awkward situations.” (So, no, you’re not the only one.)

When we’ve got all that working for us, there’s no going back. And that’s all the more reason to pay attention and make conscious choices. Here’s another telling section from the Post piece, trying to explain why people can become captives of information flowing through a small chunk of metal and plastic when there’s a real world right in front of them:

It is because they are human, and human beings tend to repeat actions that are pleasurable and rewarding, particularly if they get our endorphins flowing. The complication is that we devalue delayed rewards -- the feeling, for instance, of looking back on lovely moments with family -- in favor of the immediacy of the new. In this case, it's data. It makes us high.

So we’re now at risk of a new addiction. That’s not reason enough to send us back to the old ways of communicating, any more than the potential abuse of the new technology called the ‘book’ way back when was reason enough to reject it.

However, the risks should give us pause. Most of the time, it’s best to be present where we actually are, and engaged with the people we’re actually with. If we aren’t, we may be spending our lives nowhere at all.