Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives (7 page)

In my senior year of high school, I got my first cell phone. It was a big, unwieldy Nokia 5110 in a lime-green case. It looked like and felt like a brick, and that’s what I called it. But, again, it opened up a new world of amazing possibilities. For the first time, the ability to reach someone and be reached wasn’t tied to a physical location. I no longer had to wait outside the east entrance to the mall for twenty minutes because my friend was at the
west
entrance.

If you’re lucky, you skipped that whole dial-up Internet phase. Maybe your first phone was a smartphone. No playing Snake for hours at a time on a tiny monochrome screen. But however those moments played out, they all tell a common story. Technology and connectivity are becoming more advanced every day.

Once it was cool to have your own landline. Now five billion people around the world have their own mobile phones, and about a billion of those are smartphones with access to the Internet, e-mail, and all the amazing apps that are available today. We’ve gone from a world where a decade ago Internet access was a novelty to one where 2.4 billion people are online. And millions more join every day.

Devices are faster, cheaper, and more powerful than anything we could have imagined even a few years ago. In Silicon Valley, every geek is familiar with Moore’s law, named after the founder of Intel, Gordon Moore. Back in 1965, he predicted that microchips would double in power roughly every eighteen months. That prediction has remained true. Also, as computers have continued to get faster every year, the cost of devices has steadily fallen.

This trend is what has allowed so many more people to get their hands on computers, smartphones, and tablets over the last decade, and why these devices keep appearing in ever more places. Moore’s law is what has led to billions more people getting phones and hooking up to the Internet, and why a phone today is now a hundred thousand times more powerful than the computer on the Apollo spacecraft that took men to the moon.

Plus, people share more online every year. A few years ago, someone came up with the name for a technology trend designed after our own family! “Zuck’s law,” so-named for my dear brother, says that the amount of information we share in the world doubles every two years. In the time it takes you to read a single page of this book, another hundred hours of cat videos, hilarious skateboarding dogs, and many other, er, valuable pieces of content will have been uploaded to the web. Over a million tweets will have been shared. Some of them will actually be read. And over sixteen million pieces of content will have been posted on Facebook. That’s a lot of photos of people’s lunches.

Of course, there are limits to this trend. At some point, people simply can’t handle any more information—there are only so many hilarious cat videos and cute baby pictures we can look at. But you get the idea. The scale of what’s being shared is almost beyond our comprehension. Here’s an incredible thought: according to a
Digital Universe
report published in December 2012 by the analyst firm IDC, there are more pieces of digital content in the world today than there are grains of sand on every beach on Earth. Wow.

And none of these trends is slowing down.

The whole world is getting connected. You can get online anywhere. You can connect to the Internet on top of Mount Everest. You can find a signal at the International Space Station. Many astronauts have built up online fan followings by posting mind-blowing photos of the Earth from orbit. Talk about a Kodak moment.

So, in less than four decades we’ve gone from talking about connecting the world to
actually
connecting the world. And our expectations of connectivity are becoming a lot more demanding.

While growing up I remember how exciting it was to get online for even a few minutes and how lucky I felt to enjoy a good thirty minutes of chatting with my friends on AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) without one of my family picking up the telephone. Then I would wail frantically for them to hang up.

Today, we expect to be online all the time, and we expect to be reachable everywhere. We usually are. A Morgan Stanley
Internet Trends
report shows that over 90 percent of people keep their mobile phones within three feet of them, twenty-four hours a day. A May 2012 Harris poll in the United States found that 53 percent of people regularly check their phones in the middle of the night after they’ve already gone to bed, and a surprising and slightly disturbing number of people check their phones while on the toilet. (I don’t imagine most wash their handsets afterward. Think about that the next time someone hands you his or her phone and asks you to take a photo with it. You’re welcome.)

This online-all-the-time mentality pervades every area of our lives. Two 2012 surveys, one from Yahoo! and the other from Gazelle, revealed the following eye-opening data:

25 percent of women would give up sex for a year to keep their tablets.

15 percent of all survey respondents would give up their cars to keep their tablets.

Nearly 15 percent of all survey respondents said they’d rather give up sex entirely than go for even a weekend without their iPhones.

A 2012 TeleNav survey asked people which of life’s “little pleasures” they would rather do without for a week, instead of parting with their phones:

70 percent would give up alcohol.

21 percent would give up their shoes.

28 percent of Apple product users would go without seeing their significant others; 23 percent of Android users agreed.

A recent study from McCann Truth Central claimed that 49 percent of married moms would give up their engagement rings before they would part with their mobile phones. And a 2012 study from Harris Interactive revealed that 40 percent of people would rather
go to jail
for the evening than give up their social media accounts.

So, this is the world we live in now. Technology is almost everywhere and has come to dominate our lives. So much so, in fact, that we’re starting to see people yearning to be less connected and trying to implement rules, structure, and discipline in both their own and their families’ lives, to ensure that all this connectivity does not come at the expense of relationships, skill development, and manners.

It’s going to become increasingly important to find that balance, because in the next decade we’re going to see something even more extraordinary. Everyone and everything will be connected. There will be no division anymore between online and offline.

Beyond people, we’ll see objects, our environments, our homes, our clothes, and our cars come alive with data. One of the most popular Silicon Valley predictions is of a future with an “Internet of Things”—a world where our cars, kitchen appliances, and even shoes are connected. We’re well on the way to seeing that become a reality. According to a Cisco study in April 2011, there are between ten and fifteen billion connected devices in the world today, but by 2020 that number will have reached fifty billion.

A few months ago, I had a cute, hilarious, and sort of terrifying moment with my son, Asher, which showed me what tomorrow might look like. Asher has come to know and love
Barney and Friends,
the children’s TV show about that famous purple dinosaur. Asher loves to sing and dance along with the characters, and he could easily watch the show for hours on end, if only I would let him. One afternoon I was working on my laptop while Asher was playing with his toys on the rug. He got bored after a while, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw him staring up at a photo frame on the bookcase. It was a photo of my parents.

“What is it, love?” I asked.

Asher looked at me and then pointed at the frame. “Booney?” he asked.

For a moment, I didn’t realize what he was talking about. But then I got it. Asher had come to realize that content always flows from screens. On the big TV, he can get
Barney.
On my iPad, he can get Barney. So, surely a photo frame must also be able to conjure up his favorite television character.

I laughed. Asher looked disappointed.

But then I thought,
He’s absolutely right. Why shouldn’t he be able to watch Barney on that photo frame? For that matter, why shouldn’t any device be able to show us any information we want?
One day he’ll be right, and already his child’s logic shows just how intuitive and obvious this future will be. Every piece of glass will be a screen, and every screen a portal to another world of information, content, ideas, and entertainment. There’s absolutely no reason there can’t be a purple dinosaur in every frame.

As a new mom, that’s both exciting and utterly terrifying. It’s hard enough to balance screen time versus non-screen time as it is. What happens in a world where everything is screen time?

The future will be a place of infinite possibilities. No one will ever need to sneak into his or her dad’s office again for a chance to experience the magic. But as we get more and more connected, it’s also going to become increasingly important to know when to step away, when to focus on the people and places around us. A world where every object is a screen means a world of endless access to information, but it also means a world where we risk jeopardizing our relationships with loved ones if we don’t look up from that screen from time to time.

Our definition of “magical moments” may change to become those increasingly rare simple moments when nobody is connected, and there is no magic whatsoever.

What’s the upside? We’re more connected.

And the downside? We’re more connected.

Technology has altered every aspect of our lives, from our relationships to our families to our careers to our love lives. It’s changed how we celebrate birthdays, how we announce major life news, how we define friendships, and how we demand customer service.

With smartphones, and the cameras built into them, friends and family can share all the most important moments in their lives with one another as they happen. In June 2011, a Pew Research Center survey of over two thousand American adults found that Facebook users have stronger ties with their closest friends, find it easier to get support and advice from people, and are more likely to stay in touch with “dormant ties,” old friends from high school or college, or people who live far away.

Grandparents can see the face of a newborn grandchild from thousands of miles away through the lens of a webcam and via video calling. In fact, research published in 2012 by Dr. Shelia Cotten at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, showed that seniors who used the Internet were about 30 percent less likely to be depressed than seniors who didn’t.

Colleagues can have virtual face-to-face meetings with people working in offices anywhere in the world—there’s no such thing as a remote office anymore.

Friends can capture every moment of a dinner party through photos and make those photos beautiful with professional-looking edits, filters, and borders.

That same ease of communication might also mean that you get an informal Facebook message on your birthday, instead of a phone call; that you might get an e-mail from the person sitting right next to you at work, instead of an actual conversation; or that everybody at your dinner party might be so busy taking photos and making them look nice, that they’re no longer paying attention to anybody else. We can miss important moments if our heads are constantly buried in those phones.

Today, everyone is a broadcaster as well as a receiver. In the past, we were all just passive consumers of information. Creating content was reserved only for the rich and powerful, who controlled and ran large media companies. But now, each of us can generate and share as much as we receive.

When I wrote for my high school newspaper, we had a staff of twenty students working diligently to produce a paper with a total circulation of about a thousand readers. Nowadays many of us can reach over a thousand people with a single tweet, photo, or Facebook status update.

Now everyone is a media company. We can use technology to make our voices louder and heard in more places. When people come together online to raise their voices as a chorus, truly spectacular things can happen. In 2008, an unemployed twenty-one-year-old engineer in Colombia named Oscar Morales set up a Facebook page protesting the FARC, a terrorist group in his country. FARC had been kidnapping people, planting bombs, and terrorizing innocent people for years. One evening, sitting on his computer, Oscar read the news of another attack. Out of frustration, he created the page and named it optimistically “One Million Voices Against the FARC!”

He didn’t expect to get nearly that many people. But then something incredible happened. Within four hours the page had fifteen hundred members. The next day it had four thousand. By the end of the week it had a hundred thousand.

Stunned by the unexpected success of his online movement, Oscar did something he had never expected to do. He called for a nationwide day of protest against the FARC.

One month later, twelve million people marched in two hundred cities in what became the largest demonstration against terrorism in history. And in the end, the wave of political pressure the marches set off greatly contributed to sending the Colombian government and the rebels back on the road to peace talks.

What Oscar did was amazing and courageous. But not unique. Today, all over the world, in coffee shops and backrooms, in dorm rooms and town squares, other brave but otherwise completely ordinary people are using the tools of technology to stand up and advocate for change in their communities. In the hands of young, idealistic, well-organized activists, services like Google, Facebook, and Twitter become more than just a set of apps or Internet destinations. They become the tools of change. They become pathways to freedom.

That’s exactly what we saw happen with the use of the Internet in places like Egypt and Tunisia during the Arab Spring, when large numbers of young, motivated activists took to the streets there and in countries throughout the Middle East and North Africa to demand greater social and political freedoms, and it’s what we continue to see in Russia, China, Iran, and many other countries.