by Richard Asa / © 2014, Chicago Tribune. Distributed by MCT Information Services.

Michael Harris’ epiphany came when, as a writer at Vancouver Magazine, he looked at his computer screen and saw 14 open windows while his smartphone was buzzing almost nonstop. What attention he had left was bouncing back and forth between the two.

  In that moment, he says, he realized he was everywhere and nowhere at once.

  For years, Harris had thought about what amounted to this moment, so he decided to quit his job and write The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection, a memoir in which he meditates on life before the Internet and how we’re losing the natural gravitation toward silence and deep reflection in favor of instant gratification and “likes.”

Remembering ‘life before the Internet’

  The book, essentially, focuses on what Harris calls the “straddle generation,” that group of people who remember life before the Internet and are immersed in it now. They are the demographic that will most naturally understand the book’s subtle, even enigmatic premise more than any other: that there is a before and an after we can preserve to our benefit.

  “It is enigmatic,” Harris says of this loss he writes about. “But it’s also so big that it’s surprising we’ve ignored that part of things for so long. We’re so entranced by what online life gives to us that we’ve shied away from those intangible things that it has stripped from us over time.”

  Harris writes in an elegant, accessible and often hilarious way as he deals with his own Internet demons, but he also backs up his premises with more than 200 references that include research studies, presentations and comments from a host of pundits from Mark Twain to Marshall McLuhan.

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Discussion Questions

-Do you long for “life before the internet?” Explain.

-Have you figured out how to “engineer a healthy media diet?” Explain.

-What do you feel like you’ve given up by “being constantly connected”?

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