100 Things We've Lost to the Internet

by Pamela Paul Narrated by Lisa Flanagan

Overview

The acclaimed editor of The New York Times Book Review takes readers on a nostalgic tour of the pre-Internet age, offering powerful insights into both the profound and the seemingly trivial things we've lost.

Remember all those ingrained habits, cherished ideas, beloved objects, and stubborn preferences from the pre-Internet age? They're gone.

To some of those things we can say good riddance. But many we miss terribly. Whatever our emotional response to this departed realm, we are faced with the fact that nearly every aspect of modern life now takes place in filtered, isolated corners of cyberspace-a space that has slowly subsumed our physical habitats, replacing or transforming the office, our local library, a favorite bar, the movie theater, and the coffee shop where people met one another's gaze from across the room. Even as we've gained the ability to gather without leaving our house, many of the fundamentally human experiences that have sustained us have disappeared.

In one hundred glimpses of that pre-Internet world, Pamela Paul, editor of The New York Times Book Review, presents a captivating record of the world before cyberspace-from voicemails to blind dates to punctuation to civility. There are the small losses: postcards, the blessings of an adolescence largely spared of documentation, the Rolodex, and the genuine surprises at high school reunions. But there are larger repercussions, too: weaker memories, the inability to entertain oneself, and the utter demolition of privacy.

100 Things We've Lost to the Internet is at once an evocative swan song for a disappearing era and, perhaps, a guide to reclaiming just a little bit more of the world IRL.

Editorial Reviews

OCTOBER 2021 - AudioFile

Narrator Lisa Flanagan has a wonderful vocal personality—lithe with a broad palette of pitch patterns and a range of believable emotional tones. Her friendly voice works well with this lighthearted overview of how dramatically the Internet has changed the world in the past 30 years. Though being digitally connected has improved life in many ways, the author says we’ve lost many of the interpersonal experiences that used to sustain us. We have less privacy, don’t need all those reference books, and have largely forgotten how to have vocal conversations with other people. The audiobook is entertaining nostalgia for anyone who feels incompetent navigating the World Wide Web, and a soothing reminder that those of us who miss the simplicity of the pre-Internet era are not alone. T.W. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

08/02/2021

The dislocations of the internet era get the listicle treatment in this charming if superficial survey. New York Times Book Review editor Paul (Rectangle Time) inventories “the things we achingly miss, the things we hardly knew existed, the things to which we can give a hard adios,” including such behaviors as ignoring people (“It was useful to pretend to have no idea someone was trying to reach you”) and “being in the moment” during a concert or other large gathering, rather than gazing at one’s phone; qualities including patience and civility; and physical items like kitchen phones and checkbooks. “Every time the Internet swings the door wide open,” Paul contends, “the consequences are at once liberating and dire.” Previously, everyday life was “unimpeded by what was going on in other people’s heads”; now, however, “the input never stops.” While Paul occasionally brings in statistics and expert analysis, her rants are generally an accomplished solo act, enriched by her self-deprecating sense of humor (she describes her book as “grumpy old-man thoughts and wary skepticism, lashed through with a contrary streak of optimism”). Readers who remember the dawning of the internet era will find plenty to commiserate with in this mostly lighthearted lament. Illus. (Oct.)

From the Publisher

[A] rare feat of exploring what technology has done to us without succumbing to doom and panic . . . Poignant, thought-provoking.”—The Guardian

“An accomplished solo act . . . Readers who remember the dawning of the internet era will find plenty to commiserate with in this mostly lighthearted lament.”—Publishers Weekly

OCTOBER 2021 - AudioFile

Narrator Lisa Flanagan has a wonderful vocal personality—lithe with a broad palette of pitch patterns and a range of believable emotional tones. Her friendly voice works well with this lighthearted overview of how dramatically the Internet has changed the world in the past 30 years. Though being digitally connected has improved life in many ways, the author says we’ve lost many of the interpersonal experiences that used to sustain us. We have less privacy, don’t need all those reference books, and have largely forgotten how to have vocal conversations with other people. The audiobook is entertaining nostalgia for anyone who feels incompetent navigating the World Wide Web, and a soothing reminder that those of us who miss the simplicity of the pre-Internet era are not alone. T.W. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2021-08-25
The editor of the New York Times Book Review offers dismayed lamentations on all that is being lost to the internet.

In her latest, Paul analyzes the implications of the internet age, deploying “my grumpy-old-man thoughts and wary skepticism, lashed through with a contrary streak of optimism, accumulated over years of observing the cul­ture and covering its manifestations and effects.” She acknowledges the putative treasures and tools of the internet, but she reminds readers that for every gain, there is a loss—e.g., privacy, civility, or myriad products, services, and practices we may have thought to be timeless. To many, writes the author, we can say good riddance or a fond farewell, though she aches for the loss of others. From handwritten letters to quiet, unoccupied moments, cursive writing to vacations without work (or email), school librarians to newspapers, LPs to mixtapes to the notion of “closure”—so much we thought eternal is quaintly antiquarian or gone forever. As Paul engagingly shows, their replacements aren’t always an advance. Yet one thing Paul neglects to address, save by implication, is the power of “no.” We are not forced in every case to accede to fashion, to all of modern technology’s demands, or to the dictates of contemporary sensibilities. Paul is incisive when she gets serious, as in her regrets on the decline of reading (especially of books), diminishing opportunities for solitude, and our eroding capacity for empathy. But some of her death knells are premature, a stretch, too sweeping, or off-base, while others come off as overly tongue-in-cheek. It’s understandable that Paul writes as if Gen X reality (and that of their children) is a dominant force. Still, there are plenty of people pushing back against the tide in meaningful ways. The author should know there are also 100 ways to resist digital dominance as well.

A mixed-bag cultural assessment of the internet landscape.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172875823
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	10/26/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Boredom

Remember boredom? The way it would hang over you when you were stuck in traffic and there was nothing decent on the radio and time dripped by? You’d be trapped in line at the supermarket, your eyes glazed after having read each headline on every tabloid wilting by the Doublemint gum, twice. You’d be waiting for your roommate to show up for dinner, having plotted your meal from hors d’oeuvres to dessert twenty minutes ago, or languishing at the doctor’s office with nothing but mottled old copies of Reader’s Digest on offer. Boredom was available just about everywhere. Nothing to do, nothing to divert or distract you during what should have been precious free moments amid the frantic hours of so much else to get done. You realize you could have brought a book, and why the hell didn’t you?

But we have solved this because there is no more boredom. There are no empty moments and the mere thought of it—and who has time to think about it?—seems absurd. Not so long ago, Motorola coined the term “micro-boredom” to describe those scattered, small moments that might bedevil us but could be solved in an instant by the smartphone—no sooner was the term coined than the problem was eliminated. The slightest void can be filled with a thumb to the screen: apps, clips, posts, links, the next bout of unfettered binge-watching all at the ready. Any number of friends, acquaintances, colleagues, Facebook “friends,” Words with Friends players, or chat group participants is on your wrist or in your pocket, set to engage. 

A novelist acquaintance told me how chagrined she was by her capacity to procrastinate online in lieu of working on her next book. (Join us, do.) After spending an entire afternoon on Instagram, to the point where she’d seen every last post on her timeline, she was gripped by the sudden fear that one day she’d arrive at a point where there was nothing more to see. The message on her phone would simply say, “That’s it. You’re done. You’ve reached the end of the Internet.” I mentioned this to one of my children and he said, “That joke is everywhere.”

Kids grow up with an ever-present escape valve, like a built-in ejector seat from any unwanted situation. They never really have to be there if they don’t want to be, and neither do the adults. The second most common reason people use Facebook, by their own admission, is to alleviate boredom. My husband’s standard line when I ask him what he thought of a particular lecture or show has been to say derisively when it had zero interest for him, “I went to SeaWorld,” but now he or anyone else can actually—rather than metaphorically—go to SeaWorld, or at least some live-cam simulacrum, at any time. Tuning out no longer means spacing out; it means tuning in to something else.

People used to accept that much of life was boring. The word “boredom” didn’t even emerge until the mid-nineteenth century, in part because it was nothing to be remarked upon. Life was boredom and boredom was life, whether it descended in the wheat field or at the spinning wheel. Memoirs of pre-twenty-first-century existence are rife with long stretches of tedium, no matter how much money you had to fritter away. When not idling in drawing rooms, the leisure class took aimless walks down empty footpaths and gazed at trees. They went motoring and gazed at more trees. Those who had to work for a living had it harder. Agricultural and industrial and office jobs were often mind-numbing; few people were looking to be fulfilled or engaged by paid labor. Children got used to the idea from an early age, left unattended with nothing to distract them other than maybe a bookshelf or tree branch.

Only a few short decades ago, during the lost age of underparenting, grown-ups thought a certain amount of boredom was appropriate, even to be encouraged, because it forced kids to exercise their imagination and ingenuity. A little ennui would make a person less bored in the long run.

Nowadays, subjecting a child to inactivity is seen as a gross dereliction of parental duty; thus, the proliferation of extracurricular, after-school, on-top-of-everything-else opportunities and efforts to engage. But when not being überparented and micromanaged, kids are left to their own devices—
their own digital devices, that is. Parents preparing for a long car ride or airplane trip are like army officers plotting a complicated land maneuver. Which movies to load onto the iPad? Should we start a new family-friendly podcast? Is this an okay time to let the kids play Fortnite until their brains melt into the back seat?

What did parents in the seventies do when kids were bored in the back? Nothing! They let them suck in gas fumes. Torture their siblings. And since it wasn’t actually used for wearing, play with the seatbelt. If at any point you complained about being bored at home, you were really asking for it. “Go outside,” your parents would roar, or worse, “Clean your room.”

But it was only while lolling around the basement or backyard that you’d settle into the anesthetizing effects of boredom, and with that monotony, your brain would kick into action, attempting to compensate. You might notice the world around you, both the minute and the grand, at its natural pace, letting go of the need to relentlessly move on to the next new thing. Small observations would begin to emerge and coalesce into ideas. There’s a reason people have their most exciting and original thoughts in the shower. Our minds start to wander and we follow. You have to turn off the input in order to generate output. But the input never stops.

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