By William Powers, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, April 11, 2008

Is life in this brave new media age making us very, very happy or terribly sad?

	Digital overload isn't making us happier or more productive.

For a long time, the answer seemed clear: Happy! Remember the hope and euphoria of the early digital years, back in the '90s? Soon news and other useful information would be streaming at us around the clock on beautiful little screens. Everything you need and everyone you know would be a few clicks away. Goodbye, cubicles and long commutes; hello, home office and the pajama lifestyle.

Technology was going to solve all of our problems. Life was about to become easier and a lot more fun.

Well, here we are. It didn't quite pan out, did it? And now the backlash has begun. The very technologies that were supposed to make us happy are reportedly making us miserable. Giddy has given way to gloomy.

Item: Earlier this week, The New York Times reported in a front-page story that blogging is killing people. Under the headline "In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop," the piece explained that today's work-at-home bloggers are like 19th-century garment workers, driving themselves to exhaustion for little pay. "A growing workforce of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment."

In some cases, they're even dying. Since December, The Times reported with dark foreboding, three prominent bloggers have had heart attacks, two of them fatal.

Item: Research in Motion, which makes the BlackBerry, recently reported a blowout first quarter, selling 2.2 million of its wildly popular PDA's in just three months. In the old days, this news would have brought hosannas. E-mail is bringing the world together-hooray! But today the ubiquitous PDA is increasingly seen as a social and cultural problem. Even as the sales numbers were making news, Forbes.com posted a story headlined "Are You Addicted to Your BlackBerry?" It cited research showing that the information overload created by the "Crackberry" and other devices can lower IQ, hurt productivity, and kill the libido. "Always checking e-mail and too weary for sex?" asked Forbes.

The problem with the digital backlash is that it's as simple-minded as the rapture that preceded it. A lot of bloggers rightly jumped on The Times for creating another pseudo-trend. Think about it: Out of millions of bloggers, three recently had heart attacks. That's awfully thin evidence for the case that blogging kills. Or as Wall Street Journal health blogger Scott Hensley nicely put it in a post about the Times story, "The plural of anecdote is not data."

The Forbes story hit on something far more real, but to treat digital mania as another trendy addiction with a cute name -- Crackberry -- is to underplay its cultural and social significance.

As we spend a larger and larger portion of each day staring at screens, we are effectively redefining our priorities and thus our lives. And the question remains: Will it make us happy?

This answer is hugely important. If we knew it, we would be able to figure out the best ways to deploy and live with these fantastic technologies, so that they enhanced, rather than diminished, the quality of our lives.

This knowledge isn't going to come from shocking newspaper anecdotes or fashionable buzzwords. It's more likely to come from social scientists. Forbes cited some scholarly work, but there's much more to be done.

Measuring what makes us happy isn't easy. There are a panoply of methods, ranging from the old-fashioned interview to the latest brain-imaging techniques borrowed from neuroscience. The products of these efforts are on prominent display in bookstores, where "happiness studies" are all the rage. But so far nobody has broken the code.

As the scare stories suggest, there's a sense that we're on a bad hamster wheel and don't know how to get off. A friend of mine calls his own Internet habit "pernicious," yet he can't wean himself away. There's a tendency to blame the technology, a la the dying bloggers. But that's too easy. Perhaps the fault is not in our screens but in ourselves.

-- William Powers is a columnist for National Journal magazine, where "Off Message" appears. His e-mail address is bpowers@nationaljournal.com.

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