The Winter of Our Disconnect (7 page)

After twenty-four years, two husbands, and more changes of hairstyle than I care to count, I am still a New Yorker who’s just passing through. It’s a cultural identity as stubborn as any birthmark, which no amount of exposure to the relentless Western Australian sunshine can fade. For me, information technology is so much more than a means to an end. It’s a hotline, a lifeline, to my Real World. The one in which I cannot physically or directly participate. The one that exists Up Over, half a world beyond the impossible blue of the Indian Ocean and the breeze sweeping in through the kitchen window.

As I swatted a blowfly dead—blowflies are to the Western Australian summer what blackheads are to being fourteen—it occurred to me that the biggest challenge of this whole project might have to do with relinquishing that ostrichlike delusion: that burying my head in information and entertainment from “home” was just as good as actually being there.

But for now, there were many smaller decks that needed to be cleared. At the moment, we were screen-free in theory only. In reality, it was a case of media, media everywhere and not a drop to drink.

 

 

The laptops were no problem to pack away—I stuck all three of them in a filing cabinet, under H for hibernation—but bedding down Bill’s beloved gaming PC took a bit more grunt.

The Beast, as we called it (and the towering gray chipboard enclosure in which it brooded), had been allowed to become the focal point of the family room. Now it sat slightly askew, covered in dust and discarded peripherals, like a ruined monument from some long-vanished race of teenage barbarians.

A massive monitor sat serenely in the center of it all surrounded by offerings of half-drunk water bottles and crumpled candy wrappers. I rolled the table out from the wall, uncovering a snake pit of cobwebby cords, cables, and connectors. Also a physics textbook. I spotted a hank of what I feared was human hair but turned out to be a tumbleweed of Rupert’s undercoat and some pencil shavings. I took a photo, just for old time’s sake. And then I rolled up my sleeves.

Over the next two hours, I unplugged and coiled up chargers for a bewildering profusion of digital drek: two mobile phones, one Nintendo DS, a PS/3, an iPod, two vintage Game Boys, several thumb drives, an external hard drive, and a digital camera. Three-quarters of these devices were missing and presumed dead, but I saved the chargers anyhow. Because they might show up one day, like Bo Peep’s sheep or some deadbeat dad—and also because I am, alas, a hoarder. To be honest, it was all I could do to toss out the tumbling tumbleweed.

The rest of the gear I dusted, coiled, and stashed at the back of the old TV cabinet, next to the Barney videos. (Yeah, well. We might want to watch them again someday, okay?) The Beast itself would be leaving for a working holiday, a sort of whistle-stop tour of Bill’s friends’ bedrooms. I packed it a little bag—a USB cable, some DVDs, and a thumb drive, just in case it got peckish—and lugged it to the front door to await pick-up.

 

 

I’d always worried that being a single-parent family somehow put us at greater risk of information abuse. But no, according to the Pew Internet & American Life survey. The latest figures show that two-parent families with children have the highest technology concentration of any household type. Today the average eight- to eighteen-year-old shares his home with two computers, and 84 percent of American children have a home Internet connection. So, all up, our tally of one desktop and three laptops—a networked computer for each member of family—is maybe not typical, but it’s totally un-unusual.
¹

The televisions were next on my hit list. I aimed to rub them out by the time Bill splashed down from training. (If there’s a single thing Bill is more passionate about than The Beast, it is being a water-polo goalie. With no digital distractions, it was a fair bet that the pool would become his new default setting.) According to the Kaiser Foundation, the typical home with kids has 3.8 televisions sets, 2.8 DVD or VCR players, and 1 digital video recorder. Thirty-seven percent of such households also lay proud claim to a video screen in the family car. Among all eight- to eighteen-year-olds, 71 percent have a TV in their bedroom, and half also have a video game player and/ or cable TV. In this, as in so many other respects, we were aberrant, only this time it was in a good way. We had only two TVs, not counting the battered black-and-white twelve-inch Sussy’d bought for five bucks at a craft fair when she was nine. (“Interesting handiwork,” I’d sniffed at the time.)

Figures from the Consumer Electronics Association show that 87 percent of American homes have cable or satellite TV. In Australia, less than a quarter of households do, and we had left their ranks about six months before The Experiment began. Personally, and I feel a little weird admitting this in public, I don’t really
do
television. It’s not a moral issue. I’m just like one of those natural vegetarian types, who freakishly happens to prefer flaxseed to steaks.

I wasn’t always like this. When I was a kid, my whole day was structured around my favorite shows, and had been from the moment I first clapped eyes on
Romper Room
, circa 1961 (think taffeta party dresses, miniature sports coats, and patent leather pumps for
all my friends today
!). But something happened to my television viewing around the time I went to college. Like my virginity perhaps, it just sort of withered away. When I had kids, it seemed to disappear altogether.

As a single parent, I found that the last thing I craved at the end of the day was noise. Of any kind. I couldn’t even listen to
music
for years. In my frame of reference, television was strictly a child-deflection /distraction/diversion device. They’d watch
Play School
or
Thomas the Tank Engine
or
Lady Lovely Locks
so that I could get on with cooking dinner and matching socks, or meeting deadlines and—very occasionally—a man.

In fourteen years as a single parent, I have dated only three men, yet ended up living with two of them. Separately, I hasten to add! The second of those partners, a one-time Australian Olympian, arrived with a twenty-four-hour sports channel in his wake, as part of a handsome subscription television package, and the impact on the family’s television viewing habits was dramatic.

Sussy got in touch with her latent American roots and discovered sitcoms, and the dopier they were, the better she liked ’em. (
The Suite Life of Zack & Cody
, for example, featuring eleven-year-old identical twins who make their home in a luxury hotel, where their single mother performs a nightclub act. Enough said?) Bill dabbled briefly in World Wide Wrestling, before veering off in the direction of
Family Guy
and
The Daily Show
and a Dantesque loop of Australian Rules Football. Anni, interestingly, watched nothing at all—ever. She felt about our new satellite capability more or less the way she felt about the new partner: “Not a fan,” in her own terse words.

The relationship broke up, but the Lifestyle Channel lingered on. It wasn’t till I’d reached the acceptance stage of relationship bereavement that I finally had it disconnected. By that point, the children had discovered the illicit joys of downloading. Holed up in their bedrooms with the latest episodes of
The Hills
or
The Secret Life of the American Teenager
or
Naruto
, the family-room television seemed sooo Edward R. Murrow. It was time to move on. We hauled the big, old television to Bill’s bedroom, and I bought a cheap “fat screen” replacement set, much to the children’s humiliation. It was under the load of this embarrassment that I was now staggering toward the garden shed.

I set it down carefully atop a Styrofoam bodyboard, as if it were going on a long sea journey. Bill’s TV, which easily weighed as much as I, or for that matter the shed, did, was going to be more of a challenge. But I was desperate to get rid of it before he got back from training. It may sound ridiculous, but he was so attached to it—and proud of it, almost, the way boys
are
proud of their machines and gadgets—I felt guilty about taking it away from him. Mean, too. I’d been so dismissive of the friends who’d said, “Are you sure you want to do that to your children?” Now, for the first time, I wasn’t so sure.

What would I do if Bill suddenly snapped? If he refused to part with the TV and reneged on his promise? I’d be heartbroken. Not just for the plans I’d made (elaborate though they were). But for his sake. For all their sakes.

I wanted my kids to experience this—and I wanted it in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reasons that I wanted them to travel overseas, or practice yoga, or learn a foreign language, or take sailing lessons: to enlarge themselves. To discover themselves. To become human beings more fully alive, in the
Walden
esque words of Saint Irenaeus. My children have lived in Australia all their lives. But in important respects they have been raised elsewhere, in the supranational city-state prophesied by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s, and made flesh by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in the 1990s. Digitopia. Cyburbia. The Global Village. Call it what you will, it is where they live now. My children happen to be dual Australian-American citizens. But first and foremost, they are Digital Natives—just like yours.

When I encountered the term “Digital Native” in John Palfrey and Urs Gasser’s 2008 book
Born Digital
, I didn’t even need to read the definition. I knew instinctively what it meant and to whom it referred. The term was coined by game designer and self-described “visionary” Marc Prensky in 2001 and refers to “the first generation born and raised completely wired,” in the words of Palfrey and Gasser.
²
That means Anni, Bill, and Sussy, all born between 1990 and 1994, definitely qualify for membership. I don’t.

Despite my hard-won technological know-how, and even though I can do some online tasks better than they can (well, one anyway: If there was a TV show called
So You Think You Can Google?
, I’d be an overnight sensation), I am by definition a Digital Immigrant—and if you were born before 1980, so are you.

No matter how tech-savvy we Digital Immigrants become, we betray our Old World origins at every turn. Starting with reading the instruction manual, which is a dead giveaway. When a new technology arrives in the home, the Natives don’t need to set out on a humbling search for the “On” button. They just know, as though they’ve been fitted with an auto-detect device their elders and inferiors have only read about in the IT pages of their sad little newspapers. A new application is the same. Immigrants such as you and me wade conscientiously through the documentation. We do the tutorial. We register for online support. In short, we approach every new media experience—from Twitter to TiVo—as if it were a digital disaster waiting to happen. We respond by lining up a walking stick and a wheelchair, just in case.

The Natives find this hilarious. They are no more frightened by new media than they are by a new pair of running shoes. They just jump right in and start sprinting. While we’re struggling with setting the time and date, they’ve shot a music video, customized the ringtone with seasonally appropriate sound effects, and changed the wallpaper to a close-up of the pug relieving himself.

We Digital Immigrants work hard on our second-language skills. But we still speak “Download” haltingly, and with thick foreign accents. We say “write” where we should say “post”; “page” where we should say “profile.” We balk at using “friend” as a verb. We “dial” our phones and “look up” facts. We forget the word “avatar,” if we ever knew it to begin with. And we appeal constantly to our kids to translate for us. (“Hey, guys! Cousin Linda just threw a barrel of monkeys at me on Facebook. Please tell me this is a good thing.”)

Like most others of their tribe, my own Digital Natives regularly traveled to foreign lands, albeit in short hops, even before the Winter of Our Disconnect descended. They did read books (every once in a while). They played music and sports, and went shopping. They indulged in the odd bout of extreme hair coloring. Lord knows, they would always press “pause” to eat—grazing pretty much constantly, like a small but attractive herd of goats. And, of course, no matter what other balls they were keeping in the air, they always seemed to find time to annoy one another.

The whole point of The Experiment was to send the Digital Natives on an
extended
trip abroad. A sort of family holiday back to the Old Country. An immersion experience, if you will, in the culture of their forebears. In time, I dared to hope, they might even adapt some of their quaint folkways for use back home in their native land.

But such lofty dreams would have to wait. For now, I had a more modest goal: to move the goddamn television already. I repaired to Bill’s bedroom, located at the very back of the house, for a site visit. It had been a long time since I’d surveyed the Crack Den in any objective way. Looking around me now, I could understand why. The TV was the size of a refrigerator box. The room was the size of a refrigerator. To say it dominated the space was an absurd understatement. The good news was that the television sat on a dresser that was just at waist height. Ergonomically this was propitious because it meant I didn’t need to bend my knees to lift it. I could easily wrap my arms around it, if only I were a gorilla. As it was, the thing was as bulky and unbudgeable as a husband on a couch. There had to be another way. Maybe a wheelbarrow? If so, I’d have to work fast because Bill was due back any minute.

I made haste to the shed, half expecting to find Lucy and Ethel crouching behind the fertilizer. (Over the next six months, I would experience many such moments. If I’d ever secretly wished my life were being filmed live in front of a studio audience—and trust me, I hadn’t—it would have been deeply gratifying.) Lined with an old horse blanket, the wheelbarrow made a serviceable rickshaw. I wheeled it around to the back entrance, just a step from Bill’s bedroom door. I even managed to grip the TV and heave it off the dresser. What I couldn’t do was turn or walk. Or breathe. I was rooted to the spot, frantically wondering what to do now, before my forearms unhinged like Lego pieces, when Bill came charging down the hallway, a pool towel flapping, capelike, around his ankles.