By Giordano Durante

Remember what it was like to sit down in a waiting room, a faulty fluorescent light flickering in an overhead panel, the smell of stale coffee, the ringing of an unattended phone on a desk? You’d wait there, potentially for a long stretch of empty time, and start talking to strangers, others who were as stuck and as desperate as you. A bond would form, for there was a sense of solidarity in this shared plight. Small talk about the weather, the length of the wait or politics could turn subversive as a ripple of revolt would spread, a murmur of protest against the delay and those responsible for it. Maybe, in these situations, new friendships were forged; perhaps even romantic relationships might flourish, sparked by a flirtatious exchange of looks.

Well, all that is over now. Pop into the Primary Care Centre on an average morning and most people will be entranced by their devices. They’ll be sending breathless voice notes to people across the Rock, doomscrolling the latest global conflict on X, or flicking through a timeline of reels showing different eyebrow blading techniques.

The serendipitous connection with strangers in public places is just one of the things that we’ve lost to the internet, according to Pamela Paul’s book 100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet. Although this book came out in 2021, and I’m only reviewing it now—or, more accurately, using it as a springboard for reflection—it’s still mightily relevant to our hyper-connected age, and many of its points will be applicable to the AI era we’re hurtling towards.

The book consists of 100 micro essays which cover everything from ‘Boredom’ to ‘Getting Lost’, from ‘The Phone Call’ to ‘Paperwork’ and from ‘Eye Contact’ to ‘A Parent’s Undivided Attention’.

This last one is a bugbear of mine. Paul, who is currently writer at large for The Wall Street Journal but was editor of The New York Times Book Review when she wrote this punchy book, calls the phenomenon of parents glued to their phones while at the park, or while strolling with their prams, a form of “neglectful phone parenting”. The effect of this is to “remove a parent from the immediacy and totality of the sounds and sights of the human being crawling in front of him”. She bewails the loss of the nonsensical babbling and pulling of funny faces which would, in pre-smartphone times, establish a tight union between parent and child. 

Another ‘lost’ phenomenon she examines is ‘Record Albums’: the devotion and care we displayed towards our collection of LPs, cassettes and CDs—how we would sit down and listen to a whole album from beginning to end, totally absorbed and without that hyperactive skipping between tracks and artists encouraged by streaming platforms.

Ultimately, we’re now in a position to see that when practically everything ever recorded or filmed is available at all times, things appear to lose their value. Why was Shaka Zulu the best thing in the world in Gibraltar in the late 1980s? Apart from the witch doctor’s disturbing dugs and the gory spear battles, it was the height of entertainment because it was the only thing being shown on TV; it was the only focus of our attention because it wasn’t in competition with an 80-episode series about young, hot doctors in a Boston hospital.

I’m no luddite or superior ascetic (I’m an inveterate doomscroller on the loo, first thing in the morning) and my job involves checking my phone for emails and messages throughout the day, but it’s undeniable that the screens have ruined us and our attention spans, that social media has polarised people and that the very texture of life in the digital age is different, more accelerated and less authentic.

Still, there are many benefits. I remember trudging to a travel agency in La Línea four or five times in 2000 just to book a simple trip to Prague involving return flights and a hotel. Of course, in those pre-internet days, there was no way to check where the hotel was, what it was like inside or whether there were any restaurants nearby. The result: we spent a week in a dull, communist-era block in the middle of nowhere, a rattly 20 minute tram ride away from the centre.

Paul accepts this—she’s not an uncompromising tech sceptic. She writes that, while the loss of some aspects of our pre-internet lives “sting”, others, like going from shop to shop hunting down one item, were undeniable “hassles”.

In her introduction, she says “nothing about progress is straightforward” and that any radical change will sweep away countless things that we will look back to with a pang of nostalgia. The trouble, of course, is that such losses take time to be felt—they’re not immediate. Remember that social media only became all-consuming once fast mobile data and smartphones were widely available—in 2008, when I reluctantly opened a Facebook account to share photos of a stag do with friends, I would only connect at home on my laptop.

One problem with this book is that many of Paul’s points require a more sustained treatment; many of her arguments need more support and some of the things she mentions (the Filofax, anyone?) might not strike all readers as obvious losses. In her defence, part of this is down to her chosen format of short, snappy essays; it’s hardly a form that lends itself to lengthy discussion. Perhaps the brevity of the argument is an admission of, and a concession to, our limited digital age attention spans.

Some reviewers note that Paul doesn’t make it clear that we are free to reject many of these digital encroachments. We could just say a firm “no” to scrolling mindlessly in waiting rooms, for example. In other words, the losses she discusses are not inevitable losses—they’re not necessarily imposed on us against our will and there is still time, and enough human gumption, to hold on to what we cherished about those misty pre-internet times.

Entertaining, quirky, and perceptive, this book prompts the thought that we should assess the impact and value of any new technology by asking whether it aligns with and furthers values that we already hold. With AI, another technological advance that will shape human thought and behaviour in ways we just cannot yet anticipate, one senses that Paul could also craft a similar list of what we will lose: critical thinking, jobs, writing skills, video editing, graphic design…

Perhaps she said it best in a Guardian interview following the book’s release where she said: “I will only adopt something if I really think it’s going to improve my life in some substantial way.”

That seems sensible to me.