Cannot imagine the harsh and silent world I'm describing

From Don't Pick Up: Why kids need to separate from their parents by Terry Castle. Interesting. Supports the idea of the importance of boredom as a source of variation in epistemological terms.

Finally, one student—a delightful young woman whom I know to be smart and levelheaded—confesses that she talks to her mother on the cellphone at least five, maybe six, even seven times a day: We're like best friends, so I call her whenever I get out of class. She wants to know about my professors, what was the exam, so I tell her what's going on and give her, you know, updates. Sometimes my grandmother's there, and I talk to her too.

I'm stunned; I'm aghast; I'm going gaga. I must look fairly stricken too—Elektra keening over the corpse of Agamemnon—because now the whole class starts laughing at me, their strange unfathomable lady-professor, the one who doesn't own a television and obviously doesn't have any kids of her own. What a freak. "But when I was in school," I manage finally to gasp, "All we wanted to do was get away from our parents!" "We never called our parents!" "We despised our parents!" "In fact," I splutter—and this is the showstopper—"we only had one telephone in our whole dorm—in the hallway—for 50 people! If your parents called, you'd yell from your room, Tell them I'm not here!"

After this last outburst, the students too look aghast. Not to mention morally discomfited. No; these happy, busy, optimistic Stanford undergrads, so beautiful and good in their unisex T-shirts, hoodies, and J.Crew shorts; so smart, scrupulous, forward-looking, well-meaning, well-behaved, and utterly presentable—just the best and the nicest, really—simply cannot imagine the harsh and silent world I'm describing.

The idea of constant engagement is intriguing but are people simply finding an alternate way of dealing with Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus. We have a couple of thousand hours a year beyond that time necessary for work, and purposeful activities such as eating, commuting, etc. For the past few decades much of that cognitive surplus has been invested by most people in dis-engagment activities - principally TV. Neil Postman was raising the alarms on this back in 1985 in his classic, Amusing Ourselves to Death.

With always connected/always on devices, is some of that cognitive surplus being redirected towards virtual social engagement? Staying in touch with friends and family instead of watching TV?

Shirky characterizes pervasive societal non-productive habits as coping mechanisms. The mass movement of people from the countryside to the burgeoning but unhealthy city of London in the eighteenth century boosted national and individual productivity but was also hugely stressful. With access to cheap gin, he describes a city on a permanent bender as people escaped into a gin fog as a means of handling the stress of unfamiliar city living. In the 20th century, many would ascribe a similar mass escape into the flickering world of TV as a similar coping mechanism.

Perhaps there is a cycle here. Posit that there is always a cognitive surplus of a couple of thousand hours. Ideally people use that cognitive surplus for productive purposes. Realistically most people use it for coping purposes. What we might be seeing is a slow reduction in the destructiveness of coping mechanisms. From violence to alcoholic indulgence to drug indulgence to TV to mindless chattering. If true, that is actually beneficial.

But it doesn't address the real conundrum. Why don't people use their full capacity to improve their lives and the lives of others. Why drink, do drugs, lose one self in vacuous shows and constantly check one's friend's status? Maybe coping is just a permanent condition in an evolving environment and such activities are necessary just as is sleep after a rigorous day.