In his marvelously insightful and useful new book Net Smart: How to Thrive on Line, Howard Rheingold tells the story of what may be the world’s first email interruption. David Levy, formerly a researcher at the legendary PARC think tank in Palo Alto, was demonstrating how the very first email interface worked when a new email happened to come in. He switch from demonstrating to answering the email, thus ushering in (if you believe some pundits) The End of Civilization As We Know It.
This delightful story goes on. Now a professor at the University of Washington, Levy teaches a class called “Information and Contemplation.” Like so many digital innovators I work with, Levy is concerned with deep breathing, mindfulness, and introspection. Rather than that being in contradiction to email interruption or compensation for what Rheingold calls “our always-on lives,” mindfulness, according to Levy, is a response to attention overload not just for a digital age but for a modern age in which just about everything we do, for the last two hundred or so years, has come time-stamped. The Industrial Revolution required humans to act as much like machines as possible. Yes, the digital interrupts our well-learned assembly line rhythms. Yes, multimedia distract us. But returning to the nostalgia of the “good old days”–meaning any time before April of 1993 when the Mosaic 1.0 browser went public–is a misplaced nostalgia for the most recent attempt to mechanize the human soul. It is hardly a return (as Levy, Rheingold, and I would say) to an introspective, unregulated, mindful inner life that eludes not only the multimedia digital age but the regulated, machinic assembly line of industrialism too.