Tom Chatfield's Blog

September 1, 2015

Live This Book!

My beautiful new “Live This Book!“ has just been published by Penguin: a journal that asks you to put pen to paper, and consider what it means to spend time with the things that truly count in life, love, work and leisure. 


Live This Book Cover


I’ll be speaking, writing, collaborating and exploring around it over the coming months: from events at The School of Life and Google to talks on the Southbank, via the BarbicanManchester, and further afield.


If you’re intrigued, please do drop me a line  (tomdotchatfieldatgmaildotcom?subject=Live This Book)  . This isn’t an anti-tech book. But it is about negotiating richer relationships with and through digital tools, and the importance of stepping back from each screen to ask what a rich engagement with life really looks like.

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Published on September 01, 2015 08:53

April 17, 2015

A most intimate relationship

Here’s a piece I particularly enjoyed writing, commissioned by American site 99U: an exploration of the extraordinary intimacy of our relationships with digital tools, and what it means to negotiate with them successfully.


There’s no such thing as a neutral tool. Everything we use wants something from us.


Cars ask us to behave differently than buses or trains or planes; each encodes different ways of thinking about space and movement. A television asks us to sit and watch. Software asks us to interact and respond. Even the subtlest design feature can nudge us towards new actions—like the social scientists who painted a pair of eyes above an honesty box and saw a tripling in donations from people who suddenly felt themselves as being “watched.”


What, then, about the intricacies of one of the closest relationships in modern life—between us and the digital devices we carry with us—and the ways in which we might meaningfully hope to judge this?


I say “relationship,” and it’s a word I mean in all of its ambivalent, yearning, chest-tightening intensity. A few technologies occupy a startlingly intimate place in most modern lives. Our smartphones are among the most sacred and personal of our possessions, rarely out of sight or mind. For many of us, they are the first thing we touch when we wake in the morning and the last thing we touch when we go to bed at night.


They guard our secrets, connect us to the people and pursuits we care about most; they promise that we never need be alone, ignored, bored, unknowing, lost, without a waiting audience to woo.


Hollywood has long liked to anthropomorphize its machines, and they tend to fall into twin camps: seducers (Her, Ex Machina) or enslavers (Robot Overlords, The Matrix). Apocalyptic imaginings aside, there’s something in both these characterisations that should give even the most proselytizing technophile pause—an ambivalence neatly captured in James Cameron’s 1991 sci-fi action-fest Terminator 2.


In the second half of the film, there’s a scene in which heroine Sarah Connor watches Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 Terminator playing with her son. Reprogrammed to protect and obey him, the robot has flipped from one polarity to the other: from perfect assassin to perfect playmate. “It was suddenly so clear,” she says in flat-pitched voiceover. “The Terminator would never stop. It would never leave him, and it would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there.”


Tireless, infinitely patient, offering an eager compliance that leaves every other relationship looking second-rate: I find it hard to ponder Sarah Conner’s take on the Terminator without thinking of the iPhone nestled warmly in my pocket. It’s my own, hand-held Arnie: never too busy, never too tired, always the same; offering steady but infinite options and engagements. It’s a match made in silicon heaven.


Except, of course, I myself am often busy and tired: too busy to keep my wits about me or my priorities my own. There are many different people and places in my life that I owe many different kinds of time and attention. Yet what the screen offers makes it so much easier to manage these relationships: to call people’s presence into and out of being at whim; to perform and half-reveal what I think, want, and feel. My relationship with technology is a kind of killing through kindness. It’s like living with someone so obsessed with making my life easier that I don’t even consider asking for anything they cannot give. As the comfortable grooves of habit deepen, I move outside them less and less.


Click here to read the rest of the article at 99U

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Published on April 17, 2015 05:22

The most intimate relationship in your life: your smartphone?

Here’s a piece I particularly enjoyed writing, commissioned by American site 99U: an exploration of the extraordinary intimacy of our relationships with digital tools, and what it means to negotiate with them successfully.


There’s no such thing as a neutral tool. Everything we use wants something from us.


Cars ask us to behave differently than buses or trains or planes; each encodes different ways of thinking about space and movement. A television asks us to sit and watch. Software asks us to interact and respond. Even the subtlest design feature can nudge us towards new actions—like the social scientists who painted a pair of eyes above an honesty box and saw a tripling in donations from people who suddenly felt themselves as being “watched.”


What, then, about the intricacies of one of the closest relationships in modern life—between us and the digital devices we carry with us—and the ways in which we might meaningfully hope to judge this?


I say “relationship,” and it’s a word I mean in all of its ambivalent, yearning, chest-tightening intensity. A few technologies occupy a startlingly intimate place in most modern lives. Our smartphones are among the most sacred and personal of our possessions, rarely out of sight or mind. For many of us, they are the first thing we touch when we wake in the morning and the last thing we touch when we go to bed at night.


They guard our secrets, connect us to the people and pursuits we care about most; they promise that we never need be alone, ignored, bored, unknowing, lost, without a waiting audience to woo.


Hollywood has long liked to anthropomorphize its machines, and they tend to fall into twin camps: seducers (Her, Ex Machina) or enslavers (Robot Overlords, The Matrix). Apocalyptic imaginings aside, there’s something in both these characterisations that should give even the most proselytizing technophile pause—an ambivalence neatly captured in James Cameron’s 1991 sci-fi action-fest Terminator 2.


In the second half of the film, there’s a scene in which heroine Sarah Connor watches Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 Terminator playing with her son. Reprogrammed to protect and obey him, the robot has flipped from one polarity to the other: from perfect assassin to perfect playmate. “It was suddenly so clear,” she says in flat-pitched voiceover. “The Terminator would never stop. It would never leave him, and it would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there.”


Tireless, infinitely patient, offering an eager compliance that leaves every other relationship looking second-rate: I find it hard to ponder Sarah Conner’s take on the Terminator without thinking of the iPhone nestled warmly in my pocket. It’s my own, hand-held Arnie: never too busy, never too tired, always the same; offering steady but infinite options and engagements. It’s a match made in silicon heaven.


Except, of course, I myself am often busy and tired: too busy to keep my wits about me or my priorities my own. There are many different people and places in my life that I owe many different kinds of time and attention. Yet what the screen offers makes it so much easier to manage these relationships: to call people’s presence into and out of being at whim; to perform and half-reveal what I think, want, and feel. My relationship with technology is a kind of killing through kindness. It’s like living with someone so obsessed with making my life easier that I don’t even consider asking for anything they cannot give. As the comfortable grooves of habit deepen, I move outside them less and less.


Click here to read the rest of the article at 99U

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Published on April 17, 2015 05:22

March 25, 2015

Are you over-connected?

I’ve been working for a long time on this essay for BBC Future, and am delighted finally to see it online together with some of Josh Pulman’s brilliant photos. The first few paras are below. Do read the whole essay on the BBC Future site.


A group of people wait by a monument, unaware of each other’s existence. A woman strides open-mouthed down a busy street, holding one hand across her heart. Two young men – brothers? – stand behind a white fence, both their heads bowed at the same angle.


These are some of the moments captured in photographer Josh Pulman’s ongoing series called Somewhere Else, which documents people using mobile phones in public places (see pictures). Almost every street in every city across the world is packed with people doing this – something that didn’t exist a few decades ago. We have grown accustomed to the fact that shared physical space no longer means shared experience. Everywhere we go, we carry with us options far more enticing than the place and moment we happen to be standing within: access to friends, family, news, views, scandals, celebrity, work, leisure, information, rumour.


Little wonder that we are transfixed; that the faces in Pulman’s images ripple with such emotion. We are free, if “free” is the right word, to beam stimulation or distraction into our brains at any moment. Via the screens we carry – and will soon be wearing – it has never been easier to summon those we love, need, care about or rely upon.


Yet, as Pulman himself asks, “If two people are walking down the street together both on the phone to someone else, are they really together? And what is the effect on the rest of us of such public displays of emotion, whether it’s anxiety, rage or joy?” To be human is to crave connection. But can our talent betray us? Is it possible to be “overconnected” – and, if so, what does it mean for our future?


Click here to continue reading at BBC Future

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Published on March 25, 2015 03:03

February 26, 2015

Paper vs screens

Here’s a piece I wrote recently for the Guardian, looking at a favourite topic: negotiating the different experiences of print and digital reading and writing, and trying to move beyond the notion that one must be “better” for everything.


My son is 18 months old, and I’ve been reading books with him since he was born. I say “reading”, but I really mean “looking at” – not to mention grasping, dropping, throwing, cuddling, chewing, and everything else a tiny human being likes to do. Over the last six months, though, he has begun not simply to look but also to recognise a few letters and numbers. He calls a capital Y a “yak” after a picture on the door of his room; a capital H is “hedgehog”; a capital K, “kangaroo”; and so on.


Reading, unlike speaking, is a young activity in evolutionary terms. Humans have been speaking in some form for hundreds of thousands of years; we are born with the ability to acquire speech etched into our neurones. The earliest writing, however, emerged only 6,000 years ago, and every act of reading remains a version of what my son is learning: identifying the special species of physical objects known as letters and words, using much the same neural circuits as we use to identify trees, cars, animals and telephone boxes.


It’s not only words and letters that we process as objects. Texts themselves, so far as our brains are concerned, are physical landscapes. So it shouldn’t be surprising that we respond differently to words printed on a page compared to words appearing on a screen; or that the key to understanding these differences lies in the geography of words in the world.


For her new book, Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World, linguistics professor Naomi Baron conducted a survey of reading preferences among over 300 university students across the US, Japan, Slovakia and Germany. When given a choice between media ranging from printouts to smartphones, laptops, e-readers and desktops, 92% of respondents replied that it was hard copy that best allowed them to concentrate.


This isn’t a result likely to surprise many editors, or anyone else who works closely with text. While writing this article, I gathered my thoughts through a version of the same principle: having collated my notes onscreen, I printed said notes, scribbled all over the resulting printout, argued with myself in the margins, placed exclamation marks next to key points, spread out the scrawled result – and from this landscape hewed a (hopefully) coherent argument.


What exactly was going on here? Age and habit played their part. But there is also a growing scientific recognition that many of a screen’s unrivalled assets – search, boundless and bottomless capacity, links and leaps and seamless navigation – are either unhelpful or downright destructive when it comes to certain kinds of reading and writing.


Across three experiments in 2013, researchers Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer compared the effectiveness of students taking longhand notes versus typing onto laptops. Their conclusion: the relative slowness of writing by hand demands heavier “mental lifting”, forcing students to summarise rather than to quote verbatim – in turn tending to increase conceptual understanding, application and retention.


In other words, friction is good – at least so far as the remembering brain is concerned. Moreover, the textured variety of physical writing can itself be significant. In a 2012 study at Indiana University, psychologist Karin James tested five-year-old children who did not yet know how to read or write by asking them to reproduce a letter or shape in one of three ways: typed onto a computer, drawn onto a blank sheet, or traced over a dotted outline. When the children were drawing freehand, an MRI scan during the test showed activation across areas of the brain associated in adults with reading and writing. The other two methods showed no such activation.


Similar effects have been found in other tests, suggesting not only a close link between reading and writing, but that the experience of reading itself differs between letters learned through handwriting and letters learned through typing. Add to this the help that the physical geography of a printed page or the heft of a book can provide to memory, and you’ve got a conclusion neatly matching our embodied natures: the varied, demanding, motor-skill-activating physicality of objects tends to light up our brains brighter than the placeless, weightless scrolling of words on screens.


In many ways, this is an unfair result, effectively comparing print at its best to digital at its worst. Spreading my scrawled-upon printouts across a desk, I’m not just accessing data; I’m reviewing the idiosyncratic geography of something I created, carried and adorned. But I researched my piece online, I’m going to type it up onscreen, and my readers will enjoy an onscreen environment expressly designed to gift resonance: a geography, a context. Screens are at their worst when they ape and mourn paper. At their best, they’re something free to engage and activate our wondering minds in ways undreamt of a century ago.


Above all, it seems to me, we must abandon the notion that there is only one way of reading, or that technology and paper are engaged in some implacable war. We’re lucky enough to have both growing self-knowledge and an opportunity to make our options as fit for purpose as possible – as slippery and searchable or slow with friction as the occasion demands.


I can’t imagine teaching my son to read in a house without any physical books, pens or paper. But I can’t imagine denying him the limitless words and worlds a screen can bring to him either. I hope I can help him learn to make the most of both – and to type/copy/paste/sketch/scribble precisely as much as he needs to make each idea his own.

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Published on February 26, 2015 12:21

Why reading and writing on paper can be better for your brain

Here’s a piece I wrote recently for the Guardian, looking at a favourite topic: negotiating the different experiences of print and digital reading and writing, and trying to move beyond the notion that one must be “better” for everything.


My son is 18 months old, and I’ve been reading books with him since he was born. I say “reading”, but I really mean “looking at” – not to mention grasping, dropping, throwing, cuddling, chewing, and everything else a tiny human being likes to do. Over the last six months, though, he has begun not simply to look but also to recognise a few letters and numbers. He calls a capital Y a “yak” after a picture on the door of his room; a capital H is “hedgehog”; a capital K, “kangaroo”; and so on.


Reading, unlike speaking, is a young activity in evolutionary terms. Humans have been speaking in some form for hundreds of thousands of years; we are born with the ability to acquire speech etched into our neurones. The earliest writing, however, emerged only 6,000 years ago, and every act of reading remains a version of what my son is learning: identifying the special species of physical objects known as letters and words, using much the same neural circuits as we use to identify trees, cars, animals and telephone boxes.


It’s not only words and letters that we process as objects. Texts themselves, so far as our brains are concerned, are physical landscapes. So it shouldn’t be surprising that we respond differently to words printed on a page compared to words appearing on a screen; or that the key to understanding these differences lies in the geography of words in the world.


For her new book, Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World, linguistics professor Naomi Baron conducted a survey of reading preferences among over 300 university students across the US, Japan, Slovakia and Germany. When given a choice between media ranging from printouts to smartphones, laptops, e-readers and desktops, 92% of respondents replied that it was hard copy that best allowed them to concentrate.


This isn’t a result likely to surprise many editors, or anyone else who works closely with text. While writing this article, I gathered my thoughts through a version of the same principle: having collated my notes onscreen, I printed said notes, scribbled all over the resulting printout, argued with myself in the margins, placed exclamation marks next to key points, spread out the scrawled result – and from this landscape hewed a (hopefully) coherent argument.


What exactly was going on here? Age and habit played their part. But there is also a growing scientific recognition that many of a screen’s unrivalled assets – search, boundless and bottomless capacity, links and leaps and seamless navigation – are either unhelpful or downright destructive when it comes to certain kinds of reading and writing.


Across three experiments in 2013, researchers Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer compared the effectiveness of students taking longhand notes versus typing onto laptops. Their conclusion: the relative slowness of writing by hand demands heavier “mental lifting”, forcing students to summarise rather than to quote verbatim – in turn tending to increase conceptual understanding, application and retention.


In other words, friction is good – at least so far as the remembering brain is concerned. Moreover, the textured variety of physical writing can itself be significant. In a 2012 study at Indiana University, psychologist Karin James tested five-year-old children who did not yet know how to read or write by asking them to reproduce a letter or shape in one of three ways: typed onto a computer, drawn onto a blank sheet, or traced over a dotted outline. When the children were drawing freehand, an MRI scan during the test showed activation across areas of the brain associated in adults with reading and writing. The other two methods showed no such activation.


Similar effects have been found in other tests, suggesting not only a close link between reading and writing, but that the experience of reading itself differs between letters learned through handwriting and letters learned through typing. Add to this the help that the physical geography of a printed page or the heft of a book can provide to memory, and you’ve got a conclusion neatly matching our embodied natures: the varied, demanding, motor-skill-activating physicality of objects tends to light up our brains brighter than the placeless, weightless scrolling of words on screens.


In many ways, this is an unfair result, effectively comparing print at its best to digital at its worst. Spreading my scrawled-upon printouts across a desk, I’m not just accessing data; I’m reviewing the idiosyncratic geography of something I created, carried and adorned. But I researched my piece online, I’m going to type it up onscreen, and my readers will enjoy an onscreen environment expressly designed to gift resonance: a geography, a context. Screens are at their worst when they ape and mourn paper. At their best, they’re something free to engage and activate our wondering minds in ways undreamt of a century ago.


Above all, it seems to me, we must abandon the notion that there is only one way of reading, or that technology and paper are engaged in some implacable war. We’re lucky enough to have both growing self-knowledge and an opportunity to make our options as fit for purpose as possible – as slippery and searchable or slow with friction as the occasion demands.


I can’t imagine teaching my son to read in a house without any physical books, pens or paper. But I can’t imagine denying him the limitless words and worlds a screen can bring to him either. I hope I can help him learn to make the most of both – and to type/copy/paste/sketch/scribble precisely as much as he needs to make each idea his own.

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Published on February 26, 2015 12:21

December 15, 2014

Hour of Writes

I was lucky enough recently to judge the weekly writing competition for marvellous writing site Hour of Writes. This is the editorial I wrote about the pleasures and challenges of the experience. 


As I get older, I become more obsessed with time: how I spend it; how it seems to be spent for me by habits, obligations, demands, technologies, nervous tics. I worry that I am losing control of my moments.


I also turn to reading and writing more gratefully than ever, because there is something in the piercing concentration of written language that saves me from this worry.


When a piece of writing touches me, it propels my moments towards coherence. It creates a spaciousness that feels like freedom. And others’ writing makes me want to write myself. I bottle up the need to set words together, carefully, until it is ready.


I believe that dedicating a certain time and space to writing is an exercise in freedom. And, in judging this weekly competition for Hour of Writes, I have experienced a space throbbing with others’ unbottled words; with a sound of souls stretching toward the high notes; with language doing its alchemical thing and turning time into perpetuity.


Am I getting a little over-excited? Quite possibly. This is what happens when you give someone permission to set down syllable after syllable with the promise of an audience. I’m stringing together my moments into a kind of music, and I hope you’re enjoying the tune. Because I have certainly enjoyed yours: the scraps and snatches of story I’ve been granted, the arrows shot from other worlds.


Picking winners is a funny thing with writing. It’s hopelessly subjective, yet it gestures towards the most immense objectivity: the shared, shifting universe of letters. What you write in an hour may echo for years, centuries. It may take your moments and transport them into other minds. If it’s good – and let us, please (if elsewhere) debate what that means, because it’s worth every argument – it might just change everything.


When it comes to words, we’re all in the business of mind-reading. We are astonishingly good at it. Letter by letter, we set in motion the most complex machinery this planet has ever seen.


So. I have picked a winner. I have picked a couple of runners up. I have not found it easy, and I don’t expect you to agree. But I am extremely glad and grateful for the opportunity. And – if you have made it this far, to this dangling clause of an ante-penultimate sentence – I suggest you read on. What will others’ words release in you? We are waiting, wondering, listening into our screens.


Do visit Hour of Writes to browse, discover and write yourself

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Published on December 15, 2014 14:58

Hour of Writes: choosing between stories

I was lucky enough recently to judge the weekly writing competition for marvellous writing site Hour of Writes. This is the editorial I wrote about the pleasures and challenges of the experience. 


As I get older, I become more obsessed with time: how I spend it; how it seems to be spent for me by habits, obligations, demands, technologies, nervous tics. I worry that I am losing control of my moments.


I also turn to reading and writing more gratefully than ever, because there is something in the piercing concentration of written language that saves me from this worry.


When a piece of writing touches me, it propels my moments towards coherence. It creates a spaciousness that feels like freedom. And others’ writing makes me want to write myself. I bottle up the need to set words together, carefully, until it is ready.


I believe that dedicating a certain time and space to writing is an exercise in freedom. And, in judging this weekly competition for Hour of Writes, I have experienced a space throbbing with others’ unbottled words; with a sound of souls stretching toward the high notes; with language doing its alchemical thing and turning time into perpetuity.


Am I getting a little over-excited? Quite possibly. This is what happens when you give someone permission to set down syllable after syllable with the promise of an audience. I’m stringing together my moments into a kind of music, and I hope you’re enjoying the tune. Because I have certainly enjoyed yours: the scraps and snatches of story I’ve been granted, the arrows shot from other worlds.


Picking winners is a funny thing with writing. It’s hopelessly subjective, yet it gestures towards the most immense objectivity: the shared, shifting universe of letters. What you write in an hour may echo for years, centuries. It may take your moments and transport them into other minds. If it’s good – and let us, please (if elsewhere) debate what that means, because it’s worth every argument – it might just change everything.


When it comes to words, we’re all in the business of mind-reading. We are astonishingly good at it. Letter by letter, we set in motion the most complex machinery this planet has ever seen.


So. I have picked a winner. I have picked a couple of runners up. I have not found it easy, and I don’t expect you to agree. But I am extremely glad and grateful for the opportunity. And – if you have made it this far, to this dangling clause of an ante-penultimate sentence – I suggest you read on. What will others’ words release in you? We are waiting, wondering, listening into our screens.


Do visit Hour of Writes to browse, discover and write yourself

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Published on December 15, 2014 14:58

November 7, 2014

Maths and the Simpsons

Beneath a cloud of jazz in the bar of London’s Langham hotel, the air crackled with rational fervour. I was sat with three luminaries of the geekish world: Simon Singh (Cambridge PhD in particle physics), bestselling author of Fermat’s Last Theorem and, most recently, The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets; Al Jean (Harvard maths degree), head writer and executive producer of The Simpsons; and David X Cohen (Berkeley masters in theoretical computer science), ex-Simpsons writer and executive producer of its sister series Futurama.


Ahead of their evening appearance at the Science Museum, we discussed the delights of cartoons, geek culture, the common ground between comedy and mathematical proofs—and why science means subversion. You can read the full edited transcript of our conversation over on Medium.

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Published on November 07, 2014 08:05

A physicist, a mathematician and a computer scientist walk into a bar: in conversation with Simon Singh, Al Jean and David X Cohen

Beneath a cloud of jazz in the bar of London’s Langham hotel, the air crackled with rational fervour. I was sat with three luminaries of the geekish world: Simon Singh (Cambridge PhD in particle physics), bestselling author of Fermat’s Last Theorem and, most recently, The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets; Al Jean (Harvard maths degree), head writer and executive producer of The Simpsons; and David X Cohen (Berkeley masters in theoretical computer science), ex-Simpsons writer and executive producer of its sister series Futurama.


Ahead of their evening appearance at the Science Museum, we discussed the delights of cartoons, geek culture, the common ground between comedy and mathematical proofs—and why science means subversion. You can read the full edited transcript of our conversation over on Medium.

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Published on November 07, 2014 08:05