The Winter of Our Disconnect (2 page)

The question of whether communication technology makes our lives
easier
is much more specific, and less difficult to answer. Or is it?

When I first read the Pew research, it reminded me of a study I read in the
British Journal of Sociology
on the impact of domestic technology on housework.
⁶
Among other findings, the researchers discovered that having a washing machine and a dryer actually
increased
the time families—okay, women—spent on laundry tasks. For a start, people with dryers wash more clothes. And although a washing machine definitely makes it easier to get dirty clothes clean, it also raises the bar on the underlying question of “how clean is clean enough?” The new technology, in other words, solves an existing problem but in the process it creates a new and improved problem, and more laundry. It’s a tale that the history of technological innovation tells us over and over again, as if on an endless loop of tape. The promise of “better living through technology!”—and you can take your pick which one—is
always
a loaded deal, and often a paradoxical one as well. It tends to be both true and untrue in equal proportions. Our technologies invariably start out as responses to a need. But over time, and in subtle, unpredictable ways, they come to redefine that need.

So ... how connected, I found myself wondering, is connected enough? As a social scientist, journalist, and mother, I’ve always been an enthusiastic user of information technology (and I’m awfully fond of my dryer too). But I was also growing skeptical of the redemptive power of media to improve our lives—let alone to make them “easier” or simplify them. Like many other parents, I’d noticed that the more we seemed to communicate as individuals, the less we seemed to cohere as a family. (Talk about a disconnect!)

There were contradictions on a broader scale too—and they have been widely noted. That the more facts we have at our fingertips, the less we seem to know. That the “convenience” of messaging media (e-mail, SMS, IM) consumes ever larger and more indigestible chunks of our time and headspace. That as a culture we are practically
swimming
in entertainment, yet remain more depressed than any people who have ever lived. Basically, I started considering a scenario E. M. Forster never anticipated: the possibility that the more we connect, the further we may drift, the more fragmented we may become.

Or not. Because, just to complicate matters, I happen to believe that the possibilities held out to us by media are hugely exciting. I am not a Golden-Ager, lamenting the decline of the candle in a neon-lit world. Not in the least. I love my gadgets (and I’ve got a gazillion of ’em to prove it). I think my life is enhanced by technology. And I know the world at large is. Yet the idea that there might be a media equivalent of what micro-finance guru David Bussau calls “an economics of enough” continued to occupy my thoughts.

It was an intriguing set of questions—and I was pretty sure I would
not
find the answers on Wikipedia. But how on earth could I test my hypotheses-slash-hunches?

That’s when I remembered Barry Marshall—the Australian microbiologist who won a Nobel Prize in 2005 for the simple but astounding discovery that stomach ulcers are caused by bacteria. Not stress, or spicy foods, or excess acid. Germs. Plain old germs. In retrospect, it seems so obvious. In the early eighties, Marshall’s theory was dismissed as outlandish—especially by the pharmaceutical companies that underwrite the clinical trials by which medical research is tested. Frustrated but undaunted, Marshall decided to take matters into his own hands ... indeed, into his own stomach lining. He swallowed some of the bacteria in question and waited to see whether he would develop an ulcer. He did. And the rest—give or take a decade of intensive further research—is history.

So it occurred to me: If Marshall could use his own life as a petri dish, why couldn’t I?

(Gulp.)

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Who We Are, and Why We Pressed “Pause”

—
KIP’S WEDDING SONG,
Napoleon Dynamite
(2004)

 

 

 

 

 

When I first announced my intention to pull the plug on our family’s entire armory of electronic weaponry—from the ittiest bittiest iPod Shuffle to my son’s seriously souped-up gaming PC (the computing equivalent of a Dodge Ram)—my three kids didn’t blink an eye. Looking back, I can understand why. They didn’t hear me.

Well, they
are
teenagers. And they were busy. Uploading photos from last night’s gathering, stalking a potential boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend’s Facebook friends, watching Odie the Talking Pug on YouTube (“I ruuuv ooooo,” he howls to David Letterman). “Guys, are you listening?” I persisted.

“Can’t you see we’re doing homework, Mum?” my son replied irritably.

To be fair, it was the kind of thing I say a lot. Such as, “That’s it—you’re grounded for life!” or “Wait till your father gets home, young lady” (and I’ve been divorced for fourteen years). It probably sounded to them like just another in a long line of empty threats. It even sounded that way to me, to be honest. The urge to do a full-scale digital detox had been building for years. But it was more in the nature of a wistful but essentially ridiculous fantasy—like having a torrid affair with the Dalai Lama, or learning to tie a scarf four ways.

And then I reread
Walden
. (Note to self: Friends don’t let friends reread Thoreau during an estrogen low.)

Walden
—the story of the most famous stint in rehab in literary history—is my favorite book in the whole world, and I try to read it at least as often as I have a pap smear. I love
Walden
for lots of reasons, but mostly for its economy—the way it distills life and language to its most intoxicating essentials. You probably already know that it was written by transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, who left his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, in 1844 to conduct “an experiment in living” in the woods near Walden Pond. He lived there for two years in a wooden hut he built with his own hands, subsisting mainly on a monkish diet of wheaten cakes and pond fish. No neighbors. No running water. And, needless to say, no kids.

To be honest, I’d been thinking about running away to the woods myself a lot toward the end of 2008. It wasn’t just the three teenagers I was wrangling: Anni, who’d just turned eighteen (terrifyingly, the legal drinking age in Western Australia, where we lived); Bill, fifteen, the man of the house (in his own mind, at least); and Sussy, the baby, fourteen (“Juliet’s age when she got married, Mum,” as she constantly reminded me).

They were at tricky ages, to be sure. But then, at age fifty, so was I. A career journalist, I was now part of the brand-new podcasting platform for ABC Radio. I loved the challenge of spitting out a weekly program, and I especially loved mastering the digital technology that modern broadcasting entails. What I didn’t love was the huge time pressure. I was away from home more than I’d ever been since I’d started having babies, and the sense that I was losing control of my house and its contents—i.e., my kids—was ominous.

At the same time, our media habits had reached a scary kind of crescendo. It wasn’t just the way the girls were becoming mere accessories of their own social-networking profile, as if real life were simply a dress rehearsal (or, more accurately, a photo op) for the next status update; or the fact that my son’s domestic default mode was set to “illegal download,” and his homework, which he’d insisted he needed a quad-core gaming computer and high-speed broadband to complete, was getting lost in transmission—although that was all part of it.

Thinking back, I realize there was no one breaking point, no single epiphany or
aha!
moment, but rather a series of such moments: scenes and stills I can scroll through in no particular order of importance, like a digital slideshow set to shuffle.

The abiding image of the back of Bill’s head, for example, as he sat, enthroned before his PC in the region formerly known as the family room. Or the soundtrack of the conversations we’d been having for the last year or so, the ones that began with me saying anything at all (“Have you done your homework?” “Are you still enrolled in high school?” “Can you please put down your weapon and press ‘pause’ now? It’s dinnertime”) and ended with him replying, “Yeah. What?”

Maybe it was the evening the video clip playing on the corner of Sussy’s desktop unexpectedly waved and called out gaily, “Hi, Susan!” It turned out to be a school friend streaming herself live on webcam via Skype. When my vital signs restabilized, I moved swiftly from simple fear to profound panic. What other visitors were logging on to her bedroom, in real time, full color, and stereo sound, while I slept?

Anni generally hit the trends first and most furiously. Always precocious, she’d been the first in her school to launch into MySpace way back in Year 10. (Not content with her own profile, she’d speedily created one for Jesus Christ [Relationship Status: It’s Complicated] and another for Rupert, our pug [Favorite Movie:
Men in Black
].) At eighteen, she was still bingeing on social networking—Facebook being her drug of choice—and was also prone to sudden-onset gaming benders. Most recently, it was the online multiplayer word game called TextTwist. I’d watch her shoulders tense as she stabbed the keys with a viciousness normally reserved for conversations about curfews. And when she started gaining on her goal to become the world’s number-one player, her jubilation had (for me) a disturbing edge. Watching her rapt, LCD-lit eyes, I couldn’t help but think of Nero updating his status while Rome burned.

My own patterns were getting a little weird too. I never thought I’d be the kind of single mother who’d openly sleep with her iPhone, but ... yeah. (I told myself it was no different from reading a book in bed—which, if I hadn’t been watching feature-length movies and shopping for underwear, might well have been true.) In fact, if I didn’t drag my laptop, a pair of speakers, my digital recorder, and a camera in too, I sometimes felt a little lonely. I told myself I was just doing my job. But there were times I looked less like a journalist than some demented IT technician in a nightie. Good times, good times.

However, it wasn’t until I started surfing the Net, replying to text messages, listening to podcasts, and, on one memorable occasion, doing a live radio interview—all the while “otherwise engaged” in the loo—that I admitted I had a problem. Was I was using media to (cringe) self-medicate, on the fast track to becoming a middle-aged Lindsay Lohan of the App Store? Was it time to check myself in to rehab?

There was other stuff that was bothering me too. We were eating meals as a family less and less often. Never, if you want to get technical about it. The girls were either splurge-snacking or experimenting with weird diets. For days on end I swear Sussy ate nothing but condiments. Bill—aka the Cereal Killer—seemed to survive largely on shredded wheat and instant noodles, foods that shared a common, disturbing resemblance to roof insulation.

They were still having friends over, but more and more of their socializing took the form of little knots of spectators gathered around the cheery glow of YouTube—or, worse, dispersed into separate corners, each to his own device. Their sleep patterns were heading south too—hardly surprising given that the alerts from their three cell phones were intermittently audible through the night, chirping like a cadre of evil crickets.

And there were other things they’d hit the “pause” button on. Music—either playing it or listening to it as anything other than the background buzz to an instant messaging exchange. Books. Exercise. Conversation. And that other thing. Whaddaya call it? Oh, yeah. Life.

Although my own media habits were hardly immaculate, I could at least remember a time when things had been different. Simpler. More direct. Less tangled up with freaking USB cables. I found myself fantasizing about what life would be like in our house if I pulled the plug once and for all, hurtling us cold turkey into Wi-Fi withdrawal—myself and my omnipresent information IV included.

And at that stage, it
was
a fantasy. As a journalist and author, my livelihood depends on technology. People who wax nostalgic about a golden age of any kind, whether technological or political or cultural, have always seriously annoyed me. It’s like listening to my mother talking about going to the movies for a quarter and having change left over to buy a hamburger and a Coke and, for all I know, stock options in MGM. The way I see it, it’s hard enough to live in the present moment without somebody trying to drag you back to some sepia-tinged, hyperidealized pseudotopia that is usually three parts “La Vie en Rose” to one part irritable bowel syndrome. Every mythical “golden age,” I have always believed, was exactly that. Mythical.

I grew up in the sixties and seventies, and although I have fond memories of
I Love Lucy
, instant mashed potatoes, and the Latin mass (in no particular order of importance), I do NOT believe my own childhood was superior to that of my own children. Parents and kids lived in two separate worlds in those days. That had its plusses, sure—like when you jumped on your bike and went to play at your friend’s house till puberty, and nobody panicked. But it also had its minuses. Like most everybody else in my generation, I watched way too much dumb black-and-white TV, ate ridiculous snack food—come on, aerosol cheese?—and wouldn’t have dreamed of confiding what I really felt and thought to a grown-up.

So nostalgia for “the way we were” isn’t one of my weaknesses. I don’t believe in avoiding your own reality, and I don’t believe in the healing power of deprivation. The temptation to fix our family’s discontents by ripping the modem from its socket smacked of both these fallacies.

Plus, I was menopausal. Sweet reason was not exactly what you’d call my strong suit.