Reproduction of Henry David Thoreau and his cabin on Walden Pond in Concord, MA

The past month or so, I’ve have been hearing a curious groundswell of an idea: that our Anywhere vision of ubiquitous connectivity is a bad idea and harmful to our society. The chorus started in an article by William Deresiewicz in the Chronicle of Higher Education as noted at Nicholas Carr’s Rough Type blog:

If six hours of television a day creates the aptitude for boredom, the inability to sit still, a hundred text messages a day creates the aptitude for loneliness, the inability to be by yourself. Some degree of boredom and loneliness is to be expected, especially among young people, given the way our human environment has been attenuated. But technology amplifies those tendencies. You could call your schoolmates when I was a teenager, but you couldn’t call them 100 times a day. You could get together with your friends when I was in college, but you couldn’t always get together with them when you wanted to, for the simple reason that you couldn’t always find them. If boredom is the great emotion of the TV generation, loneliness is the great emotion of the Web generation. We lost the ability to be still, our capacity for idleness. They have lost the ability to be alone, their capacity for solitude.

Hmmm. The old days were better because we couldn’t find people and had to sit by ourselves? That argument seems like a stretch.

And then the Boston Globe piled onto the idea in its Globe magazine article, The End of Alone:

“We’ve gone from an American ethic that championed the lone guy on a horseback to an ethic of managing multiple data streams,” says Dalton Conley, a sociology professor at New York University and author of the new book Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety. “It’s very hard for people to unplug and be alone — and be with the one data stream of their mind.”

What’s fueling this? Conley says it’s anxiety borne out of a deep-seated fear that we’re being left out of something, somewhere, and that we may lose out on advancement in our work, social, or family lives if we truly check out. “The anxiety of being alone drives this behavior to constantly respond and Twitter and text, but the very act of doing it creates the anxiety.”

I believe that both articles are missing the point. The ability to be connected Anywhere is just that: an ability. It is not a mandate. We may not be comfortable with our new abilities to communicate any time and any where, but that doesn’t mean we should give it up. We could make a similar claim that city living creates similar demands on our connected selves and creates isolation, yet I see few of these Anywhere critics claiming that we should return to our rural and agrarian roots (although in many ways that seems like a more interesting argument).

I believe both articles are examples of a well-trod American tradition: longing for the good old days when we didn’t have labor-saving technologies and life was simpler. In Britain, it was the Luddites who rejected mechanical looms as evil technologies that put them out of work in the 18th century. Here in America, Henry David Thoreau retreated to the woods at Walden Pond in search of solitude and refuge from the busy-ness of 19th century life — a life that we today would consider our “good old days.” Yet as documented in reality shows such as PBS’s Frontier House, those rural good old days really consisted of seven days a week of back-breaking work. Oh, and life expectancies were much lower, despite todays’ perceptions that it was a utopian life of low stress.

The bottom line: ubiquitous connectivity is a technology we can use for good or for ill. But given a choice between being Anywhere and Nowhere, today’s consumers are voting or Anywhere with their wallets. And for those longing for the peace and quiet of Nowhere, you needn’t retreat to a wood shack on Walden Pond. Phones and computers still come with “Off” buttons; we only have to use them.

P.S. After I posted this, Gene Signorini noted that connecting with others is a fundamental human need, a trend that Declan Lonergan noted nicely in his framework report, Transforming Anywhere. And perhaps denying that basic human need as a form of meditation and penance is an explanation for this recent news article: In Italy, one of the most connected countries in the world, the Catholic Church has urged parishoners to give up texting for Lent.