The End of Absence:
Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection

By Michael Harris

Published by HarperCollins

243 pages, $29.99

Reviewed by JoAnn Dionne

I loved The End of Absence the moment I heard of it, sometime late last summer, through an email linking to the Can-Lit website 49th Shelf.com. As the non-owner of a smartphone, as a person who dearly misses her pre-Internet brain, I felt like this book had been written just for me.

And what a relief to learn that someone, namely 30-something author Michael Harris, eleven years my junior, thought the same way I did about our tech-saturated world. It made me feel less alone, less an old fuddy-duddy, less a Luddite. Indeed, it seems Harris did write this book for people like me, those of us born prior to 1985, who knew life as adults before and after the rise of the Internet. The “straddle generation,” as he calls us. The last of the daydreamers.

We are, as Harris points out, witnessing a unique moment in history. Soon, there will be no living memory of a time without the Internet. In the first half of his book, Harris reminds us that for everything we’ve gained from the Internet, something has been lost. And what we’ve lost most is absence. Remember when, he asks, we used to read books on grassy hillsides then gaze up at shifting clouds? Remember when we could hike for weeks in England and no one knew where we were? Remember when we poured our souls into private diaries and not into video confessionals on YouTube? Remember when we could savour a moment without tweeting it? Remember when we used to remember? When we used to forget?

Harris tries to break away from the on-line world in the second half of his book, to find some of this absence lost. To retrain his attention span, he sets himself the task of reading War and Peace in two weeks. I laughed out loud at spots in this chapter, and again in the chapter where, after duct-taping his cell phone to an old phone cord and duct-taping the cord to his kitchen counter, Harris embarks on an “Analog August,” a month of no-Internet-anything. At the end of both exercises, Harris feels calmer, more awake—and more acutely aware of just how “irrevocably, damnably, utterly wired to the promise of connection” he is. We all are.

My inner-Luddite was hoping for a call to arms by the book’s end, a mass rejection of all things on-line. But no. Harris’s advice is more sage, more practical than that. Technology is here to stay, he reminds us. Our job is to live intelligently with it. We must be mindful of the absences we’ve lost, and choose, daily, when and how to connect. Perhaps, then, this book wasn’t written for people like me, but rather for “digital natives,” those born post-1985, who will never know life without constant connection, who will never truly understand absence, and may never realize they have a choice.

JoAnn Dionne is the author of Little Emperors:  A Year with the Future of China, and teaches at the University of Victoria.