Michael Harris' epiphany came when, as a writer at Vancouver Magazine, he looked at his computer screen and saw 14 open windows while his smartphone was buzzing almost nonstop. In that moment, he said, he realized that he was everywhere and nowhere at once.
Harris quit his job and wrote "The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection" (Current), a recently released memoir in which he meditates on the "loss of lack" — or life before the Internet — and how we're losing the natural gravitation toward silence and deep reflection in favor of instant gratification and "likes."
The book focuses on what Harris calls the "straddle generation," those people who remember life before the Internet and are immersed in it now. They are the demographic that probably will best understand the book's premise: that there is a before and an after we can preserve to our benefit.
"It is enigmatic," Harris said of the loss he writes about. "We're so entranced by what online life gives to us that we've shied away from those intangible things that it has stripped from us."
He deals with his own Internet demons, but he backs up his premises with studies, presentations and comments from a host of pundits from Mark Twain to Marshall McLuhan.
Many of the studies he cites point to the myriad ways we are being distracted, among them, a growing and disconcerting need for attention and fame.
He refers to an analysis of TV shows that aired from 1967 to 2007 that was done by Yalda Uhls, a researcher at UCLA's Children's Digital Media Center.
"Post-Internet TV content (typified by 'Hannah Montana' and 'American Idol') had swerved dramatically from family-oriented shows like 'Happy Days' in previous decades," Harris writes. "In the final decade leading up to 2007, fame became an overwhelming focus, which was one of the least important values in tween TV in earlier years."