 So, for anyone who isn't familiar, can you tell us a little bit about this radical experiment that you did? Yeah, I can, because I actually have a lot in common with Dave. I may not seem like that at the outset, but I too have been running a series of brain experiments on myself in the form of three teenagers. And when we undertook our experiment in disconnecting, they were 14, 16, and 18. So the prime years of hyperconnectivity. And it wasn't just my kids who had the moral equivalent, you might say, of electrodes attached to their brains. But I too had gone that way with a vengeance. I was very happily involved in a love affair, I guess you would say, with my iPhone. We were kind of living in each other's pockets. I had a nickname for her, bought her outfits, jewelry, sneaker into intimate places. Since writing the book, I thought I was outing myself by saying, I slept with my iPhone, I brought my iPhone into the bathroom, I bought it jewelry, and the dominant response has been, you too? So clearly I'm not unusual in this way. But the fact that we were spending so much time as a family, within the confines of our home, interacting constantly connected with our screens, but it's been noted before this great paradox that the more connected we become at one level, at another level we seem to be very disconnected. And I felt that when things had gotten to the stage, we're making eye contact with my kids was kind of an event, where the basic view that I had of them was either that, the back of their heads or there, the hairline, because they were bent over a screen, that maybe something should give. And yeah, it was a fantasy, it was kind of like, do you guys have kids? Does anybody here have teenagers? So you know what I'm talking about, you have fantasized I'm sure about ripping the modem out of the wall, and maybe you've even done it from time to time, and then like I had done, and then about 10 minutes later you think, oh yeah, but I've got to check my email. So you plug it back in again. So it started as a fantasy, and then I think it was rereading Thoreau's Walden, which I do every year, it's kind of like getting a pap smear for me, that it's part of my spiritual hygiene, if you will. And this year, when everybody was sort of suctioned onto Facebook and Myspace, which was still very big at the time, it had new resonance for me, because you probably know the story of Walden, where Thoreau takes himself off to a cabin in the woods, which he builds with his own hands. So and it's a retreat that lasts for two years, away from the civilization of his day in the mid-19th century. But what struck me in this reading of it was that he wasn't really running away from anything. He was trying to run towards something, that he was wanting to connect more directly and more fully and more authentically with real life, with RL, as he understood it. And that had a great deal of appeal to me, because the idea, you know, I love technology, I love living in the 21st century, I don't actually want to be living at a time when, you know, the post office is cutting edge. Thoreau was skeptical about the post office. He thought it would lead to all kinds of decadent behavior. So that appealed to me, and it occurred to me that I could recreate kind of a Walden in our home, simply by disconnecting us from our technology. We didn't have to go anywhere. We just had to go, yeah. That's super interesting. So you talk in your book about boredom, like the challenge of boredom, and there was a session earlier today on youth culture about boredom. So how did you address that, and did it really end up being a problem? Well, boredom was like so much at the center of the entire experiment. It was very much in a way the impetus for it, because there was the Walden connection, but really the proximate cause, the straw that broke the camel's back was this conversation I had with my son, who was a very addicted gamer, a very dedicated gamer, shall we say. And I came home from work one day, and my kids were in front of their screens as always, and Bill was, you know, his dwarf was hitting somebody over the head with a mace, and so it was all normal. And when I greeted them, nobody turned around, nobody said anything, and I kind of, as a rhetorical question, I just kind of burst out with, oh my, you know, what would our lives be like without all this shit? What would our lives be like? And my son did not pause with his joystick. He just said, our lives would be boring, that's what. And I found that rather disturbing, and so I engaged him and said, well, you know, what are you saying, Bill? Are you saying that up until the invention of World of Warcraft, you know, that everybody was bored all the time? And he went back to playing, and about two seconds later he said, they must have been, because that's why they invented the computer. But that really got me thinking, and I thought, you know, that is a smarter answer than you know, because think about what you're saying, that if nobody was ever bored, then maybe nobody would ever innovate, then maybe nobody would ever create. Maybe that state of discomfort and friction that you're calling boredom, and that I might just call having some headspace for a change, you know, maybe that's important. So then I went off on this big tangent as I do as a parent, which is very tiresome. So Bill already was not listening to me, and I would say, in fact, you know what, boredom didn't even exist before the 18th century. I was just making this up, just freestyling. It was totally a product of print culture. It's a product of the middle class and affluence and, you know, without time on your hands, how could you, and it's a matter of choice. And as I say, he was already bored with the conversation, but I was on fire. And so what did I do? I ran to my computer and started Googling, you know, the intellectual history of boredom and found that my hunches were actually, you know, there was quite a bit of support there in the literature. And so I decided that it would be imperative that we had to, we had to forge into this new frontier and figure out what it was like to experience boredom, that it was something that was totally lacking from our lives. Not that we were, you know, not that we were so engaged with life, I mean, far from it, but we were all kind of hooked into this almost like an IV drip, an intravenous drip of information and entertainment that was just keeping our nose above the water of boredom and not letting us sink down. And I was terribly interested in getting the waters to close over our heads and just to see what happened. And so you ended up, I assume, finding better things to do than being bored and finding interesting offline activities. But I'm kind of wondering what skills you learned during that period that you brought into your life now that the experiment is over. Okay. Well, yeah, we're skipping over all the good parts. Oh, really? We kind of are because, yeah, it was like, it sort of turned out to be true that you needed to be bored out of your skull in order to impel you to go further, you know, to push yourself. And you know, just to talk about my son for a second, like he lasted, I think, the first day, I actually, for two weeks, we shut off all electricity and all power in the house entirely, which I thought was going to be fun because I was pretty sure we had a gas hot water system, but it turned out it had an electrical spark. So, you know, yeah, even I was a little bit uncomfortable with that. But anyway, we forged ahead. And on the first morning, my son lasted maybe 12, 13 minutes before coming into my bedroom and saying, I'm bored, you know, there's nothing to do. And I said, well, you know, what have you done so far? You've been up for, you know, 14 minutes. Well, you know, I'm rereading Harry Potter. Of course, he hadn't read any books that weren't Harry Potter for, you know, for many years. And what he ended up doing in the day is subsequent. He kind of excavated his toy cupboard. He went back. He almost like he did regress in time. So the next day I went in, he was sitting on the floor playing with Lego. And he looked, he was having a really good time. And, you know, the next day I went in early in the morning and he was making shadow puppets on the wall, he was kind of creating his own screen, if you will. And then, you know, he borrowed in a little bit deeper and found this saxophone. That's actually the good people at Volante. My wonderful Swedish publishers have actually included a little saxophone on the cover of this book in honor of my son's rediscovery of this, you know, of this activity that he completely put away. He picked up the saxophone, which he hadn't had in his hands for probably two years. He did it out of sheer and utter boredom because there was literally nothing else to do. He'd done the Lego, he'd done Harry Potter, he'd done the things. And it was a very fortunate moment that he was driven to such desperation because within a few weeks he was playing saxophone probably for four or five hours a day. That is to say, as much time as he had been spending on the gaming, he still could play, which astounded him. I was pretty shocked. That ended up changing his peer group, it ended up changing his head entirely. And the worst moment for me in the experiment in the six months was also the best moment for me. And it was the point at around three months in when my son said, you know, put down his instrument for once. I mean, it was driving us crazy. There were bad things that happened, really. There were very bad things. This was one of them. I drove the girls insane, but he said, you know, how good would I be now if I could have all those hours back that I spent, you know, like shooting people? How good would I be? And it was, indeed, like a dagger to my heart, but it was as a parent, I thought, ah-ha. But then I thought, well, you know, okay, so better late than never, I guess. So that, you know, we each had our own story very, very different, each child and the family and myself in coping with our boredom. My youngest child coped with it by sleeping. She slept virtually round the clock for six weeks. Well, her first reaction was to move to her dad's, I have to say. She was like, you know, I haven't really seen enough of dad and his internet connection, you know. So I think I might move in with him for a while. And then when she came back, she would come home from school and she'd be like, oh my God, you know what, there's nothing, it's so boring around here. It is so freaking boring. And she would fall on her bed, you know, like a tree, you know, like face first with her school uniform on and everything and sleep until dinner and then get up and have dinner. And then, you know, she'd use the landline, we did have a landline, so she became like one of those kids out of the 1960s, you know, bye-bye birdie, going steady, going steady. Ran up a thousand dollar phone bill one month, that was an unpleasant surprise. But one day after about six weeks, she woke up on a Saturday morning and this is a 14-year-old for those of you who have kids in this age range at nine o'clock. And she came in, she was actually panicked. She came into the kitchen and was like, random, what's wrong with me? I just, why did I wake up? Who wakes up at nine o'clock? What is this? And I said, you know, do you feel okay? And she said, yeah, I feel good. I, you know, said, are you tired? No. It was probably the first time she hadn't been tired in two years, plus. And so her story of the experiment and the boredom, the boredom, was all about repaying a massive sleep debt, like a sleep debt that makes, you know, the debt ceiling in the U.S. look like nothing at this point. And that response to boredom really was almost like her getting a personality transplant. And it was something that I really hadn't taken account of at all, the fact that she was like most teenagers, you know, 24-7 to them really means 24-7. I mean, it really does, text messages coming all through the night and you answer them, you go back to sleep, you Facebook, you go back to sleep. My daughter, this same daughter who is now 16, had a sleep over the other day, just briefly, she's back online with her best friend. And they went in to check on them. They'd fall into sleep side by side with their iPhones, in their hands, like transitional objects, you know, like teddy bears. And the next day I checked her Facebook page and her girlfriend had actually posted to Susie's wall, you're sleeping on my side of the bed, move over. So, but anyway, so have we made any progress perhaps you're asking yourself? Yeah. I don't know. There's loads of time. So, what I want to get to is what can we take away from this experiment? How can we change our default settings away from being constantly connected to, you know, if not taking six months and doing a radical experiment, bringing some sort of technology fast or some sort of consciousness at least into our use of technology? Well, I do, as I said before, I do love technology. I am no Luddite. I'm not interested in living the rest of my life without technology and I'm not an evangelist for that way of life. But I guess I am an evangelist for an ecological kind of perspective, a perspective that takes balance into account. And I felt that our lives, certainly as a family, were very much out of balance and this was my really last ditch attempt to restore it. If I had been better at living a balanced life with regard to the way we use media, I wouldn't have had to do something so drastic as pull the plug for six months. And it can be a lot easier as you know when you've tried to give up something you love to go cold turkey than, you know, to manage it and be more moderate. But I think for me the guiding principle and what we have taken away from it and really what inspired it to begin with was the notion of living deliberately, making conscious and active choices about how we use technology, which involves the acknowledgment that, you know, we love to say that our media are simply tools and there's something really wrong with that statement and probably it's the word simply because it suggests that tools do not exert imperatives of their own, that they are wholly within our control, that the relationship that we have with tools is one way. In fact always, any kind of technology or tool you want to mention, there's always an interactive quality to it and therefore you always have to be watchful. You always have to ask yourself the questions, how is my tool shaping me in its image? I mean the old aphorism, which I love to quote, to a man with a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. You know, to a girl with a Facebook page, the whole world looks like... A post. A post. A photo op. Yeah. Totally. So I think the notion of living deliberately and making conscious choices, it's a very simple message, but it's something that we haven't really been that good at doing in this first flush of the information explosion that we're all living through, getting some distance because it's all happening like this for us. You know, this is an historical fact. We're living at a time of enormous change and enormous excitement and euphoria and we've made a rush for it and that's totally understandable. But I think, you know, the next phase of becoming, you know, responsible cyber-citizens is to achieve a critical distance and not get swept away by the tidal wave. I think that's a pretty awesome place to stop and go have a beer. Everybody, if you haven't noticed, Susan is hilarious. Her book is hilarious. It was just released in Swedish. And it's for sale and apparently you can buy it on iSettle from Simon, Susan's publisher, who is here in the audience. And with cash. Yes. Good old fashioned cash. So thank you so much, everyone, and I hope you enjoy your evenings. Thank you. Thanks, Megan.