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us. What these broad findings don’t tell us is how to change it.
    Studies and surveys reflect what’s generally true, i.e., true for most people in a given population. These general truths are supposed to help us answer the questions we have about our own particular lives. In short, they look to the crowd for understanding. On some subjects, the crowd really does have the answers. In politics, for instance, elections are decided by how most people vote. That is why, in the weeks leading up to a big election, polling data are genuinely interesting and useful. To the extent that studies shed new light on some specific aspect of how we are living with technology, they can be illuminating; I cite some such studies in this book. However, on the question of how to respond to the challenge of screens and their growing power over us, there is no reason to believe that what most people do and say will tell us anything useful at all. To the contrary, with screens the problem is the crowd itself and why we’re drawn to it so powerfully. It’s like asking a chocolate layer cake to help you think about your overeating.
    Ultimately, human experience is not about what happens to most people, it’s about what happens to each of us, hour by hour and moment by moment. Rather than using the general as a route to the particular, sometimes we need to take exactly the opposite approach. This is especially true when the question is the quality of our lives. In recent years, there’s been a tremendous fascination with crowd thinking and behavior. The digital crowd not only has power, we’re told, it also has wisdom.
    Watching the crowd can certainly tell you which way popular tastes are heading and who’s buying which products at any given moment. This isn’t wisdom at all, however, but what’scommonly known as “smarts,” that canny ability to read the landscape that serves one well in stock picking, gambling, and other short-term pursuits. Every crowd is just a collection of individual selves, and to understand what’s happening to those selves right now, we all have instant, no-password access to the most reliable source of all. Our own lives can teach us things that no data set ever can, if we’d just pay attention to them.
    To help you think about your own connected life, I’m going to begin with two stories from mine. The first is about the urge to connect to others through screens—where does it come from, and why is it so urgent? The second is about the opposite impulse, the desire to disconnect. My experiences won’t be exactly like yours. I offer these stories as illustrations of the conflicting drives so many of us are feeling lately, in our own particular ways. What we haven’t figured out is how to reconcile these drives or whether they even can be reconciled. It’s the conundrum at the heart of the digital age, and in order to solve it, we first need to see it up close, in the granular details of the everyday.

Chapter Two
HELLO, MOTHER
    The Magic of Screens
    I ’m in my car driving to my mother’s house. She lives about two hours from me and close to one of those small-city airports where it’s easy to park out front, the lines are short, and the security people are friendly. When I travel for work, I try to book my flights out of that airport and I get to visit my mother on both ends of the trip. This time I’m catching an evening flight, and she’s cooking dinner.
    As usual, I got a late start and won’t be arriving anywhere near the time she’s expecting me, so I need to call her to say I’ll be late. I wait for a stretch of empty highway where it feels safe to look away for a few seconds. I open my mobile phone and hit the 4 key, which is programmed with her home number. * A photo of my mother appears on the screen, a head-and-shoulders shot that I took months ago with the phone’s camera. I later selected it as her ID