The Winter of Our Disconnect Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  » 1 - Who We Are, and Why We Pressed “Pause”

  » 2 - Power Trip: The Darkness Descends

  » 3 - Boredom for Beginners

  » 4 - My iPhone/Myself: Notes from a Digital Fugitive

  » 5 - The Sound of One Hand Doing Homework

  » 6 - Loss of Facebook: Friending the Old-fashioned Way

  » 7 - Eat, Play, Sleep

  » 8 - The Return of the Digital Native

  » Afterword

  » Notes

  » Recommended Reading

  » About the Author

  ALSO BY SUSAN MAUSHART

  Sort of a Place Like Home

  The Mask of Motherhood

  Wifework: What Marriage Really Means

  for Women

  What Women Want Next

  JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA © Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) © Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England © Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) © Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) © Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Center, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India © Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) © Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2010 by Susan Maushart

  Most Tarcher/Penguin books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchase for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, and educational needs. Special books or book excerpts also can be created to fit specific needs. For details, write Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Special Markets, 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Maushart, Susan, date.

  The winter of our disconnect: how three totally wired teenagers (and a mother who slept with her iPhone) pulled the

  plug on their technology and lived to tell the tale / Susan Maushart.—1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-48612-2

  1. Maushart, Susan—Family. 2. Information technology—Social aspects—Australia—Case studies. 3. Internet and

  teenagers—Australia—Case studies. 4. Internet addicts—Australia—Case studies. 5. Alternative lifestyles—Australia—

  Case studies. 6. Families—Australia—Case studies. I. Title.

  HM851.M

  303.48’330994—dc22

  Neither the publisher nor the author is engaged in rendering professional advice or services to the individual reader. The ideas, procedures, and suggestions contained in this book are not intended as a substitute for consulting with your physician. All matters regarding your health require medical supervision. Neither the author nor the publisher shall be liable or responsible for any loss or damage allegedly arising from any information or suggestion in this book.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Christine L. Nystrom

  and

  Neil Postman (1931-2003)

  I would like to extend thanks to the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Western Australia, which provided a techno-haven for writing this book.

  » Introduction

  Raising three teenagers as a single parent is no Contiki cruise at the best of times. But when I decided we should all set sail for a six-month screen-free adventure, it suddenly came closer to The Caine Mutiny, with me in the Bogart role.

  There were lots of reasons why we pulled the plug on our electronic media ... or, I should say, why I did, because heaven knows my children would have sooner volunteered to go without food, water, or hair products. At ages fourteen, fifteen, and eighteen, my daughters and my son don’t use media. They inhabit media. And they do so exactly as fish inhabit a pond. Gracefully. Unblinkingly. And utterly without consciousness or curiosity as to how they got there.

  They don’t remember a time before e-mail, or instant messaging, or Google. Even the media of their own childhood—VHS and dial-up, Nintendo 64 and “cordful” phones—they regard as relics, as quaint as inkwells. They collectively refer to civilization pre- high-definition flat screen as “the black and white days.”

  My kids—like yours, I’m guessing—are part of a generation that cut its teeth, literally and figuratively, on a keyboard, learning to say “’puter” along with “Mama,” “juice,” and “Now!” They’re kids who’ve had cell phones and wireless Internet longer than they’ve had molars. Who multitask their schoolwork alongside five or six other electronic inputs, to the syncopated beat of the Instant Messenger pulsing insistently like some distant tribal tom-tom.

  Wait a minute. Did I say they do their schoolwork like that? Correction. They do their life like that.

  When my children laugh, they don’t say “ha ha.” They say “LOL.” In fact, they conjugate it. (“LOL at this picture before I Photoshopped your nose, Mom!”) They download movies and TV shows as casually as you or I might switch on the radio. And when I remind them piracy is a crime, they look at one another and go “LOL.” (“Aargh, me hearty!” someone adds, as if to an imaginary parrot, and they LOL again, louder this time.) These are kids who shrug when they lose their iPods, with all five thousand tunes and Lord-knows-what in the way of video clips, feature films, and “TV” shows (like, who watches TV on a television anymore?). “There’s plenty more where that came from,” their attitude says. And the most infuriating thing of all? They’re right. The digital content that powers their world, like matter itself, can never truly be destroyed. Like the Magic Pudding of Australian legend, it’s a dessert bar that never runs out of cheesecake.

  There’s so much that’s wonderful, and at the same time nauseating, about that.

  The Winter of Our Disconnect—aka The Experiment (as we all eventually came to call it)—was in some ways an accident waiting to happen. Over a period of years, I watched and worried as our media began to function as a force field separating my children from what my son, only half ironically, called RL (Real Life). But to be honest, the teenagers weren’t the only ones with dependency issues. Although a relatively recent arrival to the global village, I’d been known to abuse information too. (Sneaking my iPhone into the toilet? Did I have no self-respect?) As a journalist, it was easy to hide my habit, but deep down I knew I was hooked.

  The Winter of Our Disconnect started out as a kind of purge. It ended up as so much more. Long story short: Our digital detox messed with our heads, our hearts, and our homework. It changed the way we ate and the way we slept, the way we “friended,” fought, planned, and played. It altered the very taste and texture of our family life. Hell, it even altered the mouthfeel. In the end, our family’s self-imposed exile from the Information Age changed our lives indelibly—and infinitely for the better. This book is our travel log, our apologia,
our Pilgrim’s Progress slash Walden Pond slash Lonely Planet Guide to Google-free Living.

  At the simplest level, The Winter of Our Disconnect is the story of how one highly idiosyncratic family survived six months of wandering through the desert, digitally speaking, and the lessons we learned about ourselves and our technology along the way. At the same time, our story is a channel, if you’ll excuse the expression, to a wider view—into the impact of new media on the lives of families, into the very heart of the meaning of home.

  “Only connect,” implored E. M. Forster in his acclaimed novel Howards End, published a century ago. It must have seemed like such a good idea at the time. In 1910, the global village was still farmland. The telephone had only recently outgrown the ridicule that first greeted it. The first commercial radio station was still a world war away. It had been a scant sixty years since the debut of the telegraph. (“What hath God wrought?” inventor Samuel F. B. Morse brooded morosely in the world’s first text message.)

  Ninety-nine years and one trillion Web pages later, “only connect” is a goal we have achieved with a vengeance. So much so that our biggest challenge today may be finding the moral courage to log off.

  Today, some 93 percent of teenagers are online and 75 percent use cell phones, according to 2010 figures from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Marketing data show 92 percent of teens own an iPod or MP3 player, while upward of two-thirds own their own computer (and access to one at home is near-universal). But the most provocative statistics are those that show how intensely our children interact with their media. In a large-scale study of young people who use media, conducted in 2005—ancient history already—up to a third told the Kaiser Family Foundation they were using multiple electronic devices simultaneously “most of the time.” Researchers calculated that that meant the average American teenager was spending 8.5 hours a day in some form of mass-mediated interaction. And because media use in families is directly correlated with income, the figures were higher still in households at the more affluent end of the socioeconomic spectrum, and where parents were more highly educated.1

  By 2010, when Kaiser updated the data, the media bubble continued to swell. Kids aged eight to eighteen had now increased their screen time by more than an hour and a quarter a day, from six hours, twenty-one minutes to seven hours, thirty-eight minutes—or the equivalent of an average working day, seven days a week. When multitasking was factored into the equation, the figure distended even further: to nearly eleven hours of what researchers now call “exposure.” Add time spent texting and talking on cell phones—which the Kaiser folks did not even define as media—and the picture gets downright radioactive.2

  For Generation M, as the Kaiser report dubbed these eight- to eighteen-year-olds, media use is not an activity—like exercise, or playing Monopoly, or bickering with your brother in the backseat. It’s an environment: pervasive, invisible, shrink-wrapped around pretty much everything kids do and say and think. How adaptive an environment is the question—and the answer, not surprisingly, seems to depend entirely on whom you ask. The Pew Project found that, among teens, 88 percent are convinced that technology makes their lives easier. A decidedly more ambivalent 69 percent of parents say the same—although two-thirds also make some effort to regulate their children’s use of media in some way (rules about safe sites, file sharing, time use, etc.).3

  A 2007 Kaiser study found that nearly one in five parents believed there was no need to monitor their kids’ screen time closely,4 while the Pew research showed an astonishing 30 percent of parents believe that media have no effect on their children one way or the other.5 Maybe that’s wishful thinking. On the other hand, maybe it’s not wishful enough. “One way or the other”—to me it’s like saying the food we eat, or the air we breathe, or the communities we live in have no effect on us one way or the other. Or it could be these parents simply had a hard time imagining life outside the technological bubble—and, if so, who could blame them? Before undertaking this project, I had a hard time imagining it myself.

  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.)

  » 1

  Who We Are, and Why We Pressed “Pause”

  I love technology

  But not as much as you, you see.

  But I still love technology,

  Always and forev
er.

  —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.