Toronto author Michael Harris wants to be alone. At least some of the time.

And so should we all, he argues.

But in his new book, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection , Harris says his generation will be the last to know true solitude; to have enjoyed the real opportunity to slip away into their own minds and dwell and revel in the thoughts and dreams that harbour there.

The Internet has virtually claimed any access to solitude for people born under its spell, says Harris, whose book is out this month.

And, he says, it is rapidly seducing people who knew life without digital connectivity away from the intermittent, Crusoe-like withdrawals of the mind they once enjoyed.

The Star spoke with Harris about the perils he sees in such constant connectivity.

And along with his book, Harris is also promoting the idea of an Analogue August, which would encourage children and teens especially to be weaned of their digital technologies for a month each year.

Following is an edited version of the conversation:

People celebrate the Internet because of the connection and information access it allows, but you’re arguing in this book that these things come with significant costs and losses for us as human beings. Can you list some of the key ones you’ve identified?

The book focuses on one in particular, which is the loss of absence. To be clear, I’m not anti-technology. I’m not writing on a typewriter, I’m talking on an iPhone, I wrote it on a (MacBook Air). I don’t believe technology is good or evil. I just think that like the knives in your kitchen they are dangerous and useful.

But as far as what the biggest downside is . . . we’re the last generation that will ever live that knows what life was like before the Internet. And in that change, we lose an understanding of the value of absence.

Tell us

What do you mean specifically by “absence” as you use it here and what do we lose without it?

What we lose is solitude, daydreaming, reverie. And we know that when we fill in all those corners of our lives with constant connectivity and constant distraction, it does take a mental toll. The book has all the stats and reports. But the sum of it is that we know that we need solitude. That there is a certain ratio required of hours to ourselves, versus hours connected to other people and other information sources.

Is that connectivity a necessary consequence of access to the Internet — the ubiquitous and easy access to its technologies? Or can people just pull back? If it’s there and easily accessed is using it a choice?

It appears to be necessary. Neilson reports that the average American teenager is sending or receiving 4,000 text messages a month. And we know that spending eight hours a day looking at screens is really pretty average too.

My hope is that we’re at the beginning of becoming more intelligent about media studies. And when I finished working on this book, the thing I was really charged with was this desire to actually promote media studies not only in universities, but in high school. And I think we might be on the verge of starting to be more intelligent about our media diets.

What is a healthy relationship between humans and digital technology?

There can’t be a single prescription for that. I think everybody has a different job and a different age and a different mental capacity too. And so unfortunately, just like everybody has a different metabolism for what they eat, we all have to design our own media diets.

As with food diets, the tendency would be towards less, is that right?

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Yes, less, and more intelligent choices. But we’re much more sophisticated about what we eat now (than decades ago) and similarly I think we’re becoming much more sophisticated about our media diets.

You have a catchy glossary of terms that can describe some of the things that you talk about in the book. I wonder if we could talk about some of these things and what they mean? Like what do “Avatar Crush” and “Condition Creep” mean?

Avatar Crush is something that anyone who has done any kind of online dating has experienced. Instead of meeting someone in a bar or at a dinner party where you immediately understand whether or not they have bad breath, or whether you like the way they talk, or whether they are intelligent, we now actually have these initial connections with avatars. So there’s this danger of falling in love with a production of a person instead of the person themselves.

Condition creep is basically the idea of shifting baselines. You know whenever you try to get anything done online that at some point something comes up that says accept these terms and conditions. And the first few times this happened to me I actually tried to read them. But if you’re using iTunes, for example, every month or so you get new terms and conditions and we now just automatically click through those.

What I found was that anybody under 30 really doesn’t even consider what those conditions are that they are agreeing to. The classic example is Snapchat. Teenagers and older people are sending each other basically homemade pornography with the understanding that it will disappear in a few seconds of being delivered. Of course it turned out that wasn’t actually true.

Older generations used our brains to store and retrieve information. Is that human function being replaced by Google?

Being able to recall facts the way that Google can, I think that’s fundamentally different from what accessing of human memory is, which is much more curated and has a lot more error in it absolutely. But I think there’s a danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

People need the Internet in almost any profession you can think of. We are hooked to the technology. Yet you are calling on people to participate in an “Analogue August.” What do you have in mind there?

Honestly, when we first started talking about Analogue August my hope was it could become an annual thing where teachers and parents would be encouraging children to disconnect for the month, because anyone who has a job does not have that privilege for most of the time.

So that was the thought that maybe we could safeguard this little moment of absence for children.