The Time of Our Lives (21 page)

They are the pioneers of a technology that is changing our lives and our world at such a pace that it can outrun judgment. Information technology, the cosmos of the Internet hooked up to laptops and desktops, smartphones and digital cameras, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, satellite and cable television, and who knows what someone in a garage in Silicon Valley is working on next.

Cornelius Vanderbilt, J. P. Morgan, Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and the other men who built the American industrial and financial foundation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are fixed parts of the national memory for their boldness, wealth, willful manners, and larger-than-life personal lifestyles.

Future generations will be studying the likes of Bill Gates of Microsoft, Steve Jobs of Apple, Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and who knows what other cyber pioneers with the same fascination my generation had for the earlier titans.

This new universe they’ve created with other cyber-geniuses around the world has an infinite capacity for constant expansion, but we do know that in its seminal stage it is already profoundly changing communication, commerce, research, medicine, and social structure everywhere.

The physical properties of this transformative epoch are self-evident. What gets too little attention are the limits, a subject I try to encourage younger generations to engage.

You cannot eliminate poverty or disease by hitting the delete key.

You cannot reverse global warming by striking backspace.

Nuclear proliferation, political and religious imperialism, and natural disasters won’t disappear when you hit delete. (Control-alt-delete is also how you access the home page.)

It will do us little good to wire the world if we short-circuit our souls.

The hard work of constantly improving life on this precious planet requires people willing to put their boots on the ground, get their hands dirty, and spend their nights in scary places.

No text message will ever replace the first kiss. “I luv u” on a tiny screen will never replace that declaration whispered into your ear at the end of a long embrace. Holding a BlackBerry cannot compare with holding hands on a first date or exchanging spoken vows on a wedding day. I never want to hear a lyric that goes, “A tweet is just a tweet—as time goes by.”

If I am asked to give a wedding toast, I remind the couple that no GPS system or Google map will show them the way to a long, happy union. In fact, the electronic guides can lull their users into a kind of lethargy that does not serve them well when the batteries run low or the devices are misplaced.

It’s a much wider world than the small screen on your laptop, smartphone, or GPS device. I know those devices can be helpful, but I will never forget my first encounter with their use. I was emerging from a backcountry fishing trip in the wilderness area north of Yellowstone when I encountered a small party of day hikers running around frantically just off the trail. When I asked if there was something wrong, one of them explained they were with a Stanford professor who was testing one of the new handheld GPS devices.

During a break he’d set it down and then resumed his hike, inadvertently leaving it behind. They were desperately trying to find it. I laughed to myself as I thought of the device lying on a bed of pine needles, knowing exactly where it was, while the hapless hikers acted like a small herd of sheep untethered from their herder.

THE PAST

To offer some historic perspective, think of the beginning of the twentieth century, when other forms of new technologies were sweeping the developed world: electricity, telephones, airplanes, automobiles, breakthroughs in medicine. It was the beginning of the American Century, and the possibilities were endless.

Before the hundred years ended, we had been involved in two world wars, endured a crushing Great Depression, and witnessed holocausts in Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Russia became the Soviet Union, a cruel and cold-blooded oppressor of the most basic human rights, all in the name of liberating the proletariat. China, that ancient civilization of invention, culture, and philosophy, was converted into a closed landscape of thought control and commune economies better suited to the nineteenth century than the twentieth.

THE PRESENT

It is folly to discount both the proven and still-untested transformative applications of these new technologies. In every conceivable way they are game changers. We’re in a global race to keep up with their ramifications and impact in every aspect of life. What we’re missing, however, is a national dialogue about the wise use of these powerful instruments of communication. In the hands of reckless or vindictive users they are used for intimidation and malice. They can be the electronic equivalent of pulling a pin on a grenade and rolling the explosive into someone’s private life—what came to be called “fragging” in Vietnam.

In the fall of 2010, a Rutgers college student committed suicide after his roommate streamed video on the Internet of him having a sexual encounter with another male. Other teenagers have been driven to suicide or depression by website bullying and humiliation. The easy temptations of information technology can swiftly outrun judgment. It is not unique to America.

Imagine the task ahead for Chinese leaders as they try to manage a booming economy, a mix of state and private controls, the move of millions of people from the countryside into more settled areas, and the building of industries that will provide jobs and finance necessary infrastructure—all while remaining determined to retain political control and restrict outside influences.

The ultimate test for the leadership of China may be its attempts to control access to the Internet. The Politburo may be able to control elections, restrict free speech, direct the economy, manipulate international currency markets, determine who shall go to school where, and dispense swift, brutal punishment to those who fail to fall in line, but controlling access to the Internet? The Internet is oxygen to a new generation and there are simply too many ways to access it in this vast new universe that has been created. For all of their cunning and exceptional managerial skills in bringing China from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first in the past thirty years, for Chinese leaders to think they can wall off the Internet is the modern equivalent of their ancestors thinking the Great Wall of China could hold back marauding nomadic tribes in the fifth century
B.C
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As you read this, a clever young Chinese student is hacking his or her way through the Beijing firewall, breaking into the brave new world where the riches of information and the excitement of social networking are pulsing with possibilities.

The Chinese leadership, to say nothing of their counterparts in every corner of the globe, would be far better served if they redirected their efforts to making the Internet work for them rather than restricting its use.

When the Internet took hold in our society, a number of friends would come to me and say things like, “You can’t believe little Johnny; he’s an absolute whiz on his computer. He’s on the keyboard late every night!” When I then asked, “Do you have any idea where Johnny the keyboard master is going with his new space-age powers?” they’d look at me with blank or slightly worried expressions. “No?” I’d say. “Well, you’d better find out.”

Later they’d come to me with anguished expressions, saying, “When I approach his room I hear a quick clickety-clack of the keys and then computer snapping shut. What do I do?”

The honest answer? “Beats me.”

Of course, the more responsible response is to encourage the same kind of dialogue you’d have with a child when they reach driving age or when they begin to experiment with drugs or alcohol (and they will). Develop your own Internet computer skills so you can relate at roughly the same level. Share your favorite discoveries and ask them to share theirs with you. Explore together.

This new universe has its own rules so that not even grown-ups who work with young people every day are conscious of what’s going on outside their supervision. I was amused when the very upscale school district of New Canaan, Connecticut, decided to set up an elaborate monitoring and filtering system when President Obama was scheduled to address the nation’s students on the importance of studying productively and supporting one another.

On
Meet the Press
I was critical of New Canaan and other school districts who imagined something sinister in the president’s motives, pointing out that for me, this was not a partisan issue. I reminded everyone that President Reagan did something similar when he was in office.

The New Canaan superintendent of schools was upset by my criticism and called to complain. He had a rather tortured explanation for the district’s censorious attitude and so I finally asked, “Do your students bring their personal computers to school?”

“Yes,” he replied.

Then I asked, “Do you monitor or filter what they access on their computers?”

“No,” he said.

“I rest my case,” I replied. He wanted to stand between his students and the president of the United States but he had not a clue what they were reading on their computers during school hours and in the presence of teachers and administrators.

Equally unsettling are schools that permit smartphones in the classroom without realizing that some students surreptitiously use them to cheat. A strategically placed phone with its browser open to Google is too easy to arrange.

As we go careening into this brave new world of on-the-go information available at a keystroke, shouldn’t we have an ongoing conversation about the origins, agendas, credibility, and context of the information we’re retrieving? Take, for example, the sometimes bizarre claims dropped into Wikipedia entries like errant mortar rounds.

It took me several tries to eradicate an utterly false Wikipedia statement that on the day of the 9/11 attacks I had chanted “War, war, war” on the air like a militant yell leader. A Los Angeles friend, a screaming heterosexual who depends on his secretary to guide him through cyberspace, was startled to read in his Wikipedia entry that he was the first openly gay senior partner of a major law firm.

Personal computers have been accurately described as the first technology in which the children are teaching the parents to drive. Parents and other grown-ups need not concede this territory to their offspring. We’d better get behind the wheel ourselves.

Older boomers and my generation, slightly older, are at the tail end of the user population, representing less than 13 percent of those going online. There are now a number of online sites dedicated to teaching seniors how to get with the Internet program. For those too intimidated by online instruction, senior citizen centers around the country are establishing inhouse tutorials using local young people as instructors and counselors.

There is a bonus in all of this. Dr. Laura Carstensen of the Stanford Center on Longevity reports that one of the ways to slow the aging process is to learn entirely new skills. “It’s not enough,” she says, “to do crosswords or play bridge, relying on your memory bank; you should try to learn something entirely new.” Director Gary Small at the UCLA Longevity Center concurs. “The new technology will create a major milestone in brain evolution,” he said, explaining that Internet use among seniors dramatically increases brain activity.

It’s not that baby boomers and those of us in the generation just ahead are Luddites when it comes to cyber technology and the vast new universe of the information age. During conversations with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his rock star chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, I’ve pressed them for reasons why I should at this age add one more electronic chore to my email, Google, Bing, Yahoo! list.

Sheryl immediately took me to a Facebook page organized around a Florida community and a local high school. It was a virtual reunion of the class of 1968 and they were all in touch with one another after many years of going their separate ways.

Sheryl, who was born at the tag end of the boomer years and looks more like a postgraduate student than one of the most powerful executives of the Internet era, laughed when she described an early meeting at Facebook. The executive team was discussing a new launch when one said, “Well, we have to take into account all user demographics,” and then, waving at Sheryl, added, “including the middle-aged.”

Sheryl at first didn’t know who he was waving at, but she quickly made the story into a parable about Facebook as more than just a youthful fancy.

She said, “As you get older, the barriers of time and geography become more important and we have to break them down. Facebook does that with virtual reunions which, in turn, get more people to the real reunions.”

When I asked if Facebook would replace the nursery song “Over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go,” Sandberg responded quickly, “I don’t think so, but Facebook makes it easier to share on a daily basis. We hear stories of people getting to watch their grandkids take their first step on video on Facebook.”