CHARLES SIMIC A Reunion with Boredom Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1938, and lived there until his family immigrated from his warctom country when he was sixteen, He isa translator, ions and eight collections of prose, translator of fourteen poetry collections, and professor emeritus of American literature and creative writing at the University of New Hampshire. Reunion with Boredom" was originally published on Simic’ blog at the New York Review of Books in 2011. Though it might seem ironic that an essay about the downsides of our ubiquitous computers first appeared in such a forum, note as you read the ways in which Simic is not simply antitechnologs. art phones, and tablets to occupy them endlessly? There's also television, of course, which in homes of many Americans is uge of introspective loners, now have huge TV screens alternat ing between sports and chatter to divert them from their thoughts. As soon as college students are out of class, cell phones, and in their hands, requiring full concentration and jous of their surroundings. text messages to each other t ‘These and other thoughts came to me as I sat in a dark house three days in the aftermath of Hurricane Irene. Being without its and water is a fairly common experience for those of us ein rural areas on roads lined with old trees. Every almost certain to bring down the lines, ive scarcity of population, are a low 374 AREUMION Wrrit BOREDOM 375 priority for the power company to fix. We use oil lamps and most often candles, so our evenings around the dining room table resemble séances. We sit with our heads bowed as if trying to summon spirits, while in truth struggling to see what's on our din- ner plates. Being temporarily unable to use the technology we've grown dependent on to inform ourselves about the rest of the ‘world, communicate with others, and pass the time, is a reminder f our alarming dependence on them. " are so boring!” my bad, since we had no televi autumn days and winter nights that I had an inkling of what they meant when they spoke about eternity. Everyone read in order to escape boredom, I had friends so addicted to books, their parents ‘Gere convinced they were going crazy with so many strange sto- ries and ideas running like fever through their brains, not to men- - staring at the walls. There were radios, but their delights—with the exc: mn of a few programs—wei jousands died of ennui in such homes. Others joined the navy, narried, or moved to California, Even so, looking back now, I ‘ns struck me as being either one day being absolutely sure of Greek and Egy been, on the Lower East Side in the late 1950s. The building was so noisy; there was not a chance of being bored for a second. At almost any hour of the day, one could hear several radios tuned to376 caries suaic different stations at the same time, husbands and wives arguing, mothers shouting at their children, babies crying, drunks cursing on the stairs and tenants gabbing and laughing on the front stoops. Everybody had complaints about something or someone. My university friends idealized humanity. Not ighbors. ‘They had a low opinion of almost everyone in the neighborhood. What are you studying? The old woman I was renting my room from asked me one day, and I told her: History? What kind? European, I replied. Aha, she said with a knowing look in he eye. The kings, the priests, the people being led by the nose, didn't know what to reply. Despite her gloomy view of aristocracy, she fed me like a prince. In fact, the moment one entered our building, several ethnic cuisines came to compete for fone’ nose with their tantalizing smells, making it impossible, even with all the typical disappointments of youth, to feel sorry for oneself for long. Still, thanks to the hu imposed on me, I and many others had a kind of high school reunion with boredom. [t brought-abewt--sudden_and_unmis-_ takable realization that we are only puppets jerked this way and that way by whatever device we think we are operating. With its (Sgings [oasened Tor the time being, there was nothing for us to do but slump idly in some chair with our heads dangling and our Irene ran around the yard beating up ¢ and in the process telling us what little and everything we've done over the years to make our home more attract For Discussion and Writing “I realized how much I owe to my boredom” (par. 3). is this essay poetic? Note 's "Is Google Making Us Stupid: , what would Simic say our devices are making us? Are Carr an STIPSo, HOW, and Tract, why not? cane and the hours of darkness it 5 AREUNION Wins BoREDON 377 4. Do. you have what Simic calls “a quiet place to sit and think” (pat, DP so, describe it, and what you ust fo. not, do you wish you had one——and what circumstances prevent you from having std yoyhad Pr from having such 5. looking further Simic is not alone in wishing for more quiet places for people ost an think these day, nore he alone in afguing that ged the way those of him (regard. us who are people ever sat and thought at any given time in RIStGry90__atax nuRDtcK assumptions. Wiite a reflection on ascent idea about the wort that was shaped by Kas ‘ray the workd works, What Changed that allowed these Ideas to change? Did the sclence change ffaverthe way people thought about the world? 5. looking further The power ofthe metaphor of the ‘ithe natural world. In some ways, this is obvi ‘word of furan NICHOLAS CARR Is Google Making Us Stupid? Carr was born in 1959 and first gained widespread recogni- ternal migration—you can see t Ca eae tion with his 2003 Harvard Business Review article “IT Doesn't ing horde is applied to situations in ways that can only be ‘metaphorical. What do you thint use il? What are the effects of for the Guardian, the Atlantic, the New York Ti Street Journal, Wired, the New Republ ‘Technology Review. He is author of Thi Edison to Googl ‘The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to ited for a 2011 Pi id?” originally appeared in the Atlantic in ed the article into a book-length exploration of the shed three years later. As in much of | act of technological innovation, spec omputing, on the way we live now, asking readers to step out it has. As you read this essay, note the way Carr helps us look around, Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunc- tioning machin 1e memory cit- cuits that control its artificial “brain.” “Dave, my mind is going,” Haz says, forlornly. Ican feel it, too. Over the past few years I've had an uncomfort- able sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the aPaps ‘7My mind now ex 92 micuotas carn. memory. My mind isn't going —so far as I can tell—but its chang- ing. Y'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and Td spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for some- thing else to do. [feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. I think I know what's going on. For more than a decade now, ve been spending @ lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I've got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I'm not working, I'm as likely as not to be foraging in the Webs info-thickets, reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to pod- casts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they're sometimes likened, hyperlinks don't merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.) For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my 's and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having imme: te access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they've been widely described and duly applauded. “the perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired's Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that ‘boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, mi e supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought, And what the Net seems tbe doing i away my capacity Tor concentration and contemplation, ito take is information the way the Net dis-_ ‘ ributes is in a swiftly moving steam of particles. Once Iwas a Seu sea of words, Now I zip along the surface ikea” guy ona Jet Ski I'm not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them— many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun men tioning the phenomenon, Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He specu- lates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the Web not so much because the way I read has changed, ic, I'm just seeking convenience, but because the way I maivk has changed?” Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of comput- ers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the Web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated 1 his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His think- ing, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online, “Lcan't read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “Te lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.” Anecdotes alone don't prove much. And we still await the long- term neurological and psychological experiments that will pro- vvide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of asea-d ‘examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K, educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written informa- tion. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they'd already visited. They typi- cally read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they'drae Le imesh ence for both action The clock’s methodical also took something Joseph Weizenbaum Started obeving the cl ‘The process of adapting to new intellectual techi reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began inking of their brains as operating matician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we're s surably powerful com y echnologies. It’ our map and our ; our calculator and he Net absorbs a mediun um is re-created in medium’s ith hyperlink 1 gewgaws, and it surrounds the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we're glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper's site. The result is to scatter our atte: The Net’ influence does screen, either: As people's minds become attuned to the crazy quilt end at the edges of a computer 20 1S GOOGLE MakNG Us STUPID? 97 of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audi- ence’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their arti \roduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with New York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every s design director, Tom jortcuts” would ers a quick “taste” of the day's news, sparing method of actually turning the pages and reading the tle choice but to play by the new-media of experiments aimed at improving machinists. With the approval of Mid- 's, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to rarious metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movernent as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, ‘ions —an “algorithm,” we . idvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it tured them into little more than automatons, but the factory's it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-mo98 _mIcHOLAs can defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of S ic Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, ‘best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gra‘ jon of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic to all acts of manual labor, arts.” Once his system was ap Taylor assured his it would bring about not only of industry but of society, creating efficiency. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; the future the system must be first.” ‘Taylor's system is still very much with us; it remains the ethi of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor's ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for ion, transmission, and manip- ation of inform: ms of programmers are i ‘on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to ‘canry out every mental movement of what we've come to describe as “knowledge work.” Google's headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the 25 Googleplex—is the Internet's high church, and the religion prac- ticed inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that's founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” t does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingh ‘control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind. ‘The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’ information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives In Google's view, information is, aa kind of commodity, a ut (can be mined and .cessed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of informa- tion we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers. 1S G006L8 MAKING US sTUmID? 99 i if you had all the work! tion directly attached to you Tes mae such an ambit for a pair of math 0 izzes with vast disposal anda small army of computer scien A fundamentalh ale desire to use tec! in their employ. motivated by a words, “to solve prob- ir easy assumption that we'd all “be bette: bimiins Were supplemented, or even replaced, by ae not an opening for insight he human brain is just an outdate Pte that necds a faster processor and a bigger acdc idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data- 20 we view—the more opportunities Google and 0! gain to collect information about us and to feed us adeveee ments. Most of the proprietors of the c , Most Proprietors of the commercial100 _icwonas can ‘usto distraction. | Maybe im just a worrywart, Just as there's a tendency to glo- | rify technological progress, there’ a countertendency to expect the | ‘worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’ Phaedrus, Socrates | bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowl- Gage they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the ‘words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their \&\ memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able S to “receive a quamitity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the SX most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit Lot Nisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasnt wrong—the ‘new technology did often have the effects he feared —but he was 3 Oe Ee cet many aye hte ed Yeading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and > expand human knowledge (ifnot wisdom). _ The arrival of Gutenberg’ printing press, in the 15th century S set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Htalian humanist ‘S Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of & books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studi- Sore and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply 2X printed books and broadsheeis would undermine religious author- “LB ity, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press ‘ere COTE 3 unal So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostal- gists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data- Stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn't the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the ktiowledge we ‘acquire from the author's words but for the intellectual vibrations. those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by 1S GOOGLE MAKING us stUFIO? 101 any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster ur wn ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is suishable from deep NRG EOS We lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “ an et spaces em up with “content,” we wil sacrifice something important not only in ourselves wat in ur culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Fore eloquently described whateat saker nt Richard Foreman Tome from atraition of We ame rma radon Western which hee (ye =the compe densa eth "actu oft he ersonally—a man or woman wh carried neces themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the eat heritage of the West. [But now] I see ed) we ar. rary of dense cultural in- sheritance, Foreman concluded, we risk turning aE 2001. What makes it so poignant and so weird, is the computer’ =e the computer's emotional response to the dis dark, its chil its despair as one circuit after another goes ing with the astronaut —"I can fel i 1 —and its final reversion to what can onl lled a state of innocence. ual’ outpouring of feeling con. trasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human fig- tres in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic eicteny. Thelr thoughts and actions feel sexipted, a8 # they're following the steps ofan algorithm. In the world of 2001, Beople have become so machinelike thatthe most human charac. er turns out to be a machine. That’ the essence of Kubrick’ dark prophecy: as we come to rely Computers To meaner, laliens Into artificial intelligence. For Discussion and Writing 4. What common isa about the effet of our Inereasd acces in mation is Carr arguing against? If you could phrase the idea as es lay Gnthe essays lena declarative sentence-what ould ba102 _nactonss cant _ about a large social phenomenon, he begins 2, Though Cart is w ersonal reflection. Why do swith a scene from. ‘you think he chose JUDITH ORTIZ COFER The Myth of the Latin Woman: IJust Met a Girl Named Maria Judith Ortiz Cofer was born in Puerto Rico in 1952 and grew up there Vew Jersey: She isa poet, fiction each essay see © ce fc ‘common image in scien¢ AA ne ther in an essay imagini piece of short speculative fiction fs about the ultimate value of st ind autobiographer, and In 2010, ‘Much of her (1989) and The Latin Her most recent books include a novel, 11 (2011), and three children’s books, Animal Jamboree: Latino Folktales (2012), The Pi ‘The Myth of the La siders the stereotypes Americ , andit does so At the end of one ofthe stories she in her essay, dealing with an offensive man, Cofer wri complimented me on my cool handling ofthe notes thar what she really Notice, as you read, the way through narrative a ip to London from Oxford University where I was ome graduate credits one summer, a young man, obvi- from a pub, spotted me and as if struck by inspiration went down on his knees in the aisle. With both hands over his heart he broke into an Irish tenor’s rendition of “Marfa” from West Side Story. My politely amused fellow passengers gave his lovely voice the round of gentle applause it deserved. Though I ‘was not quite as amused, I managed my version of an English smile: no show of mns of the facial muscles—I was a of my life practicing reserve and 103