Howard Axelrod

Looking back over the past generation you could easily be tempted to describe its entirety in a single word: progress. Time progressed, technology progressed, and society progressed right alongside, but author Howard Axelrod asks in his new book, "The Stars in Our Pockets: Getting Lost and Sometimes Found in the Digital Age", has our humanity and our empathy gone the other way?

Axelrod returned from a two-year escape into the Vermont wilderness to find a society eagerly rushing into online communities in an effort to be more connected, all while not looking up from their phones at the people sitting across the dinner table. He warns that in a world of instantaneous answers we are forgetting how to ask the right questions.

"The Stars in Our Pockets" builds an elegant window for us to look through and see what we are in danger of becoming. Our social structure is becoming increasingly frayed and “growing up” no longer holds the same meaning as “evolving” or even “learning”. At a time when all information is literally at our fingertips, the internet and those who profit from it are building stronger, and more invisible, echo chambers for us to live in.

Part memoir, part treatise, Axelrod reminds us of all the things we stand to lose if we continue to head in this direction. Without the silence of being truly disconnected from the constant beeps, chirps, and ever-changing vibrations in your pockets clamoring for our attention, we lack the ability to think deeply on any one thing. Our attention span retreats and dissolves until it is no longer a span of time, but instead a mere moment.

While admitting his escape into the woods more than a touch Thoreau, he doesn’t shout from his soapbox for everyone to unplug and immigrate out of cyberspace for good. There are incredibly positive attributes to the technology powering our future if we only take the time to see them and properly evangelize them. Towards the end of the book he even lays out a very reasonable and achievable blueprint for creating a new digital platform centered around voter education and participation.

"The Stars in Our Pockets: Getting Lost and Sometimes Found in the Digital Age" plays a dual role as map to the past and blueprint of our future. It will serve those well who put down their phone long enough to read it.… (meer)