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group-forming” has brought down repressive political regimes, helped communities respond to natural disasters and terrorist attacks, and worked countless other wonders of human cooperation and problem solving.
    Why do you see people urgently staring into screens everywhere you go? Pick out some nuts-and-bolts task from your own professional, community, or personal life, the equivalent of my mundane need to call Mom about dinner, and you have part of the answer.
    But there’s much more. In addition to helping us do the everyday work that supports our ultimate aims, screens can serve those higher ends directly. Think again about my phone call. While for practical purposes it didn’t matter who I was calling, spiritually and emotionally it mattered hugely. I was calling the woman who gave birth to me, a person with whom I have a relationship unlike any other. The phone brought that person’s voice and personality—and, through the photo, a sense of her physical presence—into the car with me. It gave rise to that moment of pure Mom-ness, which, though brief, was extremely valuable to me, so much so that I remembered it long afterward. That moment stayed with me because it took me out of the nitty-gritty burdens and distractions that tend to dominate my thoughts and allowed me to go deep. I appreciated in a new way my relationship with one special person, and the movie-in-the-brain that is my inner life went from a yawn to a blockbuster.
    What more could you ask for? In an ideal world, our days would be full of experiences like that one, brimming over with the “vital significance” that is the essence of a good life. And those experiences don’t grow just out of personal relationships and interactions. Ideally, our work should be just as significant to us, palpably, while we’re working. Every moment of every day is a candidate for this depth of engagement and feeling.
    Digital devices can and do make this happen. We use them to nurture relationships, to feed our emotional, social, and spiritual hungers, to think creatively and express ourselves. It’s no exaggeration to say that, at their best, they produce the kinds of moments that make life rewarding and worth living. If you’ve ever written an e-mail straight from the heart, watched a video that you couldn’t stop thinking about, or read an online essay that changed how you think about the world, you know this is true.
    In this particular case, it all happened because of a simple phone call. But notice that it happened after what we typically think of as the connection, the call itself, was over. There was a gap between the practical task and the deeper experience that followed. If that gap had not been there, would I have reaped the same benefits? Doubtful. If I’d kept on using the phone for other tasks, there wouldn’t have been time or space in my thoughts for the moment to unfold as it did. The same goes for any screen task with the potential for deeper impact and value, and many do have that potential—it could happen, but only if you give it room. We don’t know about those lost opportunities, of course, because they never see the light of day. But I think we miss them, nonetheless, whenever it occurs to us that life isn’t quite hanging together, isn’t adding up to what it might be. It’s all those unrealized epiphanies, insights, and joys—journeys the mind and heart never get to take.
    If you’re sitting in the office zipping from e-mail to e-mail to text to Web page to buzzing mobile and back again—that is, doing the usual digital dance—you’re likely losing all kinds of opportunities to reach the depth I’m talking about. An e-mail from a client requesting an innovative improvement in the product you sell might inspire you to draw up a brief sketch of how to make it happen. Heck, you might be motivated to go home and do it yourself and perhaps start your own