The Winter of Our Disconnect (16 page)

It was a wake-up call to find out that my most indispensable device could be so easily dispensed with. But what really pushed my buttons was realizing my 24/7 availability had actually impeded my efforts to parent well and my children’s to ... now what would you call it? “Kid” well? In some ways, the whole thing was like my discovery about the dishwasher. All these years it had felt so much more efficient than washing dishes by hand. It had looked and sounded that way too. But measured objectively in time and effort and outcome, it
so
wasn’t.

The urge to stay continuously connected, like the yearning to produce whiter-than-white cuffs and collars, isn’t a problem technology has solved. It’s a problem technology has by and large invented. So many of our standards—of normalcy, of effectiveness, of propriety, of safety—are consequences of our technologies. This is exactly what Thoreau was getting at when he warned us against becoming “the tools of our tools.” (Easy for him to say. The great transcendentalist apparently sent his dirty clothes back to Concord for laundering!)

That doesn’t mean technology is evil, that it gets us to do its bidding via mind control, like some fascist dictator or bolshy preschooler. To my way of thinking, this is the technology equivalent of the Twinkie Defense. Nor does it mean that we, as the users of technology, are passive victims: hapless Pandoras wringing our hands in dismay at the chaos God hath wrought. And yet, just as the stuff we consume has a funny way of repaying the compliment, the devices meant to simplify our lives merely create new and improved complexities.

“Our life,” Thoreau observed, sitting there in his nicely laundered socks, “is frittered away by detail.” One wonders what a guy who thought the Post Office was frivolous would make of the iPhone.

 

 

Severing the cellular umbilicus was something I’d dreamed of guiltily for years, from the time Anni got her first phone and started essentially microblogging the events of her after-school day. “There’s nothing to eat. ☺” or “Spider in bathroom!! When RU coming home to kill???” or “Bill just punched me.” (I’m pretty sure she had that last one on speed-dial.) For years, text messages like these had been lobbing into my workday like softballs through plate glass. And I responded to them in a way that shocks me to remember: i.e., seriously. I’d text back earnest instructions on arachnocide, or offer snack food location tips. (“Look on the second shelf of the pantry” or “Behind the milk.”) Exactly whose interests did I imagine this sort of thing was serving?

“Staying connected” is one thing—and that’s what phone conversations, especially after-school phone conversations, are all about. The exchange of nuisance texts is quite another. If you’d asked me at the time, I’d have insisted that the contact was crucial, even if the content was trivial. But truth is, these exchanges did so little to maintain loving relationships or offer reassurance—and so much to encourage dependence (theirs), guilt (mine), and dissatisfaction (all around). We were “connected,” all right. At the hip.

It wasn’t just texting either. How many times had I turned on the phone after a meeting or a movie and found ten or twelve missed calls from home—only to ring back frantically, the adrenalin practically squirting from my ears, and hear, “Oh, never mind. We found the brownie mix/hair scissors/tape/printer cartridge/pizza wheel/front-door key/cat/toilet paper/remote/black leggings/marshmallows/deck of cards/vacuum/butter/tweezers already.” I’m picturing them being duct-taped to the kitchen chairs, or huddled in an ambulance on the way to the Burn Unit, or at the very least sobbing over the lifeless body of the pug, and they’re eating brownie batter and watching YouTube. A few times I tried explaining to Anni how upsetting it is to get so many missed calls in a row, but she just shook her head sadly as if to say, “Have you considered colonic irrigation?”

 

 

I’m having lunch with a friend when her phone rings. She’s placed it on the table between us—as one does nowadays—as if it were a flower arrangement, or a piece of cutlery. “My son!” she exclaims, glancing at the screen. “Sorry!” She turns slightly away to take the call, and I eavesdrop shamelessly. (What? A girl’s entitled to
some
compensation for the interruptions of modern life.) The ensuing conversation is mystifying.

“Which way are you facing?” I hear her say. “No. I mean, which direction?” and then, after a long pause, “Do you see the grain silo, or the car park?” After a few more cryptic queries, she concludes, “Right. Walk up the ramp, turn left, and walk all the way down to ground level. Ground level, do you hear? You should be able to see it from there. Yeah, no. It’s big. Really big. Uh huh. Love you too, honey. And if there’s a problem, call me back, okay?”

She hangs up and I do my best to look uninterested. The truth is, I’d give my whole untouched half of our blue-cheese-arugulaand-pear pizza to hear the backstory. I mean, obviously the kid was lost somewhere ... but where? Like, there just aren’t that many deserted grain silos around here. Plus, Hunter isn’t nine, or physically or intellectually disabled. He’s twenty-two, over six feet tall, and brilliant.

Well, it turned out the kid—oh, let’s be honest, the
man
—was on a train platform. Seems he’d just gotten off at an unfamiliar stop and wasn’t too sure which direction to walk in. Should he go right? Should he go left? Sure, they were the only two options ... and yes, okay, there were plenty of people milling around. But still. It was awkward.

We went back to our pizza and our conversation, but I found the whole incident pretty hard to digest. The idea that an intelligent, strapping twenty-something would sooner get his mother to act as a remote-access GPS than ask the guy standing next to him—and that neither he (apparently) nor she (as far as I could tell) thought there was anything strange about that—struck me even at the time as noteworthy. I mentally filed it under “D,” for “Don’t Let This Happen to You.” But it wasn’t until we were midway through The Experiment that I started thinking about it again. Hunter’s Dilemma, I recognized with horror, was simply the logical extension of the same digital dependency I’d been fostering in my own family.

No self-respecting parent sets out to tie grown children to their wireless apron strings. But it creeps up on you. A request for ketchup here. A forwarded phone number or a little remote-control refereeing there. And before you know it, the service provider is
you
. It’s like a toddler’s bedtime ritual that grows just a wee bit longer each night, until you find yourself doomed to performing a sixty-minute nightly program of massage, puppetry, dramatic readings, and intercessions with powerful unseen forces. Bit by bit, your willingness to accommodate is making everybody totally helpless to live their own lives (or sleep their own sleep, as the case may be).

Soren Gordhamer, author of a quirky little self-help book called
Wisdom 2.0: Ancient Secrets for the Creative and Constantly Connected—
basically, Buddhism for people who text too much—argues that enlightened technology use is all about “seeing choice.” Responding to our cell phones as if they were our masters, or our mothers—allowing their summons to interrupt our driving, our dining, our dreams—is a clear case of being blind to choice, relinquishing the privilege of choice. Gordhamer explains, “If I do not see choice, then I have none. If technology is my master, I must heed its every call, and everything else is secondary.”
¹⁵
Or, in the haunting words of poet Adrienne Rich, “Only she who says / she did not choose, is the loser in the end.”

I agree with all of that, yet I know firsthand how difficult resistance can be. (The Experiment doesn’t prove I am good at “seeing choice.” On the contrary. I fear it shows I am so bad at it I have to resort to desperate measures.) Ignoring a ringing phone—in this case, quite literally—goes against all our instincts. And that goes double when the ringtone is blaring Justin Bieber. But instincts are not reflexes. Instincts can be informed, and reformed. They can also be managed. “Human nature,” as Katharine Hepburn reminds us in
The African Queen
, “is what we were put on this earth to rise above.”

One of the best ways we can do that is by testing our privately held assumptions against the evidence. There hasn’t been a ton of research into the impact of cell phones on interpersonal behavior, but the studies that do exist are pretty clear that cell phones do not make us more switched on. On the contrary, they seem to encourage users to be
less
socially responsible. A study conducted by Intel found that one in five people surveyed admitted to being more careless about punctuality because they knew they could reschedule via text at the last minute. One in five? I think we
all
do this.

I certainly used to. And my kids—all of them—did it constantly. Not just with me, but with their friends and one another. They were perfectly comfortable with a concept of time that was amorphous and stretchable, like the Dreamtime or mozzarella cheese. It drove me insane.

“I’ll text you later!” Sussy would call over her shoulder when I dropped her off at the mall or a friend’s place.

“NO YOU WON’T!” I’d bellow. “I’ll meet you here at three thirty sharp!” Generally, though, I’d get a text at 3:25, wheedling for an extra half-hour, or suggesting I “chill” at a café for a while. I was so bad at “seeing choice,” I’d actually text back. “If I wanted to ‘chill’ I would have stayed childless in the first place, young lady!” I’d snap. Or, more tersely: “Forget it. Just be there.” I won these battles, but the fact that we were having them at all showed I was definitely losing the war. Each such exchange cost both of us time, money, and aggravation. It accomplished nothing, and created nothing—unless you count the ill will.

Until it stopped, I wasn’t aware how much of a drag all this mobile micro-tweaking really was—and how far it
eroded
my peace of mind. And possibly theirs too. Being constantly connected meant keeping one’s options constantly open. SMS made everything negotiable: hour by hour, minute by minute. There was no such thing as a firm plan or a final schedule.

There was no 5:00 p.m. sharp. Just vague intentions—a whirl-wind of possibilities out of which, eventually, if you were lucky, a mutually agreeable course of action might emerge.

As far as I could make out, Anni, Bill, and Suss were genuinely comfortable with this. They’ve never really known what it’s like
not
to improvise their lives moment by moment. Clearly, it’s a Digital Native thing. For a Digital Immigrant like me, however, the psychic costs of staying chilled far outfroze the occasional benefits. Making a final decision, even about something as trivial as a pick-up time, means crossing an item off the to-do list. Keeping decisions provisional means you never cross anything off. Every day is a “work in progress.” That’s creative. And it’s exhausting. I loved how celling out hung a figurative DO NOT DISTURB Sign on the doorknob of my life.

MIT’s Lemelson Invention Index ranks the cell phone as “our most hated modern tool,” so I am obviously in good company, at least among my age peers. Because I’m pretty sure Digital Natives would rate their phones as their most dearly beloved modern tool. A University of Grenada, Spain, study of eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds found as many of 40 percent admitted to being “deeply upset and sad” at missing calls and suffering “anxiety, irritability, sleep disorders, or sleeplessness” and even “shivering and digestive problems” when their phones were switched off.
¹⁶

Digital Immigrants tend to have a less intense relationship with our phones. Yet we do tell ourselves—I certainly told myself—that we need to be on constant standby “just in case.” The truth is, if, God forbid, there’s a real emergency, we’ll be found—just as the receptionist at Sussy’s school prophesied.

Case in point: the Saturday night Anni needed to speak to me urgently about her plans for the evening. I was home, but our landline had been engaged for more than an hour. Surmising, correctly, that it was Sussy talking to Maddi on the latter’s Sidekick, she texted Sussy’s friend Andy in London asking if he would please IM Maddi in Melbourne with a message telling Sussy in Fremantle to tell me to call Anni in Claremont. Complicated? To Digital Immigrants like you and me, sure. To them? Don’t make me ROFL. The total trans-hemispheric operation took less than three minutes.

Our collective fear of being out of touch, once I’d euthanized the iPhone, was in this manner soothed. Sure, the kids were frustrated initially—“Where
were
you?” the girls demanded to know when I reeled in at 10:45 after a raucous night at the West Australian Ballet—but they quickly grasped the ancient wisdom that “no news is good news” and turned their terrifyingly agile minds to more productive matters. I gave them the kind of old-fashioned reassurance people have been giving their kids down the pre-mobile millennia: “If I’m five minutes late, I’m just stuck in traffic. If I don’t pick up the landline at work, leave a message on my voice mail.” Why this needed to be made explicit is a great mystery, but it did.

There was only one true emergency during the Winter of Our Disconnect. I got the call from Bill on my office phone, and it began with the words every mother dreads: “Mum, I’ve had an accident.”

He’d been riding his bike, fast, down a rainy street when the front wheel detached, pitching him headlong over the handlebars and into the street. He was pretty sure he’d sprained his right wrist—a week before leaving on a European tour with his water-polo team. “Stay right where you are,” I ordered. “I’m coming this second!”

“Honestly, don’t bother,” he replied. “I’m home now.” In his words: “Some lady picked me up and took me to her place and put ice on my arm. Then she put my bike in her trunk and drove me home.”

“Some lady?” I gasped. “
What
lady?”

“Dunno. Forgot to ask what her name was.”

When the twitching subsided, I reflected that Bill’s decision not to ring me—on
any
kind of phone—until he was home, cleaned up, calmed down, and safe was a good call. I couldn’t have gotten there in time to do anything meaningful anyhow. (Thank heavens there was somebody else who did, even if we
will
never know her name. Grrrrr.) As parents, we almost think of our phones as charms or amulets: as if just holding one in our handbag is sufficient to ward off danger or repel evil forces.