The cell phone in the Garden

In Leo Marx’s book The Machine in the Garden, Nathaniel Hawthorne has an a-ha moment. In his notebooks he describes an Arcadian moment; he is sitting enjoying nature when he hears the shrill (and peace-shattering) blast of a locomotive engine. Marx goes on to notice that this exact scene is reproduced in text after text in American literature. Whatever else the machine does for us and to us, it destroys a certain kind of contemplative life, and replaces the possibilities of Arcadia with the imperatives of machine time and machine space.

I’ve just read two nonfiction studies, Distraction by Damon Young, and Hamlet’s Blackberry by William Powers. Both contain a Hawthorne-like “cell phone in the garden” moment, meant to personalize and dramatize one main feature/bug of cell phones: they distract us. Damon Young describes wandering with his wife in a little Greek village on the island of Ithaca (of Odyssey fame). He describes how Ithaca differs from the party islands like Santorini, and allows the village to come to life as a place out of time: “strangely deserted,” melancholic, full of grape vines and fat green and purple fuit and stone walls and an old almond tree. Finally they come to a cliff-top resting place that is “pure poetry.”

And that is when it happens: in Arcadia, in this garden of slow time, his cell phone rings. Just like Hawthorne’s steam engine, Young’s cell phone interrupts a reverie: “The white cliffs, the herbs, the sunlight and the sea – all these blessings slowly dimmed as I was wrenched out of my reverie.” And he goes on to reflect on the unconscious reflex that answering the “digital nagger” has become, and within a sentence this reflex has grown into “something slightly sinister,” an addiction.

Young includes this scene in a book devoted to the causes of and “cures” for modern distraction. True to his calling (he is a philosopher), Young finds that distraction and its obverse, focus or attention, are always already problematic in mortal human lives. It isn’t that we have too much information now and didn’t before; it isn’t that we have cell phones or the Internet or that we are somehow radically less able than our predecessors. Or rather it is not these things alone; instead, these seem to make more difficult an already difficult task: to flourish given that we must attend to this and not that, to make thoughtful choices about where our attention ought to go.

Powers repeats this cell phone in the garden trope in his chapter on Hamlet and his “tables” (the Elizabethan version of a blackberry, a wax writing pad that can be erased and used again each day). And even more uncannily, the scene Powers draws is a repeat of Young: a phone call from his mother. He is on his way to her house when he gets her call; her picture comes up, the “Kabuki” drama of him being late and her agreeing to hold dinner unfolds, and then they sign off. As he drives, the call stays in his mind: he feels an “unexpected surge of emotion” about how much he loves her, how good-natured she is, how his son seems to have inherited these traits. The music playing in the car (jazz), the scene unfolding outside the car (pine woods) all merge with the memories of his mother, and these build in each other to an absorbing joy.

So not the machine in the garden? No. But that is not to say that cell phones are not exactly as Young would have it. The difference is the gap between the call, and the deeper experience he found he had. The gap was created artificially by being in the car, and cut off from other mundane tasks:

[The joyful epiphany about his mom] “happened after what we typically think of as the connection, the call itself, was over. There was a gap between the practical task and the deeper experience that followed, If that gap had not been there, would I have reaped the same benefits?”

In fact, he says, the cell phone and its ilk (screens of all kinds) are not bad in themselves, but in that we constantly move from one communication to another, we lose the chance to give “room” to the “after” of communication, to the room in ourselves for reflection. And this is the point that Young is making as well. This link between the utilitarian side of digital experience and the “vital significance” side is, he argues, what is missing in our current technophilia, our belief in our devices. We can have these significant moments and do, but only when we allow a gap or a pause between the rush of communicative events. And this gap allows us to reflect, as Young would have us do, on which elements of the communication are worth focusing on, are of value.

I’m not exactly sure what to make of these two scenes. But one thing is clear: the feeling that a machine (the railroad, the cell phone) is somehow connected to an interruption of reflection and of deeper feeling.

Cyborg anxiety. The anxious feeling that even when we are “controlling” machines, they are somehow also controlling and shaping us in ways we don’t like and can’t, well..control.