The Winter of Our Disconnect

by Susan Maushart

  He’d been riding his bike, fast, down a rainy street when the front wheel detached, pitching him headlong over the handlebars and into the street. He was pretty sure he’d sprained his right wrist—a week before leaving on a European tour with his water-polo team. “Stay right where you are,” I ordered. “I’m coming this second!”

  “Honestly, don’t bother,” he replied. “I’m home now.” In his words: “Some lady picked me up and took me to her place and put ice on my arm. Then she put my bike in her trunk and drove me home.”

  “Some lady?” I gasped. “What lady?”

  “Dunno. Forgot to ask what her name was.”

  When the twitching subsided, I reflected that Bill’s decision not to ring me—on any kind of phone—until he was home, cleaned up, calmed down, and safe was a good call. I couldn’t have gotten there in time to do anything meaningful anyhow. (Thank heavens there was somebody else who did, even if we will never know her name. Grrrrr.) As parents, we almost think of our phones as charms or amulets: as if just holding one in our handbag is sufficient to ward off danger or repel evil forces.

  What makes it tricky is that the My Cell Phone/Myself Fallacy contains a substantial grain of truth. Parenting in the age of mobile communication really does allow us to be there for our kids in a way never before possible. I don’t think any of us needs reminding of that. This enhanced closeness is a good thing, largely. But like most technological gifts, it comes with big strings attached. Or maybe scotch tape is a more accurate image, being so much harder to see with the naked eye.

  You know that announcement they make at the start of plays and concert performances, asking you to please switch off your phone for the duration of the event? Sometimes I think we should see our children’s young years as a live performance too. As parents, it’s hard enough to tread that fine line between concentration and codependency, without the added distraction of dueling ringtones. Phones don’t make the world a safer place for our kids. But they are capable of fostering the illusion that we can be there—always—to ensure their safety. They are also capable of fostering the illusion that it is appropriate to try. The truth is, to a very significant extent, we can’t, and it isn’t.

  At Seton Hall University in New Jersey, the head of family orientation—a title that in my day would have made as much sense as “alcohol-free frat party”—cautions parents against unintentionally encouraging their kids to become “dumping monsters.” “The student calls home and dumps all their problems on their parents,” she explains. “They say, ‘This place is awful and terrible and I can’t stand the food’ ... and then Mom and Dad stay up all night worrying and the kid goes out to party.”17

  At the University of Vermont, a program called “Parenting from a Distance” was recently trialed as a way to help parents through the stages of separation anxiety—their own!—when their children start college. UVM also hires student “bouncers” to keep parents away from events that don’t concern them. Orientation and registration, for example. College counselors say it can be tough getting parents to butt out of roommate issues. In fact, all kinds of boundary issues are challenging now that new students arrive packing a bare minimum of five to six noise-emitting devices.

  “Parental obsession with contact masks empty communication,” noted one observer bluntly. “That’s not love,” he concluded. “It’s management.” 18 (The same writer noted a trickle-down effect evident among younger children, citing a New Yorker cartoon of an irate-looking toddler in a stroller, barking into a tiny cell phone, “I’m in the Maclaren, where are you?”) After all, as Socrates might have reminded us, the unexamined iPhone is not worth having.

  In the world of social networking, the term “oversharing” describes the practice of telling too much, too often, to too many. Obviously, oversharing is a judgment call—and in a world of constant technological innovation, the boundaries are being drawn and redrawn all the time. A couple of years ago, any person over the age of twelve who updated his MySpace mood more than once a day had definitely crossed the line. Since then, Twitter has raised the bar—or perhaps lowered it—elevating to an art form the posting of life’s pointless minutiae.

  If you are inclined to disagree, go to Twitter.com and try running a “see what people are saying about ...” search using the keyword “soup,” as I’ve just done, uncovering breaking news such as, “Feeling sick! Mum is making me some soup” and “Had soup today in a tea shop in Malvern called The Kettle Sings. Soup was pepper, tomato & orange. Vg—very good. Vn—very nice.” Glancing up five minutes later, no fewer than ninety-four new results for “soup” have been posted. And it’s not even lunchtime!

  The reigning queen of oversharing is arguably self-described “lifecaster” Justine Ezarik, aka iJustine. Ezarik’s Twitter following as of July 2009—386,000—almost matched the population of Tulsa, Oklahoma. (Admittedly, that’s not even within spitting distance of top-twit Britney’s 5.1 million, approximately the population of metropolitan Atlanta.)

  The twenty-five-year-old also has her own TV channel: ijustine.tv. Until recently, Justine Ezarik was streaming her life live, 24/7, with a video camera strapped to her head. She stopped, she told USA Today’s Maria Puente, only because it was upsetting her friends and colleagues. I suspect you will not be surprised to learn that Ezarik also has a few issues around her cell phone. “I have to make a conscious effort to keep my phone in my purse and check it less,” she told Puente, “but it’s hard to do in the digital world we live in.”19

  Along with the entire population of Tulsa, I hear that.

  Psychologist Hilarie Cash lost her son to a technology dependency. Today she heads up Internet/Computer Addiction Services, a clinic that runs treatment programs for people at risk of developing serious media-related dysfunction. “All addictions have certain patterns,” explains Cash. Most of these are behavioral. Some of them are chemical, such as the release of dopamine and other opiates in the brain. The warning signs of technology addiction, perhaps unsurprisingly, are very similar to those of drug addiction: experiencing a heightened sense of euphoria while “using,” and suffering extreme cravings when deprived; neglecting friends and family, and being dishonest about one’s habit; withdrawing from other, once-pleasurable activities; undergoing changes in sleep patterns; being haunted by feelings of guilt, shame, anxiety, and depression.20 Getting naked with your BlackBerry. Okay, sorry.

  Experts say a person gets hooked on something like a smartphone through the process of intermittent reinforcement: that little ping of satisfaction you feel when an e-mail or an SMS arrives with the good-news message that you do, in fact, exist. That you are, in fact, still in the loop.

  The specific behaviors associated with incipient smartphone addiction include checking your device when you know you have zero messages—and justifying it by telling yourself you’re simply doing your job. Texting and talking while driving—a practice that Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich suggests “is the new drunk driving.”21 Sending and receiving e-mail when walking through a crosswalk. (Thank God for “E-mail ’n Walk,” a 99-cent iPhone app that uses the device’s camera to act as a third eye: showing you everything you’re missing, live, while you’ve got your nose in your e-mail.)

  I did these things—and more. Yet the only true test of an addiction is the answer to the question: How well do you function without a fix?

  To my surprise, my own answer was, “Perfectly.”

  Maybe I did love iNez not wisely but too well, but I clearly wasn’t a junkie. As the days and weeks of my unplugging flew by, it occurred to me that my iPhone issues were about as hard-core as my morning-coffee ritual. Sure, I feel sorry for myself when forced to go without. I’ve even been known to whine, “I need coffee to function,” but I’m aware (most of the time) that’s just a figure of speech. Going without coffee now and then never makes me jittery or anxious or vague at all. In fact, after the initial stab of disappointment, I generally have a cup of tea or cocoa and forget all about it. I c
ompare this to the way I felt when I was a smoker—when I would happily go without food or drink or rest or breath to procure a cigarette—and the difference is as clear as a liquid crystal display.

  The truth is, once I dumped iNez, I hardly spared her a backward glance. Yes—after all we’d been through together! It was very weird, and very, very unexpected. It was like breaking off a long-term relationship and realizing, once you’d had your big cry, that you were actually perfectly fine. You almost feel guilty about feeling so good.

  John Naish, author of Enough: Breaking Free from the World of Excess, gave up his cell phone when he realized he was becoming like the Old Man in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. “You suddenly find yourself on one end of the line with a massive fish on the other. It feels like a prize, but it drags your little boat way into the middle of the ocean. Still you keep hanging on. And then it turns out that the huge fish is no use anyway.”22 I felt that way too. Once untethered, I experienced such a heady lightness of being. There really was nothing to crave.

  The whole thing reminded me of how Anni gave up her pacifier collection at the age of eighteen months. At that point in her life—though she could speak in long sentences, recognize most colors, and recite Goodnight Moon backward—Anni couldn’t sleep without handfuls of pacifiers being thrown like confetti into her crib at bedtime. Even then, she’d often wake me at three a.m. with a specific color request. (“Pink one!” she’d shriek, or “Glow dark!”) When her favorite stuffed animal also started developing preferences, I decided it was time to call in the big guns.

  One morning I announced that the Dummy Fairy would be paying us a visit that night and that she would collect all of Anni’s pacifiers—for recycling, I explained—and leave her some special toys as a way of saying thank you.

  The next morning, the Dummy Fairy was as good as her word. And that—to my stunned and grateful amazement—was that. Anni picked up her new doll and stayed “clean” ever after. The scourge that had destroyed my sleep and spirits for so many long months was vanquished overnight.

  So, who knows? Maybe it’s genetic.

  The American Journal of Psychiatry added “Internet addiction” to its list of mental disorders in March 2008, reflecting international evidence of “excessive use of the Net followed by anguished withdrawal.”23 But other observers object that addiction is at best a metaphor ... and not a very useful one at that. In his 2009 book Cyburbia, British critic James Harkin argues that people who are cheerfully welded to their BlackBerries, iPhones, and Sidekicks are not really addicts, but “a new kind of self”—a self that defines itself primarily through the act of navigating endless loops of information. It’s a view that takes its inspiration from cybernetics, the “science of communication and control” first articulated by twentieth-century mathematician Norbert Wiener. Wiener was among the first to conceive information (and the devices we use to deploy it) as constituting a kind of ecology. Not a substance, addictive or otherwise. An environment. So the danger is not as much getting “hooked” as getting lost. “Cyburbia” is the name Harkin gives to that state of limbo. Reading his book, I recognized its landmarks immediately. After all, I used to live there myself.

  It’s hard to resist a book that opens with the line, “The first time I began to wonder about our whole approach to understanding digital communications, I was having sex on Second Life.” (I have an even more shameful confession to make. I’ve watched my stepdaughter, Naomi, having sex on Second Life. But only after I begged her.) But what resonated most for me was Harkin’s discussion of “the loop”—and how being in it can put a stranglehold on our lives.24

  Back in 2004, Internet giant Yahoo! cosponsored a study in which twenty-eight individuals in thirteen households agreed to go without Internet access for two weeks and keep diaries of their experience. Which is a bit like Thoreau going to the woods for a long weekend, but whatever. The published extracts make fascinating reading anyway. “Every day without the Internet is frustrating,” noted one participant. “I miss the private space the Internet creates for me at work,” pined another. One guy even whined that he felt “inconvenienced at having to carry around the paper, which was very cumbersome.” Another swore, “I’m even looking forward to seeing spam.” But the most oft-repeated refrain from the so-called Internet Deprivation Study was the distress people felt at being “out of the loop.” And those were the exact words they used. “I feel out of the loop.”25☺

  I knew that exact feeling. In a very primal, playground sort of way, my iPhone had me feel as though I was part of an in-group. Most obviously, I guess, it put me in the loop of iPhone users: tech-savvy, design-conscious “early adopters.” The owner of a smartphone, as opposed to a ... well, a dumb phone, I basked in its reflected glow as if it were a gifted child, and I the mother clever enough to have singlehandedly engineered it.

  Identifying on a personal level with the hunk of plastic you use to make phone calls is completely idiotic—and horribly, horribly human. We are meaning-makers by nature, even in situations where there is honestly no meaning to be made. Which is why we “read” our mobile media like tea leaves, or Rorschach ink blots. Secretly or otherwise, we see our devices as extensions of ourselves, just as we see our cars and our coffee tables and our kids. And we judge others that way too, in small but embarrassingly insignificant ways.

  “You can tell a lot about a person by the kind of phone they carry,” advises image consultant Doris Klietmann.26 Well, duh, Doris. We personalize our phones by giving them names, for crying out loud. We dress them in leather and buy them jewelry. We think hard about their other accessories, such as ringtones and desktop photos. (My own favorite ringtone was a voice recording of my kids, then in primary school, screaming “Mummy! Mummy! Let us out!”) Even the people who refuse to play the game are playing the game. My friend John, for example, is still carting around a nineties cell phone the size of a meatloaf. John says he doesn’t care—that he’s immune to phone shame—and I believe him. “That’s just the kind of person I am,” he explains with a shrug. Which happens to be exactly the point.

  Being stripped of my iPhone didn’t exactly precipitate an identity crisis, but I did find myself telling other users, a little too strenuously, “I used to have an iPhone too!”—just so there was no mistaking my membership credentials. Despite my temporary, self-imposed exile, I wanted the world to know, I was actually still in the loop. Really, I was.

  Sussy tells me the technical term for this is “try-hard.”

  My expulsion from iParadise meant I had to navigate outside the loop in more substantive ways, too, reinforcing—or perhaps simply revealing—how “out there” my global positioning actually was. I’d relied on my iPhone as a kind of feeding tube, delivering a steady stream of updates from the world I was craving to connect with. The podcasts, e-mails, and applications from Up Over that I devoured helped to keep me satisfied. But they also nourished the delusion that place—actual, physical place—could be rendered irrelevant. Could be repealed by information. And, even worse, that that was okay. That it didn’t matter much where you really lived, as long as you were at home in your head. Between the earbuds of your mind.

  Without the iPhone to fill the empty spaces, I felt uncorked. Not depressed. More sort of decanted. Drained. At the same time, as much as I’d loved the sensation of carrying the world around in my pocket, I’d forgotten how heavy it could get. The obligations that being in the loop exacts—to be perpetually on call and responsive, to keep up, for God’s sake—are oppressive too. And, rather paradoxically, exclusionary. The messages that aren’t getting through while you’re checking e-mails in the bathroom, or taking calls from under the beach umbrella, or watching a video clip of Anna Karenina on the station platform are something you never think about when you’re inside the loop.

  Sometime around month three, Sussy had declared with characteristic intensity that it was “impossible” for her to walk to the deli for a carton of milk without her iPod. “Then ride
your bike,” I suggested icily. But the truth was, I understood how she felt. In the first couple of days, walking pod-less for any distance greater than from the front door to the driveway weirded me out too. With nothing to listen to, the prospect of taking my usual walk to the beach with Rupert—something that normally wagged both our tails—loomed as more of an endurance test than a treat.

  Just as my grandmother used to say she felt naked without her clip-on earrings, initially I felt naked walking down the street without my headset. But my ears adjusted swiftly to the shock. They started accepting other inputs: wind, traffic sounds, birds, the clatter of Rupert’s tiny claws on the footpath, even—disorientingly at first—the sound of my own hair rustling. The ocean itself, audible as roaring white noise from a surprising distance away. Other sensory channels were also opening up and starting to receive signal. Those almond-shaped optical fibers on my face, for starters. It turned out there was actually quite a bit to see once you opened them up for business.

  Taking exactly the same route I’d traveled hundreds, possibly thousands of times over the years, I started seeing details I’d never noticed before. A vegetable garden planted like a well-kept secret atop a limestone outcrop. The sign outside a big old house that read “T. Dire Lodging House” (a boardinghouse?! In my neighborhood? In my century?). Some adventurous child’s teddy bear peeking down through the branches of a tall tree. A house, featureless on first glance—its brick façade the color of cheap foundation—sporting a weather vane of a matador and a charging bull. A derelict driveway haunted by the rusted-out ghosts of Jaguars past. A water feature in which a dozen long-legged, van Gogh-worthy irises stood wavering, as awkward as debutantes. A Jack Russell resting his elbows on a soccer ball. Like, who knew Jack Russells even had elbows?