The Winter of Our Disconnect Page 5

  It was midmorning by now. I sat at the kitchen table and, watching the curtains stir in a weak sea breeze, reflected happily on all the chores I could not possibly get done. On a normal morning, if I wasn’t at work toggling between my e-mails, my sound editor, the voice mail on two phones, and my customary six open tabs on Internet Explorer, I was at home toggling between the vacuum, the iPhone, the hair straightener, and three Word documents in varying degrees of undress. I’ve always considered mornings to be my most productive time. Thoreau did too, but in a somewhat different spirit. While he was at Walden Pond, he wrote, “Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.” Glancing at the $75 pile of batteries on the kitchen table, it occurred to me that simplicity was deceptively complex. The stillness was good—now that I’d experienced perhaps twenty minutes of it—but it was also, frankly, just a tiny bit spooky.

  It was Sartre, I believe, who observed so gloomily that “life is elsewhere” (and he was living in Paris at the time). He was wrong, of course. Life is never elsewhere. And convincing yourself otherwise—that you are fate’s victim, or prisoner, or terry-cloth hand puppet, even—only underscores the point. That’s one thing my not-entirely-self-imposed exile Down Under has taught me.

  When I told my Australian boyfriend I’d follow him to the ends of the earth, I had no idea he’d take me so literally. We were in graduate school at NYU, finishing our respective doctorates, when Ron, a Sydneysider, was offered a job in Perth, Western Australia. If it hadn’t been for that job offer, we probably never would have gotten married. We certainly would never have settled in Perth—a move that, from my perspective as a New Yorker (even an idealistic New Yorker, helplessly awash in the dopamine-scented haze of young love) felt more like a transfer to the lunar surface.

  When we divorced three years later, it was hardly what you’d call a bolt from the blue. He was an Anglican priest who enjoyed golf, tennis, and vintage port. I was a kick-ass feminist intellectual who excelled at chain-smoking. It was never gonna happen. Our geographical differences were equally irreconcilable. He was overjoyed to be back in his own country after four years in New York. As for me, as much as I appreciated the clean air and gorgeous beaches, I knew I could never in a billion years call Australia home.

  That was twenty-four years ago. LOL.

  In the meantime, I remarried—a doctor this time—and had three babies (but not necessarily in that order) with alarming alacrity. The kids were four, two, and six months old when we broke up. My first divorce had been sad but amicable. This one was a conflagration. With an Australian as the father of my children, my chances of moving back to the United States were now as remote as Perth itself. I’d followed my heart to the ends of the earth, all right. And now I was stranded here.

  That was fourteen years and several lifetimes ago. I look back at those days when I wished my ex-husband would get run over by a bus and feel pretty ashamed. I realize now that migration to a third-world country would have been fine. Kidding, people! He was, and very much still is, the father of my children. I remind myself of that every day of my life. The kids love him, and he loves them, and whatever the differences between us, that should be good enough for me. It’s not. But at least I recognize that it should be. Like that half-done quilt I’ve had stuffed into a bottom drawer since my eldest started middle school, I’m working on it.

  Death, it is said, concentrates the mind wonderfully. So, too, does having sole charge of three kids under five. In the early years, like many another single parent, I clung to my professional identity like a baby to an umbilicus. I started writing a weekly newspaper column about my kids. I started writing books about gender and family life. And I started planning. (Up until this time, I decided, I’d lived in the here and now perhaps a little too successfully.) I formulated a five-year plan to get us stateside. Six years later, I revised that to a ten-year plan, and then a fifteen-year plan. In the meantime, the lioness’s share of my energy went to parenting my children: one sticky, sleep-deprived, extraordinary day at a time. I reminded myself that if home was where the heart was, then by any real reckoning I was already back in Kansas. Some of the time, I even believed it.

  All this backstory matters, because, in a funny kind of way, being ... well, cut off has been such a central theme for me. You might almost say that going off the grid has been the story of my adult life. It has certainly served as the wellspring of my IT attachment issues. Simply put, digital media have made it possible for me to live in two places at once—Australia and America—in a mind/body split so sustained and ambitious, it makes Descartes look like a cheese grater.

  When I arrived in Western Australia in 1986, an airmail letter from New York took two weeks to arrive. (“You needed special onion-skin paper, special stamps, special stickers,” I tell the kids in a quavery voice. “Seriously, we’re talking one step beyond sealing wax and a signet ring.”) Trans-hemispheric phone calls were like Woody Allen’s joke about the meals at the Catskills resort: They were terrible and you never got enough of them. Annoying three-second transmission delays ensured plenty of awkward silences and inaudible cross-talk, and an eerie, swishing echo that lent conversation all the intimacy of a Jacques Cousteau special. In fact, “conversing” was a misnomer. Basically, you gurgled. And if the party you were speaking to recognized it as your gurgle, you were satisfied.

  There were even bigger problems than the four-week turnaround to find out how your two-month-old nephew was (now that he was your three-month-old nephew). The New York Times crossword puzzle, for example. Like Rapunzel pining for rampion, my craving for it grew so intense that my worried husband was forced to forage for it—in one case, in the U.S. Consulate General’s office on St. George’s Terrace. It’s a kindness I have never forgotten.

  Today, The New York Times is my homepage. I read it on my iPhone on the train to work. I do the daily puzzle then, too, if I feel like it. But there’s really no rush. Because as a premium crossword member, I have access to more than four thousand other puzzles, and solutions, from the Times’s archives.☺

  How can I begin to explain how such innovations have changed my life? I stream NPR’s Morning Edition live in my bedroom (albeit in the late evening the previous day, owing to deep time-zone weirdness). I listen to a gazillion U.S. podcasts through my car radio—including almost every program broadcast by my “home” public radio station, WNYC. WNYC! On the Kwinana Freeway, heading south over the Swan River. Past the suburbs of Dog Swamp and Innaloo, and the aspirationally titled Perth Entertainment Center!

  I can talk to my family via e-mail, Facebook, IM, or Skype, instantaneously and in real time, whenever I want to. With webcams, we can pretend we’re all in the same room, let alone the same hemisphere. (Which, come to think of it, is maybe why we don’t do it that often ...) I can call my sister’s cell phone on Long Island from my cell phone in Fremantle. I can order American music, books, and DVDs direct from Amazon. I can download American television direct from iTunes—occasionally going to heroic technological lengths to do so (by purchasing a U.S. iTunes gift card on eBay in Australian dollars from some guy in Spain, as I did recently).

  Before the Internet, getting books from the States—or even from Sydney or Melbourne—was a long-haul operation. A shipping delay of three to six months was standard. No exaggeration, the words “sea mail” make me nauseated to this day. Today, I can get an e-book as fast as anybody, anywhere—in about a minute. The first time I tried it, I literally wept for joy.

  For an information junkie in exile like me, the dawning of the digital age has been like the arrival of a rescue ship.

  Even on the occasion of my first encounter online—back when “websites,” so-called, consisted largely of dense pages of alphanumerics—I knew instantly that my world, and by extension THE world, had shifted on its axis, irreversibly. The chill that went down my spine was the same shock of recognition I felt the morning I met my husband, the day I watched
my son play his first game of water polo, the moment I beheld my firstborn’s face: that there was life before this moment, and then there would be life after. And I know that sounds pretty dramatic. But ... that’s the point.

  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 Waldenesque 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.