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The Joy of Quiet
By PICO IYER December 29, 2011
LAST year, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on "Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow." Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began - I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign - was stillness.
A few months later, I read an interview with the perennially cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? "I never read any magazines or watch TV," he said, perhaps a little hyperbolically. "Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that." He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because "I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere."
Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I'm reliably told, lies in "black-hole resorts," which charge high prices precisely because you can't get online in their rooms.
Has it really come to this?
In barely one generation we've moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them - often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.
Internet rescue camps in South Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen.
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***** Moderator's Note *****
The write goes on to say:
Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to disable (for up to eight hours) the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago.
... which seems to me to be a little bit extreme, when just unplugging a cable does the same thing.
I've been saying for a long time that the current overload of information has to stop: ever since the advent of commercial radio, fast-buck artists and hucksters and barkers and advertising executives have been thinking up New! Improved! ways of scaring the average housewife into buying things that would have been unthinkable without electronic media to promote them: everything from electrically melted chemical scents to vaginal deodorants is grist for the hype mill.
Of course, the depression helps: people are cutting back on all sorts of semi-important semi-priceless semi-desirable pieces of plastic, and in the process, they are flipping the mental switch that allows them to question why they once semi-thought they semi-needed them in the first place. When they see the blurry photograph of the three-toed boy, and the offer next to it that tells them they can see the real thing for another fifty cents, they realize that the only real decision was when they paid to come into the carnival in the first place.
Bill Horne Moderator