I loved Della—yes, my laptop had a name (shaaaame!)—but I also recognized that a trial separation was probably the best thing that could happen to us at this stage in our relationship.
Looking back, I can see that Della was the spouse and helpmeet—faithful, reliable, comfortable, and just a little dull. But my iPhone, iNez? Hoooo, mama! Now that was one smokin’ hot affair. In one impossibly sexy handful, iNez embodied all the things I love best about technology. It doesn’t get any less humiliating when I stop to think about exactly what those things are. Basically, iNez was compliant, discreet, entertaining, ridiculously receptive, and looked amazing in black lacquer. She might as well have been a freaking geisha. If I’m honest—and it’s killing me to admit this to myself, let alone to you—I got a buzz from being seen with iNez. I loved what she could do, but I also loved what she stood for—some heady confluence of youth and wealth and mastery. Being seen in her company made me feel important, powerful, “in the loop.” But loops have a way of tightening gradually. That’s why I had to leave her.
When Ian Schafer’s wife complained that he would pay more attention to her if she were digital, the thirty-three-year-old CEO of online marketing firm Deep Focus didn’t even try to deny it. Tweeting their exchange, he was interested to discover that “a lot of people’s wives feel the same way.” Schafer told USA Today he believes the human brain wasn’t built to handle so much connectivity. “We want to do more and more,” he muses, “but the more we actually do, the less of it we actually accomplish.”2
Tony Norman, who reviews gadgets for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette , was dismissive when his friends warned him not to get too close to the iPhone. He failed to lash himself to the mast and suffered the consequences. “If you ever want to know what was going through Frodo Baggins’s mind as he stood clutching the evil ring over the lava pits of Mt. Doom in The Return of the King,” wrote Norman, “buy an iPhone.”3
Computerworld’s Galen Gruman suffers from iPhone-related separation anxiety that’s so severe he’s developed a dread of subway tunnels. It’s not the claustrophobia that gets to him. It’s the “connectivity gaps.” Galen confesses that at such moments he finds himself “thumbs poised ... itching to reconnect to the outside world.”4
Then there’s Melissa Kanada, a twenty-seven-year-old PR consultant, who swore she’d stay clean during a two-week overseas trip with her boyfriend. “I think I lasted maybe four days,” she recalls. “I’m like, ‘He’s in the shower.’ Like, you feel welcomed again.”5
And Nick Thompson of Wired magazine observes, “There are a lot of people who have a problematic relationship with these devices, where the device becomes the master and they become servant.” Thompson would never let this happen to him. No way. Like the time he was expecting an important message but didn’t want to be checking for it every ten minutes. A less imaginative user might simply turn off the phone. But with the instincts of a seasoned junkie, Nick knew more drastic measures were called for. “I took the battery out, and then I put it in the [sleeping] baby’s room,” where no man—no matter how desperate for his next data fix—would dare to tread.6
And let’s not forget the guy who experiences “phantom vibrations.” (“I can still feel it as if it were receiving e-mail. I reach down to check it ... and it’s not there! Am I losing it?”) Or the man who dropped his phone in the toilet and fell to his knees to rescue and perform CPR on it, lest “the water-logged center of my universe” slip away to that great helpdesk in the sky. (“I tried blowing in all the holes, then I got the hairdryer out to try and salvage ‘My Precious.’ ”)7
I recount these testimonies not in censure, or even pity, but with the shock of recognition. They made me feel better about myself—and worse at the same time. Better, because most of these people seemed just a teensy bit sicker than I myself. But worse because they helped me to see that the problem I’d thought of as “mine”—part of my own neurotic personality structure—is actually embedding itself in our culture’s neurotic personality structure.
BlackBerry users got there first, of course, coining the term “CrackBerry”—Webster’s word of the year in 2006—as far back as 2000, and contributing to a rich and disturbing literature on their digital drug of choice. The 2008 e-book CrackBerry: True Tales of BlackBerry Use and Abuse compiles the greatest hits (in every sense of the word) from the CrackBerry.com site, including some of the stories above.
“This is a self-help book on coping with BlackBerry Addiction,” declare authors Gary Mazo, Martin Trautschold, and Kevin Michaluk. If this is self-help, I am Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Indeed, the book pretty much does for the CrackBerry what Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test did for hallucinogens.
CrackBerry is a deeply creepy read, what with featured affirmations such as, “We feel better, more complete and more whole when we are tethered to our BlackBerry at all times”—the irony being that there is no irony—and stories like that of “Sue,” the survivor of a horrific car crash, who recalls, “I was screaming in pain and asked them to find my BlackBerry.” But in some ways it gave me exactly the kind of tough love I’d been crying out for.
The “Chart of Shame,” for example, which allows abusers to locate themselves on a ladder reaching from “Plain Rude” to “Downright Dangerous”: Did I “interrupt conversation” to use my phone? (Duh.) Did I “read and respond to e-mail during a meal with others?” (Depends how you define “meal.” Also “respond,” “during,” and “others.” Oh, okay. Yes, constantly.) Did I type “while driving others in a vehicle?” (Mebbe.) Did I text “while skiing on a crowded slope?” (NO, mo-fos, as a matter of fact, I did NOT! I can’t ski. So there.)
The whole cringeworthy exercise made me relive moments of iPhone passion I’d have happily mothballed along with my size 48L maternity bras, or that tiny shred of Bill’s umbilicus that detached itself into his nappy and I could never quite bring myself to throw away. (I showed it to him recently—it looks not unlike a piece of snot now—because he thought I was making it up. Or perhaps he only wished I was.)
I remembered how bereft I felt on those rare occasions that I left iNez at home and had to trudge through the day alone and unplugged. I remembered the sensation of rootling feverishly through my handbag, frantic for the familiar touch of cool, tempered glass. I remembered the sick-making adrenalin surge I’d felt when I couldn’t find her for a moment or two, or how, securely sealed inside my info-womb once more, I’d meet the eyes of other iPhone users on the train and we’d smile a secret smile, coyly complicit in our shared vice.
Okay, so maybe I wasn’t as hardcore as some users—Johnj41, for example, who doesn’t simply sleep with his phone, he showers with it. (“I actually keep a Ziploc bag in the bathroom just so I can do this. I know, I’m pathetic, and you know what? I don’t care. LOL!”) Or Lenny M., who Velcros his phone to the handlebars of his bike so he can see the screen while he rides. Or author Gary Mazo, who has a bondage-and-discipline thang going—“I can dress it up in leather if I take it out on the town and I can protect it in armor if I need to risk its being out in the world.” They make iNez and me seem like junior prom dates. But a dependency is a dependency is a dependency, and the experience of going cold turkey emphasized how far in denial I’d been about my own neediness. Or maybe “wantiness” would be more accurate.
Because the iPhone, like any other smartphone, is such a heady cocktail of functionality, it took me a while to distill each of the elements. Phone, text, music, podcast, Internet, e-mail, apps. In my own way, I was addicted to all of them. But the greatest of these was e-mail. Even at the very earliest stages of my rehab—when I was still experiencing auditory hallucinations of my beloved ringtone (ironically, it occurs to me now, a stride piano rendition of “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off”)—I was aware that e-mail withdrawal would be my biggest personal challenge.
I’d always been ... well, let’s say “enthusiastic” about e-mail. (“Obsessional” is such an ugly word.) And why not? In m
y uneasy Western Australian exile, e-mail provided a direct pipeline to the world I’d left behind, capable of eradicating the tyranny of distance at the touch of a “Send” button. As a journalist, I’d made aggressive use of e-mail right from the start. Nothing thrilled me more than getting an instantaneous response to some arcane query from a source in New York or London or Washington, D.C. The twelve-hour time difference between Perth and EST (aka “the rest of the world”) meant it was easy to catch people online, checking their e-mail before bedtime, just as I was logging on to my day.
In the early years, once my workday was over—basically, whenever the kids rolled up from school or sports—so was my e-mail attention span. It never really occurred to me to go racing back to Outlook after dinner or before bedtime. My home office was nice and all, but it definitely wasn’t a place I wanted to hang out in once the sun went down. Even in the more recent past, when I’ve had access to a laptop and wireless broadband, I wasn’t much inclined to schlep Della around the house.
Once I hooked up with iNez, those relatively functional patterns dissolved. Now that I had the freedom to walk around in-boxicated all day long (and all night too if I wanted), my info-neediness went through the roof.
Going free-range, while it is very, very good if you are a chicken, is not necessarily so great in other categories of existence.
The whole thing made me think about my mother smoking in the garage. When I was in high school, my parents both decided to quit. My dad simply threw away his Kents, bought a pair of Nikes, and never looked back. My mother did things differently. She believed in preparations. For her, setting the table for Thanksgiving on Halloween was as close to “cold turkey” as she ever cared to get. My mother attacked her nicotine addiction in much the same spirit as she prepared a holiday meal: very, very gradually. In the last stages of her withdrawal, when she’d finally declared the house a smoke-free zone, she still allowed herself to smoke in two places: the backyard (where the neighbors could see) or the garage (where the dog crapped obediently on spread newspapers). It was a toss-up which environment was less appealing. I can still see her sitting on the concrete step in her winter coat, puffing on a Carlton with concentration.
Then, I just thought she was a nutter. Now I see the menthol in her madness. By tethering her habit to a specific, not entirely hospitable place—by putting clear spatial boundaries around it—she was gaining mastery over it. There was no possibility of lighting up automatically anymore. Every cigarette was a conscious decision—and a confining decision. By cooping herself up in the garage, she was segregating the act of smoking from associations with anything else, except smoking itself. There was nothing else for my mother to do in the garage except smoke. When she was finished, she reintegrated. She came, as it were, home.
Well, in the old days that’s the way e-mail used to be. It was like that cigarette you smoked on the step in the garage. It was a habit that knew its place. In fact, you might even say that in the old days that’s the way work itself was.
The fateful interface between wireless technology and miniaturization—of which the smartphone is the most recent apotheosis—has untethered work from its sense of place. Offices, desks, paper? Old media, all of them. All the world is an office now, and all the men and women merely telecommuters ... whether we want to be or not. “It’s a Pavlovian response,” insists one recovering CrackBerryhead. “The bell goes off to indicate a message. I walk like Frankenstein across the room, arms out—‘Must . . . check ... messages.’”8
Of course, it’s not that simple. Not even the App Store has figured out a way to disable our free will. Yet. Nevertheless, the weirdly hypnotic pull of the e-mail alert is among the most successful attention-seeking strategies known to humankind. Like a ringing phone, or a newborn baby’s hiccuppy cri de coeur, it is very nearly unignorable.
AOL Mail’s fourth annual E-mail Addiction Survey, published in July 2008, found nearly half of the four thousand e-mail users surveyed considered themselves “hooked”—up 15 percent from 2007. Fifty-one percent check their e-mail four or more times a day, and one in five do so more than ten times a day.
In the Age of the Smartphone, those figures look almost comically undercooked. (Tellingly, AOL hasn’t bothered to do a survey since.) Now we don’t actually “check” our e-mail at all, but just sort of inhale it continuously throughout the day.9 We approach our messages as demand-feeders—in exactly the way I’d once been advised by a lactation counselor. “Stop thinking of breast-feeding in terms of ‘feeds,’ ” she urged. “Nursing should be as natural and as frequent as breathing!” It sounded both lovely and terrifying. Perhaps unsurprisingly, suckling all day on one’s in-box is too.
The survey did find that more than a quarter of respondents had been so overwhelmed by their in-box they’d declared “e-mail bankruptcy,” or at least considered it seriously. I was fascinated to read that, because that’s exactly what I’d done at the start of The Experiment. Finding out there was an actual name for it made me feel less freakish. And then I read that “20 percent of users said they have over three hundred e-mails in their inboxes!”10 Three hundred? With an exclamation point, no less? Who were these pussies? At the point I declared bankruptcy, I had 9,637 messages. Now, that’s a figure worth punctuating.
I didn’t close my account entirely but set up an automated out-of-office reply, effective January 4, 2009:I am in an e-mail-free zone till further notice.
Yes, really!
I am happy to receive written correspondence at
154 Edmund Street
Beaconsfield, Western Australia
AUSTRALIA 6162
or to receive phone calls in the time-honored manner on
618 9430 4106
Clicking on “apply and save” was like going into freefall. The sheer audacity of it made my head spin. I felt defiant, reckless—as if by disconnecting, even temporarily, I were doing something illegal and perilously beyond the pale. And so I was, as responses to my (admittedly dramatically worded) announcement made clear. I’d worried about inconveniencing people, but the possibility of spooking them never occurred to me. Oops.
My family was the first to freak. “We thought you’d disappeared!” my mother cried. (Was it my imagination, or did she sound just a teensy bit disappointed?)
“We got some kind of weird bounce-back message about your e-mail being down,” complained my sister in an accusing tone. Other people rang to say how sorry they were that I’d lost my job. WTF? Since when did going offline equate with being unemployed? I fumed. Then the answer occurred to me: probably about ten years ago. Considered objectively, the inference that being disconnected equaled being disenfranchised was a pretty logical leap.
Putting my home phone number out there was another of the experimental risks I felt I had to take. We’d had a silent number for many years, ever since my book Wifework sparked a series of abusive phone calls from ex-husbands—and not even my own ex-husbands. But it had been years since I’d been seriously troubled by hatemongers. I figured getting the odd unwanted call was a small price to pay for unyoking myself from the burden of those nine-thousand-plus messages. And, anyhow, it seemed doubtful that anybody who didn’t know me well would have the chutzpah to call my home number.
Yeah, well.
The first weekend, I received a call from a reader wanting to discuss that Saturday’s column. It was painful, but I survived. I even managed to sound brisk—an effect I’d been trying and failing to achieve for, oh, half a century now. I braced myself for a barrage of similar home invasions. I never got a single one.
It’s interesting how few of us scruple to set up a private e-mail address, yet are willing to defend our home phone numbers to the death. For some reason, we don’t regard unwanted e-mails as invasions of our privacy, or incursions on our headspace, in quite the same way. Which is weird, because in lots of ways e-mails are much more intrusive than home phone calls.
If you work on a computer all day—as so many of us do—
e-mail messages explode in your face constantly, like tiny hand grenades hurled by an unseen enemy. Thanks to the hypervigilance of our Outlook accounts, messages from anybody, from everybody—friends, colleagues, bosses, randoms—bleat insistently for our attention all day long, elbowing their way onto the very pages of the very documents we are attempting to process. Sure, it’s just a two-second flash in the corner of the screen. But how it haunts one’s consciousness!b
Phone calls—even if you do happen to work from home—aren’t remotely similar. For one thing, friends don’t ring you in the middle of your working day to tell you a joke (let alone five friends, let alone a bad joke), or pass on a nugget of homespun philosophy, or describe an impossibly cute kitten/puppy/toddler/ferret. Retailers don’t ring you with deals expressly designed for “customers like you.” Colleagues don’t ring you with verbatim replays of conversations they’ve had with other colleagues. And nobody, but nobody, ever rings you, says “yep,” and hangs up again.
For the purposes of The Experiment, just to be on the safe side I decided to disconnect our home answering machine. I’d always kind of resented the answering machine and the way it shifts responsibility for making contact from the caller/petitioner to the receiver/ petitionee. I was happy to deal with the occasional inconvenience of missing a call if it meant a holiday from playing telephone tag with people I’d likely never wanted to speak to in the first place.
Long story short: I probably did miss a lot of calls, and probably 99 percent of them were truly, madly, deeply miss-able anyway. The 1 percent that may have changed my life indelibly must remain in the category of what Donald Rumsfeld has taught us call the “unknown unknowns.” I’ll never know what I don’t know about those calls—or even if there were any. I wouldn’t say I’m exactly cool with that. I’d say I’m euphoric with that.
The Winter of Our Disconnect Page 11
