The End of Absence
  • Published: 23 September 2015
  • ISBN: 9781591847922
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $32.99

The End of Absence

Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

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Soon enough, nobody will remember life before the Internet. What does this unavoidable fact mean? 

Soon enough, nobody will remember life before the Internet. What does this unavoidable fact mean?
Those of us who have lived both with and without the crowded connectivity of online life have a rare opportunity. We can still recognize the difference between Before and After. We catch ourselves idly reaching for our phones at the bus stop. Or we notice how, midconversation, a fumbling friend dives into the perfect recall of Google.
In this eloquent and thought-provoking book, Michael Harris argues that amid all the changes we're experiencing, the most interesting is the end of absence-the loss of lack. The daydreaming silences in our lives are filled; the burning solitudes are extinguished. There's no true "free time" when you carry a smartphone. Today's rarest commodity is the chance to be alone with your thoughts.
%%%Soon enough, nobody will remember life before the Internet. What does this unavoidable fact mean?

Those of us who have lived both with and without the crowded connectivity of online life have a rare opportunity. We can still recognize the difference between Before and After. We catch ourselves idly reaching for our phones at the bus stop. Or we notice how, midconversation, a fumbling friend dives into the perfect recall of Google.

In this eloquent and thought-provoking book, Michael Harris argues that amid all the changes we're experiencing, the most interesting is the end of absence-the loss of lack. The daydreaming silences in our lives are filled; the burning solitudes are extinguished. There's no true "free time" when you carry a smartphone. Today's rarest commodity is the chance to be alone with your thoughts.
  • Published: 23 September 2015
  • ISBN: 9781591847922
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $32.99
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About the author

Michael Harris

Michael Harris is the author of The End of Absence, which won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction and became a national bestseller in Canada. He writes about media, civil liberties and the arts for dozens of publications, including the Washington Post, Wired, Salon and the Globe and Mail. He lives in Vancouver.

portrait photo of Michael Harris

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Praise for The End of Absence

In this thoughtful, well-written book, Michael Harris combines personal narrative with the views of experts to show us that the digital revolution that envelops us contains traps that can lead us to understand less even as we seem to know more

Harris has caught, with brilliant fidelity and incisiveness, a hinge-point in modern history: Before and After the Digital Rapture. The End of Absence deserves a place alongside Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death and Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen. A great, important (and fun) read. I couldn't in good conscience lend out my copy: every other page is dog-eared

Everybody over sixty should read this book. The rest of the population will need no urging, unless they are too far gone to read anything longer than a blurb. The first part reads like a horror story, a shocking mind-thriller. In the second half the author, despite real foreboding, demonstrates in his own person that all is far from lost. Relief, after much learning

The End of Absence is a beautifully written and surprisingly rousing book. Michael Harris scans the flotsam of our everyday, tech-addled lives and pulls it all together to create a convincing new way to talk about our relationship with the Internet. He has taken the vague technological anxiety we all live with and shaped it into a bold call for action

The End of Absence is a genial and philosophical tour through one man's anxieties surrounding digital life

This is a lovely, direct, and beautifully written book that will make you feel good about living in the times we do. Michael Harris is honest in a way I find increasingly rare: clear, truthful, and free of vexation. A true must-read