This past weekend I came across Michael Harris’s The End of Absence.  It’s an interesting read, often summing up and building off of the thoughts of other books I’ve read about technology and culture over the last couple of years.  What makes Harris’s take different is his challenge to those of us who have lived on both sides of the internet’s existence, what we do with the lack of “lack” in an internet-driven world (because we are all on all the time).  His question and comment:

. . . if we work hard enough to understand this massive game changer, and then name the parts of the new game we want to go along with and the parts we don’t, can we then pack along some critical aspect of our earlier lives that those technologies would otherwise strip from us? . . . If we’re the last people in history to know life before the internet, we are also the only ones who will ever speak, as it were, both languages.

Here’s a short video of Harris from The Rotman School about “engineering absence.”  Some interesting thoughts, for sure.