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The Risks of Drinking from a Fire Hose

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Source: Wikipedia.org
                  Source: Wikipedia.org

To the digital native, being truly alone without some sort of external distraction is—irony of ironies—”unnatural,” almost as if the chatter from our own mind is the rhetoric of a stranger.

We can easily feel the burdens of having more knowledge than we can handle. Searching online is like trying to drink from a fire hose.  We should have known it would happen when “Google” became a verb in addition to a noun. Type in something as straightforward as “Green Mountains of Vermont,” and you’ll get about 3.3 million hits. Similarly, catch a few minutes of CNN in an airport and perhaps you get the deaths of children in a bombed Gaza hospital, news of a missing airliner, killer tornadoes in the Midwest.

The hose analogy is suggestive, but the proportions are probably wrong.  Our pervasive media use is more like trying to snag a cup of water from one of the massive outflow tunnels exiting the bottom of Hoover Dam. The point is the same: the flood of information coming at us from digital sources is simply overwhelming, giving rise to another common water-based cliche: How do we “tame the information tide?”

We all know the sources that push us away from ourselves. In addition to online searches there are mobile phones, phone apps, tweets and texts, e-mail, cable and broadcast programming, news alerts, RSS feeds, Facebook “notifications,” not to mention blogs like this one.  In addition, many of us are still deeply dependent on newspapers, magazines, movies, product catalogs, Pandora, MP3s, radio and podcasts.  Every waking minute of every day offers some distraction to drain away our abilities to focus, concentrate and—most ominously—face the unpredictable beast of our own thoughts.

On a commuter train recently it was hard to not hear the increasingly heated cell phone conversation unfolding between a passenger and her mother.  It sounded like both sides were picking old wounds that have never quite healed. Charges of emotional neglect and indifference hurled back and forth. The rider’s injunctions were laced with scorn. And she seemed to not notice that others where an involuntary audience to her woes.

One could not help but think: was this really the best moment to have this discussion?  Shouldn’t precious and fragile family relations be maintained in a better setting that could increase the chances of a better result?  In other words, must we accept the socially awkward terms of usage that new media randomly impose on us?  We seem increasingly unable to manage our informational world.

To say we pay a price for trying to bear up under media intrusions of our own making is now obvious. For most of us the compulsion to keep checking back on the open channels we have set up is nearly total and time consuming.  We choose to keep our digital companions on.  We willingly succumb to the “breaking news” story from a cable news outlet, or the random tweets and texts of others.  We may even stop a lively conversation to check a minor disputed fact that has just surfaced.

For the privilege of total immersion, we pay the price of slowly alienating ourselves from ourselves. To the digital native, being truly alone without some sort of external distraction is—irony of ironies—unnatural: almost as if the chatter coming from our own mind is the rhetoric of a stranger.

That’s a problem because we probably have some interesting things to hear from our inner selves.  A common view is that our intrapersonal chatter is often dysfunctional: full of anxieties, useless fantasies, and other forms of impractical mental skywriting. But all these attributes of consciousness contribute to our self-awareness. They are important.  We need time to work this stuff out.  They are among the reasons we walk and sleep. Not giving ourselves the time to know what we think sets us up to be aimless and disoriented.

To be sure, if media theory tells us anything, it is that our media-use habits don’t revert. There’s no waiting-for-a-phone-call Meet-Me-in-St.-Louis future for any of us.  Media evolve, and we do our best to keep up.  We just have to work a little harder to not allow them to squeeze a precious sentience out of our lives.

The next time you are stuck waiting for something to happen, try listening to the productive insights that your brain has on offer. The trick is moving past the momentary boredom of being truly “with” yourself.  Soon enough you will discover the neglected personal business that truly matters.

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The Park Solution

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New York's Bryant Park Source: Bristol University Alumni
          New York City’s Bryant Park
           

We should not be just of the physical world, but in it as well.

In the last several decades cultural observers like Todd Gitlin, Robert Putnam, and Richard Sennett have offered sobering assessments of the decline of the public realm in American life. Their critiques seem as valid today as they ever did. But numerous city, state and federal parks remain as important exemptions. To be sure physical separation from a dense community can be luxurious. Few of us want to live or work on the edge of a cacophonous circus. And yet there can be something magical about the shared world of a public park.

We may still bring to it some of the electronic paraphernalia of our connected lives. But a welcoming park has a way of bending us toward the comparative riches of the direct interaction with others. There are, of course, many reasons for escaping into the stunning spaces of America’s greatest national monuments. But serendipitous contact with the physical world and the ad-hoc community that populate a public space is possible in even one city block.

Consider Bryant Park in the middle of Manhattan at 6th Avenue and 40th St. This jewel of an inviting open space shares its relatively small block with the main branch of the New York Public Library. But within its limited 2 or 3 acres it contains everything a shared environment should have. It’s cooler and more shaded than midtown’s congested sidewalks and streets. It’s also full of French-style café chairs, which can be moved to the shade or near the center green, whatever a visitor wants. And most importantly, it offers a place to linger in conversation, or to be given time to allow the kind of mental reboot the city often discourages. Tor a tourist who loves cities, Bryant Park’s benches and chairs along its leafy northern border offer views of some classic Art Deco buildings, including the Empire State. For the kids playing ping pong and chess along its edges it’s probably just a place to “be.”  What’s impressive is how easily they all mix with workers who have escaped cramped cubicles in nearby buildings.  The park shelters all on more or less equal terms.

As in every city, a public common is a wonderful machine for making members of a community visible to each other. People are simply friendlier if encountered in public areas that are off limits to automobiles. In Bryant, events include  ice-skating in the winter, with free films, concerts and literary readings at regular intervals through the rest of the year. Its bigger twin to the south in Washington Square even includes locals who post signs next to inflatable sofas offering “free conversation.” Open outdoor commons like these are essential antidotes to the American preference for spending lavishly  only on private spaces.

Denver's City Park Photo: David Herrera, Wikimedia
                   Denver’s City Park
              Photo: David Herrera, Wikimedia

To be sure, Bryant Park is the lucky recipient of the vast wealth that surrounds it. But any traveler could tick off a list of special places that exist in part because of another American imperative recognized by Theodore Roosevelt that we need to be not just of the physical world, but in it as well. We grow closer to others when we are in landscapes that have the effect of deepening sympathy for our species and our capacities to connect. Among others, Roosevelt gave us the idea of preserving great national parks. But the scale does not need to be Yellowstone-grand. My favorites are dramatically dissimilar: a mere one acre tract of gardens and ponds in a hillside in Great Malvern England, a scattering of fire pits and picnic tables under magnificent old-growth trees in New Jersey’s Bull’s Island State Park, the thunderous meeting of ocean and rock at Asilomar State Beach in Pacific Grove California, or the grass carpet of Denver’s City Park, which falls away to reveal the skyline against the incomparable backdrop of Mt. Evans.

Everyone can construct their own list, and perhaps notice that their favorite park is special because it has fostered relationships that remain central to our lives.