- It's not much of an exaggeration to say the internet changed all of us and everything around us.

Today's guest chronicles the things we've lost in the process, the charm that comes with some uncertainty, and the romance of the time before the internet.

She's Pamela Paul, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(melodious music) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square", where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University, - And I'm G. Wayne Miller with "The Providence Journal".

- This week, we're joined by Pamela Paul, the editor of "The New York Times Book Review", whose latest book is "100 Things We've Lost to the Internet", a sometimes humorous, provocative, and thoughtful look at the world before everything was connected.

Pamela, thank you so much for being with us.

- Very happy to be here, thanks.

- So let's get right into the book.

As I mentioned, this is funny, it's thought-provoking, I found it at some times romantic.

I don't know if that's the right word.

What inspired you to write the book?

- Well, I think the fact that everything that I do, like probably everything everyone else does from the moment I wake up until the moment I try to go to sleep at the end of the day has become infused with the internet.

And it's really hard when you're just trying to keep on top of all that stuff from the moment you're woken up by your phone alarm, to the moment you desperately try to get to sleep, despite needing to check one more email and getting a notification and 10 things waiting to be done right next to you.

The internet has permeated our daily lives and we're so used to thinking in a constant fast-forward, like, what does this mean for tomorrow?

What does this mean for the next five minutes?

What does this mean for our future?

And also to thinking about really big things, like, what does this mean for democracy?

What does this mean for privacy?

And I thought let's pause for a minute, let's think about what it means for us as individuals.

What does it mean in our daily lives?

And what on earth did we used to do before all of this?

How did we get to where we wanted to go?

What did we do when we were late?

How did we let someone know?

How did we let our kids know that no-one would be home when they got home from school?

There are all these things that we have kind of forgotten about.

So I wanted to not just get us out of fast-forward, but hit pause and rewind a little bit and look at the before-times.

- I mentioned nostalgia.

I found myself, as I was reading this, thinking about what were the things that would be on my list of the 100 things that I particularly miss.

And one of the things that I really hearkened back to is I can get a hold of my kids now any time on my phone.

When I was a kid, my dad had the loudest whistle in the neighborhood and he'd go to the front door, and when it was time for us to come home for dinner, he'd whistle and we'd go running.

And I don't know if it's nostalgia or if it's, if there's something more human about that interaction than just being able to instantly contact somebody via phone.

How cognizant were you of nostalgia in writing this?

- Oh, it doesn't, I'm infused with nostalgia!

I mean, I think about it all the time.

There are all these little things, like, I'll give you one example with my kids.

I was going out to the car with my 16 year old daughter and you know how you have like a bowl of keys and there's that one that loser key to your car that's from the dealership and it doesn't have the beeper on it?

It's just a key?

And so the others were nowhere to be found.

I took that key and went out and I opened up the car door with the key rather than with the remote, and my daughter was dumbfounded.

She said, "You can open up a car with a key?"

And it was just that simple moment, like she had no idea that such a thing was even possible, and that is basically everything online.

Kids really have no idea what the world was like before, and what's interesting about you being able to be in touch with your kids any moment of the day, it's hard for us to even think about, imagine the idea that kids went off to school, they walked to school, I walked to school alone when I was eight years old.

And then I saw my parents at dinner time and they really had no idea where I was in between.

And that concept I think is not only completely alien to kids, but as a parent, I just think, how did my parents tolerate that absence of knowledge?

- It's terrifying.

- It's terrifying.

- So, when you talk about those days, and the phone in particular, I'm gonna get into that in a second; but when you talk to your kids about those days, the nostalgia that permeates this book, what do they say?

Is it a world they have any interest in?

Are they shocked or stunned that it actually happened, or do they just roll their eyes and go back on their device?

- Right, I mean, we call it a phone, first of all, but let's not kid ourselves.

It's a portable internet.

This is not a telephone.

There is no resemblance to that thing in the kitchen with the long coiled wire that you would try to stretch and play with.

So I would say that it depends on their ages.

My kids are getting a little bit older, they're 12 to 16, and there is total stupefaction.

They have no idea that some of the things that we have to go through and just find it abnormal.

They find it crazy that we still have a landline.

But I do think there is a wave of nostalgia among teenagers once they realize what the before-times are actually like.

I think that's why you see all of this retro-'80s stuff, and you see it even on TikTok, a lot of the media on there is incredibly nostalgic.

You see it in the fact that every cool kids clothing store sells little mini record players.

There are apps that actually mimic old technologies, so I do think that they recognize to a certain extent that there was an ease and a simplicity to the world before the internet.

- So phones and phone calls are an important part of this book, and you mentioned the landline and chapter 13 is "The Phone Call".

You talk about that old-fashioned landline, and then chapter 20, "The Phone in the Kitchen", you expand on that theme.

Talk about what that phone, that landline, the thing that hung up in the kitchen, and we all had one, and had the coil that you mentioned; talk about what that meant and what it was to a family back in the day.

- Yeah, if you think about it, back in ye olden-times, the only way to enter a house was to walk in through the front door or to call the home phone number.

So you could not enter into that home, that space, that family arena, without either coming through the door or calling on the phone, and that meant you knew at all times, essentially, who anyone in your family was communicating with.

So if your daughter was getting a call from a boy, or if there was a massive fight going on between one of your kids and all their friends, you would know, 'cause you would overhear them on the phone.

You might pick up, you would know exactly how long they talked for.

You would sometimes pick up the phone 'cause you need to make a call and overhear a snippet of conversation.

Now all of that is opaque.

We have no idea who our kids are communicating with.

They could be talking to a bunch of kids who they've never met before, but are friends with, people that they went to camp with five years ago and somehow they're all in some kind of Snapchat communication together, or they could be talking to a total stranger.

They could be playing a game online with a college kid somewhere across the country or somewhere across the world.

You have no idea who is kind of in your house at any given moment now that you don't have that landline.

And so it's created a kind of opacity to what everyone in the family is doing.

There's a great scene in a movie that I love that's the ultimate nostalgia thing.

It's from even before me obviously, but it's in "Meet Me in St. Louis".

And I don't know if you remember, there's a scene where a boy calls the older sister and he's, everyone thinks that he's gonna ask her to marry him.

And the entire extended family is at the table, listening in to this conversation, and that's kind of the way it was, even up through the 1980s and the '90s.

- So switching gears here a little bit, let's get into chapter 63, "Your Attention Span".

It was one of the many chapters that, as I read this book, I literally laughed out loud, ran into the next room and had to share it with my wife who also laughed.

It's just a great chapter and it's a very short chapter, as our attention spans are today.

And I'm wondering if you might be able to read that, and if you don't have the book right there, I can read that short chapter.

- I will read it aloud.

It is short, it has to be for obvious reasons.

So this is "Your Attention Span".

"Sorry, did you say something?

I am listening, just hold on one sec.

I have no idea what I've been doing for the last hour.

What was that thing I was looking up?

No, no, no, I did hear you, I swear.

Just repeat the last part.

I'm sorry, what were you saying?"

(men chuckle) - It's so funny, but it's so true.

I mean, it captures with humor where we are today.

I mean, I can't tell you how many times I, in my head or verbally, have had one of these sentences.

Talk about that, our attention span.

What happened to it?

- It's gone.

(men chuckle) And I think, combined with impatience, 'cause patience is another thing that's gone.

How many times in a day do you find yourself saying, "Wait just one second, I just have to do this one last thing.

I just have to do this one last thing.

Wait, wait, wait, just hold on one second."

And it could be in the middle of a really deep, intense conversation with someone in your family or someone that you work closely with.

But it is really difficult for us to ignore our phone's constant buzzing, ringing.

There an app called Slack, which is used in many offices, many workplaces, it's used in mine.

And it has this insidious knocking noise.

It actually sounds like someone knocking on your door and our brains are just trained to go, "Wait, what, what, what, what?"

And so it's very hard for us to tune all of that out and to deeply focus on something.

I mean, they've done studies that show that you enjoy a meal more if you don't have your phone out on the table, because you cannot ignore the presence of there are 20 people, maybe 50 people trying to get through to me on this thing that's sitting next to me while I'm trying to enjoy my appetizer with you.

So I think that, and now I will have lost my train of thought because I have no attention span.

(all laugh) I think that this immediately clear to anyone that we don't have the ability to sit down and just immerse ourselves, whether it's in a book or even in a TV show.

Because you're used to watching TV while also having this and maybe this right next to you, other things that you can look at that you can react to.

- The TV show or the movies, one of my great frustrations as an adult with children, with adult children now is I'll show them an old movie and they'll be watching the movie while they're on their phone, and I'm like, "Something's about to happen that is so important that if you miss it, none of the rest of the movie makes sense!"

So it sort of interrupts the flow.

One of the things that I wonder is all of these tangible things that we've lost, have we also lost manners?

Whether it's, we're talking about attention span or some of the things that people will say to others through a text message that they never would've said face-to-face with somebody in the wildest of examples.

Have we just lost that sort of that human connection?

That ability to interact with one another in a direct and personal and human way?

- We've lost all that, and I was attempting to interrupt you just to show it that we've, (men chuckle) we have lost social cues, we have lost empathy, because even here, us speaking now, screen to screen, something gets lost.

You can imagine if there were no pandemic that we would be in a studio and you would see a little bit more of my gestures.

There's just a sense that you get when there's another human being in the room that you don't get when it's a screen, and even more so when it's a text, and even more so even when there is an image, but it's a packaged image.

It's something that someone has done and sent on Snapchat, or crafted and created and filtered and put up on TikTok.

We are seeing packaged versions of ourselves, we're seeing limited slices of ourselves, and it's really hard to read that.

Just think about how many times you have misinterpreted an email, because tone doesn't come through, gesture doesn't come through.

Irony, we know, cannot exist on Twitter without a hundred people, a thousand people, sometimes a million people completely missing it and taking you seriously.

So it's absolutely true, and we've lost a sense of manners, even in the most basic ways.

Because everyone is carrying around this mini computer and they often have little hidden AirPods on and they can't even hear what you're saying, I don't know if you've ever been a situation where you're on the subway, for example, or you're on the train and you say, "Excuse me", to someone and they don't hear you.

Or you bump into someone and you say, "I'm so sorry", but they don't hear you because they're listening to a podcast or they're listening to music and they have no idea and they'll just glare at you, and you think like this is just making our daily interactions a lot less human and a lot less pleasant, even when we're not entirely online.

- So let me get back to chapter 63, "Your Attention Span", since my attention span brought me back there.

It is wonderfully illustrated and the illustration shows Einstein standing with his back to a chalkboard, it's an actual chalkboard.

And written on the chalkboard is E=M.

That's it, E=M, and he is standing in front, looking at his cell phone.

It's a wonderful illustration and you deliberately chose the artist for that.

Tell us about the artist and why you chose, excuse me, this particular person to illustrate this great book.

- So the illustrator is a man named Nishant Choksi who works out of England and he was my first and essentially only choice.

I felt like if he didn't say yes, I wouldn't know what to do.

And part of the reason I wanted to have the book illustrated to begin with is that this is a subject that's really serious.

We're laughing and it's funny and it's fun, but the internet has done very profound and often really dark things to all of our lives, to our countries, to the world.

It's also done great things, so I'm not saying there isn't good, but there is a lot of very dark stuff that makes us upset and makes us angry, and I didn't want to write an upset, angry book.

I wanted to leaven it a little bit and to kind of show like, okay, we can laugh at ourselves, we can recognize some of this.

All of us who lament, who look at someone in an incredibly annoyed way when they do something online, kind of recognize like, "Oh, wait, I do that.

I do that, I looked at my phone during dinner."

And so I wanted the illustrations to kind of just lighten it up a tiny bit.

Nishant Choksi can be very serious, but he's also really, really funny.

He does a lot of illustrations for us at "The New York Times", he does work in "The New Yorker".

And he'd only illustrated one book, which is a book that I actually own and love.

It's a cookbook by the chef Ottolenghi, and so I approached him out of the blue and just said, "Please!"

And he said, "Let me read it", and he read it, and luckily he loved it and responded right away and he said yes.

And then it was just incredibly hard to pick what to illustrate and to choose from among the options, because he's so creative and so brilliant.

- Pamela, I was enchanted by the chapter on the meet cue.

And there is something about romance that has been diminished, I think, by the internet.

You talk about the ubiquity of online dating services now.

Talk to us about the loss of romance.

And it seems like chance is a big part of that, but- - It is, it is.

We've lost serendipity, we've lost mystery, and of course, both of those things are a huge part of romance and courtship.

One of the examples I gave in one of the chapters is the blind date, and if you think about that, that captures so much more that's bigger than just not having really any idea who you're going to meet for dinner that night.

Because now of course, you Google the hell out of the person and you know everything about them, and you've seen their childhood pictures and you've seen their resume and you know what all their friends think about them and the embarrassing thing they did sophomore year of college.

So it's not really a blind date, you don't really know what's going in.

But what I find sad about that is the fact that we are shutting ourselves off to the possibility that maybe we shouldn't have swiped right or swiped left on Tinder.

Maybe that person who we just didn't think was physically attractive, might've actually been someone who could've opened our eyes to something new.

We don't always know what we're attracted to, especially, again, when it's online, because there's so many instances when you're in the room with someone.

It's someone that you might not have seen a photo of and said, "That guy is my type" or "That woman is my thing."

But when you're in the room with them and you're talking and you see them and they're animated, there's some ineffable attraction there, and we're just shutting ourselves off to a lot of that because we're not swiping in the right direction, or we're saying, "Oh, I'm gonna unclick.

I don't want anyone from this religion or who went to this school or does this profession".

Sometimes we don't know what we want, and sometimes we find out that what we want is not actually what we thought.

So I just think we are missing out on a lot of possibilities when we choose things by an algorithm or some kind of questionnaire.

- So the element of mystery and surprise has been increasingly lost, and you really get into that in a chapter on high school reunions.

It used to be, if you went to high school reunions, and it would be true for college reunions as well, that you hadn't seen people in 10 or 20 or whatever number of years, you didn't know what they were doing, you would learn about them, you'd be happy to see them or not happy to see them, but there was an element of, I don't know, let's find out.

That doesn't happen anymore because you know, on the internet, what everyone has done if you care to look or choose.

Is there any future for the high school reunion?

And I'll close this question, you went to your last one in 2019 and left after 20 minutes.

Talk about high school reunions.

- I knew everything I needed to know, because look, you don't even need to be an investigative journalist to see on Facebook that someone has gotten divorced, even if they don't announce it.

It's like, there goes the married name, the pictures suddenly don't show the other person in the photo.

You can figure out pretty much anything.

I'm very close friends with someone I went to second grade with and she often sleuths online and will report back to me.

She'll be like, "Remember Mary and so-and-so?

Did you know, X, Y, and Z?"

Because you can figure out all of that stuff, again, in five minutes, really.

And so when you go to the reunion, it's like this weird facsimile, like this strange alternate reality, where we're all asking the basic cocktail party, small talk questions or big questions like "What do you do?"

And, you know perfectly well what they do, and they know that you know, and yet you're going through these weird motions of having this conversation.

So I do think that, I don't know, maybe hopefully we'll still have reunions because I guess, looking at it from a positive light, you don't really have to ask those questions anymore.

So you could actually just talk and hang out together without having to go through all of those basic fact-finding questions.

- Pamela, you know, when I started reading the book, my first instinct was how's she gonna come up with a hundred things that we've lost to the internet?

And by the time I got to the end of it, I'm like, "How did she only limit it to a hundred things?"

And I'm curious, were there other things that you really had to agonize about whether or not they'd made it into the 100?

- Absolutely, and you know, the truth is, is that there are more than a hundred things in there because each chapter is multiple things.

If I'm talking about a Rolodex, for example, I'm also talking about all the other tchotchkes that used to sit on top of a desk.

Like the staple remover, the white out, the desk toy that would fascinate people when you left the room.

Now they just look at their phone or their tablet, so they don't need that.

The photos of our family, nobody prints out photos of our family that used to sit on your desktop because you could just have your screen saver.

So all that stuff has gone, and then with the Rolodex, for example, there's a bigger idea there than the physical object, because a Rolodex used to be a power symbol that would essentially say, "I know everyone.

I've met them, they gave me their card.

They think I'm important, I am important.

I am intimidating to you because you are who you know."

And that concept is really gone.

We all know everyone, we're all linked into everyone, we're all following one another and we're all connected, and it no longer really means anything to have 300 contacts in your Rolodex.

We all have thousands of contacts if we want to, it's kind of meaningless.

So what I tried to do was to narrow it down.

I think at some point I had like 212 things and think about, let's get to the essence, let's find something, whether it's an idea, like private humiliation or, sort of being uninhibited, or it's an object, like a file cabinet.

Let's then think about what are all the implications if you kind of look at it at different angles and what else would go naturally in that chapter?

- So I wanna hear briefly about a couple of your other books, which I've not read.

But to start with, "My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues."

What was that about?

- I'm glad you brought that up, 'cause that was my memoir and one of the greatest experiences I had writing that memoir was actually in Providence at the Providence Athenaeum.

But that was a book that told a little bit the story of my life through the lens of books that I've read.

I have been all my life, a very bad diary keeper.

I have like, I don't know, maybe 24 or 25 diaries with five pages filled in and the rest of it's blank because I gave up.

But one book that I successfully kept throughout my entire life starting from the age of 17 is a list of every book that I've ever read.

And in a way, in many ways, that book actually tells the story of my life much better than any diary ever could because it kind of shows where I was mentally, psychologically, emotionally at any given moment in my life.

And even just seeing the titles of the books, all of this stuff comes back to me of like, "Oh, I remember I read that when I was traveling through China", or "That was assigned to me freshman year of college", or "That was a book that so-and-so gave to me and the cover was bent", or "I've lost that book".

And then suddenly kind of that period of my life fills out.

So in that book, each chapter was the title of a book that kind of represented and told the story of a period in my life.

And also, so that it wasn't all just about me, a kind of way of reading.

So one chapter would be about what it means to have heroines or heroes in our lives and in the books we read, and another was about reading through grief or loss and books that make us cry.

- Pamela, we've got literally about 30 seconds left.

I wonder, it's the 125th anniversary of "The New York Times Book Review" where you are the editor.

Put that 125 years into some context, literally in about 30 seconds.

- Oh wow.

Well, "The New York Times Book Review" is the only freestanding newspaper book review left in the country, and so I think it holds a place for readers, not just in New York, but around the country and around the world, in that it shows us the ways in which books sort of tell the story of all of our lives.

And when I think about books, I'm gonna run out of 30 seconds!

I can't fit a 125 years in there!

It's got everything from essays by Nora Ephron and Toni Morrison, to pieces that, poetry that we ran in the summer of 2020 by Claudia Rankine.

It really tells the story of more than a century through the books that "The New York Times" has reviewed and covered, and that hopefully many of you have read.

- Well, it's a must-read in our house.

"A 100 Things We've Lost to the Internet" is a great read.

Pamela Paul, thank you so much for being with us.

That's all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square", you can find us on Facebook and Twitter, or visit pellcenter.org.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square".

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