The Winter of Our Disconnect Page 4

  TiVo (2000-ish) and even DVDs (1995-ish)—initials, its founders insist, that stand for nothing at all—seem like old technology already, though they’re far from obsolete. But tracking down a VCR to watch your old home movies is like trying to find a Bakelite phone at the Apple Store.

  Okay, what about e-mail? We can’t talk indispensable, omnipresent, and omnivorous without talking e-mail.

  I remember vividly the first e-mail message I ever received. It was from my girlfriend Pat who worked at Princeton and it was hand-delivered to me as hard copy (ironic, I know) by the IT technician at the university department where I was then employed. The year was 1994. Up until that day, I had only the fuzziest idea what e-mail was; I certainly didn’t know I’d been allocated an account. I was thrilled. Deeply confused, but thrilled.

  In fact, although e-mail was first demonstrated at MIT in 1961, it wasn’t really until the late nineties that the ranks of business- and then home-users began banking up—particularly after the launch of Hotmail in 1996. And I know all this thanks to Wikipedia, of course (formally launched in 2001, in case you’re offline and want to know).

  Speaking of monoliths, Internet search site (and so much more) Google, which as I write employs a full-time global workforce of 20,222 and is regarded as the most powerful brand in the world, was registered as a domain in 1997. The ubiquitous verb “Google” was added to both the Merriam-Webster’s and the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006. (For 1,490,000 other sources of information on this topic, just Google “history of Google.”)

  As if these statistics aren’t startling enough, consider that Facebook, which as of this writing has 400 million active users—half of whom, I swear, are “friends” with my eighteen-year-old—was launched in 2004. 2004, people! If Facebook were your child, it would still be in first grade. Today, Australians spend nearly one-third of their entire online time budget Facebooking. Admittedly, that’s a world record. (Something to do with the ozone layer?) The rest of the global village isn’t far behind. A Nielsen study published in January 2010 showed social networking increased internationally by 82 percent over the previous year.4 A GFC (global friending crisis) appears unlikely anytime soon.

  So new, and yet so far, eh? And if 1996 seems like the Stone Age even to someone like me—who can remember when the transistor frigging radio was cutting edge—is it any wonder that our kids can’t imagine life without media? Or that on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (teenage edition), access to Internet browsing, an e-mail account, Facebook, iTunes, Nintendo, and a cell phone sits somewhere between “Safety” and “Love/Belonging”?

  And yet, if the Digital Bill of Rights increasingly governs family life, and I would argue that it does, it’s important to recognize who ratified it in the first place. Actually ... and this is kind of embarrassing ... we did. Especially those of us for whom the Information Age has coincided with our coming of age as parents, producing excitement, confusion, and a weird eclipse of attention. We’ve been caught up in a monsoon of technological change as mind-blowing in its intensity as ... well, having kids in the first place. And I say that not to inspire guilt—if you’re parents, you don’t need my help with that one—but to raise consciousness.

  Public debate around the media ecology of family life has had a helpless quality, positioning parents, not entirely inaccurately, as the little Dutch boy with his finger in the digital dyke. After six months of trying to keep a single household screen-free, trust me, I have much sympathy with that view. It is true, we don’t have a prayer of holding back the flood entirely, even if we wanted to. But why would we want to? Information, like water, is a good thing ... in its place.

  The old saw reminds us that, to a man with a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. Does it follow that to a girl with a Photo-bucket account, the whole world looks like a fashion shoot? Or that to a boy with a joystick and a graphics card, the whole world looks like a psychotic dwarf with an ax? To an important extent—definitely more than we have been comfortable admitting—yes, it sort of does. Ultimately, the answer is not to take away the hammer, but to see that it is used for more than bashing away at things. To ensure our children free their hands—and their heads—to take up other tools too.

  We don’t know who discovered water, but it wasn’t a fish, someone wise once observed. Whatever else it might accomplish, or fail to, our Experiment was about to propel us, stunned and gasping, out of our fishbowl for good.

  » 2

  Power Trip: The Darkness Descends

  Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

  —WALDEN, chapter 18

  Slipping through the French doors onto the verandah, I felt the night air on my skin like some expensive moisturizer, warm and thick and lightly fragrant. It was just after midnight on a sultry summer night. I could see the moon and a few streaks of fast-moving cloud framed between the sloping tin roof and the white bougainvillea that had grown with fairy-tale abandon since the hot weather set in. The whiff of ocean salt was so fresh I could taste it.

  Inside the house, the kids were asleep, sunburned and still sandy from two weeks of holiday. Concentrating, I could hear the drone of a ceiling fan and, farther back, the hum from my son’s PC, as familiar and insistent as my own pulse. The digital display from my clock radio, flaring red, was just visible from where I stood. Seeing it flash, my heart began to beat in my head like a boom box.

  I knew what I had to do. I was scared shitless to do it.

  A voice within me spoke. “You’re a parent, right? So what else is new?”

  I looked squarely at the meter box mounted at eye level in front of me, the switch marked “MAINS” illuminated in a cheesy shaft of moonlight, took aim with a steady hand—and fired.

  The idea to go screen-free for six months had been a calculated one. The idea to get in shape for it with two weeks of Blackout Bootcamp was more of a sudden inspiration. If you will, a lightbulb going off.

  Psychologically, pulling the plug on the whole catastrophe—lights and appliances included—seemed to make sense. Like jumping into a cold pool, it was better, surely, to take the plunge in one breath-defying leap than to experience withdrawal gradually, degree by painful degree. And there was a bonus: By the time we got around to switching on the power again, we’d be desensitized. We’d rejoice in what we’d recovered, rather than bemoan what we’d lost. Or so, at least, I prayed.

  In the meantime, well, I was quite fond of candlelight. (What woman of a certain age is not?) Plus, it would mean no vacuuming for two weeks, and no gigantic loads of washing. I told the kids we would each be responsible for our own laundry, and I could practically see them silently counting their pairs of clean underpants. We had a gas stove, so cooking wasn’t an issue. And our gas water heater meant we could still have hot showers.

  “It’ll be like camping, guys!” I enthused.

  “We hate camping,” Sussy pointed out. “You hate camping, Mum.”

  Details, details! “I hate bugs and dirt and sleeping bags,” I corrected. “This is camping the way it ought to be: with our own beds, pillows, stemware, and dual-flush toilets.”

  Thoreau himself helped me figure out the timing. He’d begun his life in the woods at Walden Pond on Independence Day, July 4, 1844. For us in the southern hemisphere—where Thoreau the naturalist would have been enchanted to discover the trees shed their bark but keep their leaves—that equated to January 4. Equally important, it would allow exactly twelve hours upon our return from Gracetown to machine-wash the station wagon full of holiday laundry we’d carted home with us. (Lord knows, doing it by hand would have been like vacuuming the house with an ear syringe.) Fittingly, from the children’s point of view, our experiment would end on Independence Day.

  “But what about the phone?” the kids had asked, panicked. I explained we’d simply go back to using old-fashioned cord phones, but they were still suspicious. “How will they stay charged?” they fretted.

  “You can’t be serious,” I replied.

  T
he truth is, I had no idea. Seriously, why doesn’t a basic phone need electricity? It’s kind of magical, once you stop to think about it. And actually I had stopped to think about it not that long ago.

  It was on a day maybe six months earlier, when The Experiment was just an evil gleam in Mummy’s gimlet eye. I was working from home, and I heard the sound of many phones ringing. Nothing unusual there. Our cordless collection at that point numbered five handsets, each programmed by Sussy with its own very special, faintly satanic ringtone (a techno-inspired remix of “Home Sweet Home” being the most chilling). Visitors occasionally cried out in terror when our phones rang. For me, the scary part was finding the damn things.

  The children rarely bothered returning the phones to their recharging stations. To be honest, it wasn’t my forte either. Most of the time, we’d simply drop them where they’d last been used, like gum wrappers or gym socks. Usually you could follow a ringtone to its source—tangled up in the bedclothes, or peeking out coyly from a drawer, or squashed under the sofa cushions like a raisin. But all this took time and energy and the kind of playful ingenuity I rarely had anymore, unless a pitcher of margaritas was involved. Even worse was the problem of the MIAs: phones that had wandered away from base and been left to die in some foxhole. Every once in a while they would all go missing, and I’d find myself on a grim telephonic scavenger hunt, seeking wounded handsets too weak to respond to signal.

  On this particular day, I was expecting an important work call, and ... well, let’s put it this way. If a phone rings in the forest, and there’s nobody there who can find it, does it still make a sound?

  The next day I went out and bought a couple of old-fashioned plug-in phones for my bedroom and home office. The color of prosthetic limbs, they featured oversized buttons and pretty much nothing else, and were clearly meant for the demented and the infirm. So be it. At this point, I qualified easily on both counts. The kids ROFLed uproariously at the sight, but I knew I would have the last LOL. Next time the phone rang, instead of having to smoke it out with a gasoline torch, a psychic, and a Geiger counter, I could just pick it up and answer it. “Honestly!” I crowed. “What will they think of next?”

  So we were good for phones. Illumination would be a snap too, once we’d stocked up on candles, kerosene, flashlights, and battery-operated lanterns. It would be like mood lighting. At the very least, it would cast a romantic glow on the buildup of unvacuumed pet hair. Food and drink might be a bit trickier, but I figured it would be a good excuse to buy a massive ice chest—I’d always wanted one with wheels, the kind that looks big enough to store human remains—and to shop for meals like a single person, i.e., spontaneously and one day at a time.

  “Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner,” Thoreau exhorted. I was down with that.

  Coping without air-conditioning in the blast-furnace heat of the Western Australian summer was a less sanguine prospect. This, I knew, we would definitely yearn for ... exactly as we did every other year. It’s true. Despite temperatures that stay in the nineties all summer and frequently soar above 100, most West Aussies still live without climate control, and we were among them. It wasn’t so bad in the port city of Fremantle, where we live, and where, even on the hottest days, the Fremantle Doctor—the famous sea breeze off the Indian Ocean—comes to the rescue by early afternoon. Giving up our ceiling fans would be tough though—especially for Sussy, who prefers to sleep in a stiff breeze in all weathers, like a wolf cub.

  If worse came to worst, I reflected, we could always fill up the big clawfoot tub with cold water and soak ourselves like navy beans. We used to do this when the kids were littler and more biddable—and when it gets really hot and no one’s looking, I still do. It’s not the most dignified way to chill out, but once you break through the pain barrier and cross over to feeling like human luncheon meat, it’s way cool. Bill talked about reviving his favorite childhood cool-down strategy and making an “ice baby”: a dishtowel packed with ice cubes and fastened with a rubber band, which one takes to bed and hugs like a new teddy bear, or a transitional husband.

  The only thing I really worried about was my hair (a topic on which Thoreau provided not the slightest scrap of inspiration, incidentally). Although I’d tried to downplay it all their lives, the truth is, Anni and Sussy had a genetic predisposition to hair-related OCD. I had codependency issues with my straightener too—especially since I’d stopped coloring my hair. Anne Kreamer’s book Going Gray had been one of the highlights of my literary year, and I’d become a complete convert to the cause. So far, the experience had been reasonably positive. I looked less heritage-listed than I’d feared—more Susan Sontag than Bob Hawke. I’d recently had bangs cut and found that with daily straightening, it looked borderline chic. Without daily straightening, alas, it looked borderline freak: wavy and cowlicked, like the warden of a women’s prison on the late movie.

  It’s funny the things you cling to when you whittle down life to its barest essentials. Thoreau found he absolutely could not live without a volume of Homer in the original Greek. For me, it was really, really straight bangs.

  January 3, 2009

  THE LAST NIGHT, 10:17 p.m. As I write these words, a mere two hours from the start of Operation Hellhole, a full-scale media binge is under way. The girls are stalking a newfound hottie through the many mansions of MySpace, goddaughter Maddi (here on holiday) is taking nourishment from her Sidekick in gulps, and Bill sits becalmed and, I fear, benumbed before his computer game. It’s that hi-def gladiator one again: enormous men with tiny heads, slavegirls in push-up bras. There’s a whole lot of smiting going on.

  A bit of grumbling on the way home from Gracetown today, but it’s hard to fight properly after two weeks of holiday. On arriving home, Anni found the strength for one final (or so I hope) tantrum. “What you’re asking us to do is not fair. You’re not even asking. You’re just telling!”

  I “acknowledged concerns” because I thought it was a good mediation strategy, but also because she’s right. She announced dramatically that she would “have to move to Dad’s—but I resent it!” All sparked by my refusal to delay The Experiment till tomorrow afternoon, thus allowing her to dry and straighten hair after swimming in the morning.

  Am not without sympathy, but implied strongly that the decision was out of my hands. Have given impression that the mains power is “being shut off” (i.e., by the electricity company) rather than admitting that I am turning it off myself. I am a coward. But I am an experienced coward. I know the kind of pester-power this could generate. Like, enough to light up the whole frigging neighborhood.

  Made peace by reminding her she was free to straighten at friends’ and neighbors’.

  “But, Mum, wouldn’t that be against your own rules?”

  Not at all. At least, I don’t think so. Hang on. Don’t these people realize I’m just making it up as I go along? You know, like parenting itself.

  Had planned to discuss everybody’s expectations-slash-forebodings of the Big Boring Journey ahead, but chickened out. Am afraid asking them to think ahead in too much detail could be disastrous. They have been remarkably, uncharacteristically acquiescent so far. We want to keep that thought.

  For myself, I anticipate missing the most:• My straightener (LOL)

  • My iPhone

  • Microsoft Word (Because frankly, my writing hand has already had it)

  • Google!!

  • The New York Times online

  • Pretending I don’t really live in Perth

  I went to the discount hardware store for supplies on the morning of January 4, trying to remember Thoreau’s words: “Simplify, simplify!” Okay, it wasn’t that much to remember. But it was harder than it sounds because I actually love hardware, and the more complicated the better. I can spend hours cruising for DIY stuff: shelving, knobs and fittings, power tools. Picture-hanging tackle is a particular weakness, and so, for some reason, is the fixative aisle—you know
, glues, pastes, clamps, fillers. (Please don’t tell me that’s a metaphor.) As I wended my way toward LIGHTING, past ramparts of storage bins and leaf blowers, and down a seemingly endless aisle of hose fittings, I recalled Thoreau’s advice: “Let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand. Instead of a million, count half a dozen; and keep your accounts on your thumbnail.”

  Clearly, the man had never gone shopping for flashlights at Bunnings. Lantern-style, high-beam, fluorescent tubed, pocket-sized, solar-powered, waterproof, touch-sensitive, even head-lamp style (just the thing for reading Walden in a mineshaft). I spent a good forty-five minutes fretting over my choices, but in the end I think Thoreau would have been proud. Or at least not entirely disgusted. I saved my receipt—because Thoreau saved his receipts, and printed them, which is how we know exactly how much he spent to build his humble one-room house, down to the last nail and board ($28.12½). For what I spent on six lanterns, a box of candles, some large matches, a lot of batteries, and an ice chest ($240.81), Thoreau could have built a convention center.

  On the way home I stopped at the deli for the largest bag of ice I could find ($3.75), which I used to fill the ice chest. I stocked it with the essentials: milk, cheese, eggs, a bar of Lindt 70 percent cocoa solids dark, a cucumber, and a pretty decent Margaret River Semillon Sauvignon Blanc. (“I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man,” Thoreau had written. Yes, well. I am a woman.)