The Winter of Our Disconnect Read online

  You listen to your iPod while you do other stuff, after all. That’s the beauty of the device. In fact, that’s the whole point of the device. It allows you to live your life to a set of soundtracks of your own devising (homework music, bus music, workout music, maternal-nagging-block-out music, etc.). But a soundtrack, as the name suggests, is something that plays underneath the main event. It provides atmosphere, not plot; background noise, not foreground action. It is a takeout coffee in a cardboard cup, consumed in careless sips on the way to work. It’s not breakfast.

  “If a man loses pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer,” Thoreau observed, in what is surely the best-known line in Walden and perhaps in all of American literature. “Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured, or far away.” Like everybody else in the civilized world, I was familiar with those words. But The Experiment made me hear them anew—with unstoppered ears—as an absolutely uncanny evocation of the age of iPod. Each of us stepping to the music we hear? Hello? That is sooo not a metaphor anymore, but literally and explicitly what technology invites us to do. The fact that “pod” is derived from the Latin for “foot”—so that it could be translated roughly as “I step”—makes the connection all the spookier.

  As I write these words, I experience an almost visceral longing for the personal drumbeats of my own iPod. (Put it this way: It’s no coincidence that the Winter of Our Disconnect has coincided with the Winter of My Lapsed Gym Membership.) Yet I’ve become acutely aware that there are benefits to undergoing an elective iPodectomy. In some ways, plugging in can make it more difficult to hear that elusive different drummer. And as for the guy on keyboards, don’t get me started ...

  I should clarify here that using our iPods (or in my case an iPhone) was verboten at all times during The Experiment, as opposed to computers, which we were able to access at school or work or friends’ places or cafés, or anywhere, really, outside the boundaries of our property. (Luckily our nearest neighbors had access codes in place, or my kids might have taken up residence on the sidewalk.) “Kind of arbitrary rules,” my friend Mary sniffed. But then she’s a Presbyterian, so she would say that. Yes, there was a degree of flexibility, as we Anglicans say, in the way we—or I, really—interpreted the “no screens” injunction. We were allowed to listen to CDs, and the radio, of course, but any form of docking station was strictly out of bounds. It wasn’t logic that dictated this decision—an audio file is an audio file, after all—it was pragmatism. If iPods were allowed to roam free in people’s bedrooms, I reasoned, sooner or later they would be sure to migrate to people’s ears, and lodge there like mites. Allowing iPods into the equation would have been like, oh, I don’t know, decking the halls with bowls of Lindt truffles while you were on Atkins (which Sussy and I were by month four, btw). Like, why would you do that to yourself?

  There was one loophole the kids did manage to slither through: their phones. Like all moral lapses, this one happened when I was looking the other way. Let me explain. Way back on Christmas Day, some time between the carving of the holiday roast salmon and the popping of our homemade crackers, Bill had suddenly shattered the merriment as if with a beribboned Christmas sledgehammer. “What about our phones?” he’d asked. I watched the merriment drain from my children’s faces as, hollow-eyed and beseeching, they turned to me. The mood had lurched in an instant from Norman Rockwell to Edvard Munch. (But then holiday dinners can be like that.)

  The truth was, I’d already considered the phone question in some detail. I knew that The Experiment would need to entail a total iPhone disconnect for myself. It was my chief and most cherished addiction; plus, the device itself functioned as a kind of super-screen. It did everything all the individual devices could do, and more. I could watch TV on it, or movies, or check e-mail, or surf the Net, or take photographs, or play games, or listen to music, or ... Okay, down, girl.

  The kids’ phones were different. Between the three of them, they’d lost more mobiles than molars. It had gotten to the point where we all accepted there was no point getting them anything fancier than a digital tuna can and a piece of string. Although their phones did undoubtedly possess screens, they had no Internet, dodgy cameras, or crappy games. Plus, I’d resisted putting Anni and Bill on a plan and had instead made each of them responsible for buying their own prepaid minutes (an ignominy, if they were to be believed, on a par with being sent to school in crocheted Day-Glo ponchos). As a result of this, their phones functioned largely as pager devices. They could receive calls and texts, but their capacity to reply was restricted and often nonexistent. As for Sussy, she didn’t have a phone at all at that point. I’d given her my brand-new Nokia when the iPhone and I were still on our honeymoon, but within a month it had been stolen by dudes unknown at a down-market Year 9 social event.

  Given all that, I’d decided that the phones would be my bargaining chip—to be played if, and only if, I encountered huge resistance to the proposal. The thing was, I hadn’t encountered huge resistance, and in retrospect I can see that that’s what threw me.

  Reader, I caved. But I did put some restrictions in place. No games—not even crappy ones. (Anni, otherwise the scholarly child, was especially prone to Tetris bingeing at times of stress.) No plugging in to MP3s (despite having the storage capacity of a pill dispenser, a de facto iPod was a de facto iPod, and off-limits). They could use their phones, as phones—and nothing more. And they had to agree that abusing the privilege would mean its withdrawal without further notice. “Yes, but who’s to say what’s ‘abuse’?” Anni began.

  “Do you want your bribe, or don’t you?” Sussy hissed. I couldn’t have put it better myself.

  With access to unlimited downloads on a “real” phone—an iPhone, BlackBerry, or other smartphone—The Experiment would have been severely compromised, if not entirely pointless. Increasingly, and especially for teenagers, mobile technology is where it’s at, and content provision for handheld devices is widely regarded as the next big digital frontier. Games, movies, social media, live broadcasts, the full range of rich media right there in every child’s back pocket is already a reality for many. Soon it will be for most. What this will spell for our children’s collective experience of “boredom” is anybody’s guess. (A generation ago, we’d grown accustomed to a commercial break every seven minutes. Today’s Twitterati grow restless after 140 characters.)

  What is certain is that we will pay dearly for the privilege in all kinds of ways. According to one recent UK study, today’s teenagers are spending twelve times more than they did in 1975 to buy, quote-unquote, essential technology, even indexed for inflation.7

  The upper limit on even traditional modes of mobile connectivity, such as texting, seems to have no upper limit. “Can you believe that in April 2008 one teen managed to rack up over six thousand text messages in one month?” asks a high school counselor/ blogger. Two hundred texts a day? Ha! Not only can I believe it, I’ve streamed it live in the discomfort of my own home, but more of that later.

  At least prepaid phone minutes are self-limiting; therein lies their advantage. Once the allowance is gone, it’s gone—more or less. iPods, on the other hand, are not in the slightest degree self-limiting: While purchasing content from the iTunes Store can be fun, it is certainly not necessary. That anytime/anywhere quality lies at the heart of the iPod mystique, and was exactly what made me nervous about them. As the mother of three teenagers, I knew the first law of digital dynamics like the PalmPilot of my hand: That which can be accessed will be accessed. I’d fallen under the spell of my iPod from the first too—the date was January 30, 2007, and the song was the Pointer Sisters’ “Jump” (and I did—with joy). Suffice it to say, I knew firsthand how the seduction worked.

  Naturally, the kids agitated to be allowed to use their iPods in the car. “You said no screens in the house,” they reminded me. “You didn’t say anything about the car.”

  “Ah, but the car is an extension of the house,”
I extemporized glibly. Honestly. You needed to be a cross between Yoda and Sonia Sotomayor just to survive a day with these people. The truth is, I enjoyed listening to podded content through our iTrip—the doohickey that plugs into the cigarette lighter at one end and your iPod at the other to produce sound, improbably, through your car radio—as much as anybody. What I hated was the endless negotiations, the disc-jockeying for position, that went along with it. Whose iPod? Which playlist? For how long and at what volume? And what about podcasts? Sheesh. It almost made me nostalgic for the old days, when the only thing we had to fistfight over was the radio.

  One of our old cars—a junk heap of a Mercedes wagon with balding velour upholstery and a wheezy pneumatic locking system—had a vintage Telefunken radio that only received one station, Fremantle Community Radio (think “Hits of the War Years” and nightmarish Pat Boone tributes). Basically, we had two choices: We could listen to Vera Lynn singing “The White Cliffs of Dover,” again, or we could sit in silence. It was horrible but also wonderful. Restful, even. A balm to the decision fatigue that, as a single mother, was a constant occupational hazard.

  When our next car turned out to have both a functioning radio and a cassette player—call it a splurge, okay?—the girls tried their hand at creating mix tapes. These were, to use their favorite word, “random.” One of the classics featured “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” from The Sound of Music, “Teenage Dirtbag,” and an indie hit with which we could all, from time to time, identify: “I Love You ’Cause I Have To.” There were several such tapes and we played them over and over and over again, until they were threadbare and raspy. But we loved them—I as much as anybody. In time we all learned every word to every lyric and would shamelessly sing along. Sure, I was partial to the Disney hits (come on: Sebastian the lobster? Does Western music really get any better than that?) and gritted my teeth through the literary wilderness that is a Hilary Duff lyric, but rolling with the musical punches was the whole point of our mix tapes.

  Then we got our iPods, and we didn’t have to anymore. For us, as for most families, the advent of the personal music player ushered in a whole new era in family car trips. Boredom, once as much a feature of the average car journey as baiting your sister in the backseat, was banished like a naughty child. Now everybody could listen to their own content, podded in their own private world of sound. “Be your own telegraph,” Thoreau had exhorted his readers back in 1848. A century and a half on, we’d done better than that. We’d become our own transistor radios.

  Three kids, three iPods, three playlists, and a single pervasive silence. Presto. Of course, if you listened carefully you could hear their preferred hits leaking out of their respective inner ears—from Miley Cyrus (Suss) to Metric (Anni) to Rage Against the Machine (Bill, ironically). No conversation was necessary. Indeed, no conversation was possible. As for accommodating somebody else’s musical taste, well, if you didn’t have to, why would you? “We know what we like, Mum,” the baby informed me as she cranked up the jam on “Sexy Back.” I prayed she was mistaken. I was pretty sure it was more accurate to say she liked what she knew. And as long as we stayed securely corked within our own musical marinades—never bored but arguably never stirred, or shaken either—how could we know anything else? Listening to their music had certainly expanded my horizons in the pre-Pod era. Few women of my age could rap as effortlessly to “Fergalicious” as I.

  But it wasn’t just loss of standards that worried me. It was loss of hearing. According to recent studies by the American Academy of Audiology, more than one in eight kids suffers from irreversible, noise-induced hearing loss—and the trend, much like the volume control on our kids’ iPods, is definitely on the upward swing. By the time the iGeneration reach their sixties, it is estimated that more than half will be hearing impaired. Forget about earbuds. By then, it’ll be a case of ear trumpets. The problem is that heavy exposure to sounds delivered directly to the inner ear through earbuds or headphones wreaks havoc on the delicate hair cells of the cochlea. How loud is too loud? Basically, if you can hear even the faintest strains of High School Musical 3 from your child’s iPod, she is listening at unsafe levels.

  But trying to get my kids to listen to this—or for that matter to anything else—was unheard of. Literally. “Twenty-five percent of all iPod users listen at levels loud enough and long enough to cause damage,” I found myself practically screaming one morning.

  “What?” they replied.

  A few days before we left for Gracetown, a fourteen-year-old British girl stepped out in front of a car as she listened to her iPod, and was killed. A witness told police, “She did not hesitate, she did not stop, she did not slow down or look before crossing.” The driver was allegedly speeding and was charged with careless driving. But still. A UK insurance company claims that “podestrians,” as the Brits call them, now account for one in ten minor road accidents—and over half of them involve kids. I try hard not to be overly precious about my children’s safety—and they are, on the whole, very aware and responsible kids—but this terrified me.

  iPod muggings were another concern—especially reports of teens so invested in their devices they were unwilling to give them up without a struggle. “The iPod to the teenager is the baby to the mother,” a child expert told The Canadian Press in November 2008. “These kids are so invested in their music and in their playlists, it’s like they put their identity into their song selection. So you’re not just stealing a device. To them, you’re stealing an identity.”8 I found that perfectly understandable, which is perhaps why it rattled me. I was sure I would have reacted in exactly the same way at that age. If someone had attempted to mug me while I was lugging my entire collection of LPs plus my turntable and speakers around the city with me, I too would have resisted. (As if life without Don McLean could possibly have meaning!) But I think the point is pretty plain: I wouldn’t have been doing it in the first place.

  For all these reasons, I decided that going pod-free—as free as the grass grows, as free as the wiiiiind blows, pod-free to follow your heart—was the way to go. If boredom was the price we had to pay for rediscovering our original headspace of environmental adaptedness, aka the lost art of staring into space, then so be it.

  Not surprisingly, I guess, my own reentry trauma was relatively short-lived (but dramatic while it lasted, as you’ll find out in the next chapter). As a Baby Boomer, I’d grown up in boredom’s halcyon days, when all the world was black and white. The expectation that life would offer me a constant stream of entertainment was more of an acquired characteristic—and relatively recently acquired. I think back to my teenage bedroom, in the days when being sent to your room without supper still had vaguely negative connotations. By contrast, Sussy asked for—and received—a bar fridge for her bedroom at the age of ten. Between their so-called workstations, televisions, DVD players, Nintendos, and various listening devices, children’s rooms today feature more entertainment options than a Las Vegas casino. In my day, if you wanted to play violent interactive games, watch inappropriate content, and converse with dodgy strangers, you had to wait for a family reunion.

  But then, when I grew up, an electric carving knife qualified as high-end technology. (“Cut it on the bias, Greg! On the bias!” my mother would carp, as if the rump steak were a homemade garment Dad was attempting to piece from a pattern.) Boredom was built into the fabric of a child’s life in those days. You didn’t have to like it. But you were expected to endure it, and endure it you did. In church, for example—where my sister and I developed a whole host of elaborate and unholy strategies for passing the time, using props such as a single white glove, a couple of dimes for the collection plate, and a “children’s missal” with the freakiest illustrations this side of Sendak. (In my mind’s eye, I can still see Satan’s face, green and warty like a dill pickle, as he tempted Christ on the mountain.) I can’t imagine what would happen if I dragged my kids into a Latin mass and left them there for forty-five minutes, with only a rosary for a ha
ndheld game. They’d probably call the Kids’ Help Line and have me arrested on charges of aggravated thaasophobia.

  By contemporary standards, even our family holidays were boring. Generally, we’d drive for many hours, with only billboards, AM radio, and clouds of secondhand smoke from the front seat to beguile the time. Parents certainly didn’t take on the role of in-flight social directors-slash-events organizers for their young passengers, as we do now. A desultory game of Twenty Questions (nineteen of them some variation on “Are we there yet?”) and a roll of lifesavers was as ambitious as it ever got. Lord knows, there were no Game Boys or portable DVD players, or even Wiggles CDs. The closest we got to kids’ music was Johnny Mathis singing “Nature Boy” just a tad too longingly.

  Our capacity to do nothing at all, and do it well, amazes me now. Even when we got to our destination—my grandmother’s condo in Florida, or a family-style “lodge” in the Poconos (what were we, woodchucks?)—there wasn’t a great deal of what parents today think of as “stimulation.” My sister and I would loll around the pool, basting ourselves in baby oil and dreaming about being old enough to order cocktails and smoke cigarettes. For exercise, we bickered or rode the elevator. For entertainment, we read magazines or the slightly moldy books that in those days were still provided in a guests’ library. (Marjorie Morningstar in the Readers’ Digest condensed version, or—arguably more fitting for a family holiday with teenagers—a chlorine-scented paperback edition of The Boston Strangler.) Doing pretty much nothing at all, but doing it in a somewhat ritzier setting than our bedrooms at home, was the whole point of a holiday, as my mother would have been the first to remind us. As for “stimulation,” that’s what you needed a holiday from.

  Today, the family tourism industry—and the mums and dads who keep it running in high gear—takes an entirely different tack. “Recognizing that the fickle moods of a teenager can make or break a family vacation, a growing number of resorts are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars creating elaborate hangouts to keep the adolescent set content,” reported The New York Times in the pre-recessionary spring of 2008.9 Most of that money is being spent on media upgrades. Like the “iChair” added by Loews Coronado Bay Resort and Spa, a kind of recliner-cum-stereo—a docking chair, if you will—“that kids can plug their iPod or MP3 player into and rock out.”10 Or the Fun Club at Cancun’s Occidental Grand Xcaret, where children can play virtual tennis, golf, and bowling on a 110-inch TV—presumably without imperiling their spray-on tans. Or the no-parents-allowed Teen Lounge at the Palm Beach Ritz-Carlton, where, according to the hotel’s website, boys and girls “can create their own DJ mix and upload it to their iPod, play video games, surf the Internet, play billiards, or just hang out and play pool or Guitar Hero.” The Parker Meridien in New York projects Nintendo Wii games, complete with surround sound, on a twenty-foot wall located—believe it or not—on its racquetball court.