Getting Lost and Sometimes Found in the Digital Age
January 13, 2020
Axelrod (The Point of Vanishing), director of Loyola’s creative writing program, provides powerful arguments against today’s all-encompassing digital world in this concise and insightful meditation. After being blinded in one eye while playing basketball, Axelrod, then a college junior, was forced to adjust to the loss of peripheral vision and depth perception, leading him to a more general, lifelong interest in the factors shaping his view of the world. This search acquired new urgency after the 2016 presidential election led him to conclude that people, dependent on their digital devices, have become “lost in a new way, disoriented in our very disorientation.” To illustrate the benefits of drawing on one’s own memory and observation skills, he discusses the cognitive benefits of navigating without recourse to GPS, citing findings that London cab drivers, famous for their in-depth geographic knowledge, had larger than usual hippocampi. Other benefits of unplugging he discusses include the ability to wander and thus make unexpected discoveries, immersing oneself in an activity and entering what psychologists term “the flow state,” and cultivating a sense of curiosity and patience. While Axelrod’s basic message is familiar, his impassioned plea for a less smartphone-centric existence should resonate with many.
Starred review from October 15, 2019
A provocative inquiry into the necessity of "a new map with the digital world and the traits it calls for, and with the old physical world and the traits it calls for, and with the borders clearly marked where the two realms conflict." Refreshingly, Axelrod (Director, Creative Writing/Loyola Univ. Chicago; A Point of Vanishing: A Memoir of Two Years in Solitude, 2015, etc.) doesn't deliver a screed against cybertechnology but rather a series of philosophical meditations on the consequences of connecting ourselves digitally to the point where the realm of the screen is a world unto itself. In the woods of Vermont, where he had found sanctuary from media stimuli, he reflected on how "everything I encountered--or didn't encounter--was quietly altering my sense of time, my sense of place, and the quality of my attention and memory. What I was experiencing was changing how I was experiencing." His return to civilization resulted in sensory overload, as long walks in the woods gave way to crowded sidewalks of pedestrians focused on the experience provided by their earbuds and omnipresent smartphones, both connecting and isolating each one of them. Throughout this illuminating journey, Axelrod explores how conversational inquiry has reduced itself to texts and tweets, how a Google search has convinced a civilization that everything it needs to know can be known instantly, and how GPS gives us directions that undermine the serendipity of finding one's own way. He discusses the concept of "neural Darwinism," how "natural selection happens on both sides of your eyes" and "certain populations of neurons get selected and their connections grow stronger, while others go the way of the dodo bird." The author also ponders identity, interaction, mystery, and the strange sense of returning to one place, physically and geographically, while adapting to the cyber realm, where "we're effectively living in two places at once." The wide focus of a generalist makes readers reflect profoundly on what we lose as the cyberworld tightens its leash.
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Starred review from December 1, 2019
Axelrod lost sight in one eye while in college, a physical change that was understandably discombobulating. He withdrew into the Vermont woods for a time, and when he emerged from his Walden-like remove in 2001, "people now walked talking into their hands." Soon Facebook and Twitter altered everyone's landscape even more so. This slim, powerful book is a meditation about what happens to consciousness when people spend large swaths of time on-screen. Our sense of time makes everything seem urgent and ubiquitous. GPS orients us to where we want to go, but it doesn't afford us the ability to wander. Our brains, wired for change and danger, light up in disturbing ways because the addictive nature of apps manipulates attention "in order to manipulate [our] social instincts." Book chapters are broken into four segments?Background, Why it matters, Threats, What you can do?which gives added heft to Axelrod's philosophy. Delightfully, he discusses Monty Hall of Let's Make a Deal-fame with the same perspicacity as he discusses the New Testament story of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery. Poetic, ruminative, and never preachy, this book is a game changer for readers who yearn to see beyond 240 characters.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)