Deresiewicz is Right

Technology is terribly isolating. I notice this while sitting in the surgery waiting room this past week. I'm the only person with an iPod, and the only one who is not engaged in the nervous community that comes from these kind of places.

Perhaps it's a product of growing up in a hospital -- my father battled through a series of chronic illnesses, and as a child and teenager, I knew were all the best vending machines were hidden in the back corners of St. Francis -- but I'm just not much for that any more. Too much time spent also sleeping in ICU waiting with my mother's cancer.

So the gift of podcast allows me to escape. At least, I'm self-aware of my retreat from the community.

At the same time, the other half of my portable tech allows me to immediately become a part of a conversation with friends scattered by circumstance and ice storm. Texting gives me the sense of salon that I'm not going to have with the folks that have been randomly placed with me.

Once again, time and space are defeated by the digital age.

Here's the irony twist -- waiting in my mailbox was last week's Chronicle, in which William Deresiewicz opines the same concept in far more elegant prose. I give my highest recommendation to The End of Solitude.

There are some riveting points.

Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone.


Man may be a social animal, but solitude has traditionally been a societal value.


I particularly like this little ditty:

If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.


Deresiewicz gives us a lot to think about regarding the motivation of the digital natives, and their almost born instinct for notoriety and faux community.