The Winter of Our Disconnect

by Susan Maushart

  Anni, as the eldest and most independent, suffered the least inconvenience and probably underwent the fewest changes; paradoxically, the process of unplugging seemed to give her the most pleasure. After her initial fit of pique, and pacified by her “incentive” (as I preferred to think of the cash bribe I’d offered), Anni more than any other child consistently supported the enterprise. In fact, she’d prefigured it, having spoken in November 2008 of a plan to undergo a self-imposed Facebook fast for the holidays. Over the course of the six months, she achieved a number of important milestones, including completing two demanding professional journalism internships. (Her unflinching reporting for a magazine feature on Perth’s private girls’ schools, “Lock Up Your Daughters!,” sounded alarm bells throughout our community.) She also passed her driving test, logging in her required supervised hours with her mother clutching the parking brake and wearing a bald patch into the passenger-side floor mat, to finally obtain her license.

  Would Anni have cleared these hurdles if The Experiment had never happened? In all likelihood, yes. Would the wheels of change have spun slower, wobbled more widely, and required more frequent roadside assistance? You betcha. The sheer expanse of liberated time—in Anni’s case, upward of thirty-five hours a week—made a mockery of her usual procrastination strategies. More important still, the digital drought at home propelled her outward in search of deeper and more biologically diverse waters. Now that her social survival depended on it, connecting more directly with the challenges and gratifications of “life itself” was a no-brainer.

  Our technology had ostensibly put the world and all its wonders at our fingertips. But in truth we were more like the frog in the Chinese fable—the one who lived in a shallow well but, because he had never seen the ocean, imagined himself master of the universe. The Experiment dragged us up to the sunlight and out to the shore. Without a webcam, it looked so different out there.

  I had a lot of time to contemplate such matters, especially once the winter weather set in and we started gathering in front of the fire after dinner, like something out of Little freaking House on the Prairie . In Walden, Thoreau observes, “At length the winter set in good earnest ... and the wind began to howl around the house as if it had not had permission to do so till then . . . I withdrew yet farther into my shell, and endeavored to keep a bright fire both within my house and within my breast.” Yeah, same!

  We’d begun the Winter of Our Disconnect in glorious summer. By June the winter storms began to rip up the southern coast, raining blows on our west-facing front door and causing the curtains to billow even after the windows were shut tight. That last month felt longer than the previous five put together. For me, being house-bound made our screenlessness feel like a hardship for the first time. I longed to curl up with a movie, to watch 60 Minutes or even Australian Idol (that’s how far gone I was) on a Sunday night, to escape the confines of our insufficiently insulated four walls with my beloved NPR news ticker, or The New York Times online, or maybe a spot of harmless WILFing.

  Instead, I brooded and Boggled and fetched more wood.

  “Every man looks at his woodpile with a kind of affection,” Thoreau observed. “I love to have mine before my window, and the more chips the better, to remind me of my pleasing work.”

  My woodpile was under the carport, but I started to feel pretty much the same way about it: which is to say, overly fond. “Dudes, check out my kindling!” I’d urge the kids whenever we passed by. The indulgent, slightly sad way they smiled was unnerving. But the truth was, watching the fire was the closest thing to live home entertainment we had left. And “watching,” passively watching, I realized, was important.

  I recalled that in the primordial mists of the Screen Age, critics frequently referred to television as the “electronic hearth.” I got that now, because for me the hearth had become a kind of combustible television. Seeing us all gathered around its glow—our eyes vacant, our jaws slack, our critical faculties set to sleep mode—you would have thought we really were watching Australian Idol.

  What was going on in the children’s heads, I am rather relieved to say, I have no idea. For myself, though, these long winter evenings were all about pondering mistakes of the past (a topic no longer deflectable with massive doses of new data) and plotting new and improved mistakes for the future. (LOL.)

  Weirdly, The Experiment, for all the powerlessness it had conferred, had given each of us a renewed sense of agency. Maybe it was something about being forced to “make our own fun” that prompted it. The same Thoreauvian spirit of self-reliance that inspired us to create our own entertainment—whether it was making cupcakes or conversation, composing music or a new family ritual—spilled over into the shadows too. Staring night after night into the fire, with no plotlines except my own to distract me, I started to reflect deeply on other aspects of my life in which I’d allowed myself to be a passive receiver. Where I’d failed to “see choice”—or, to put the same thing a different way, where I’d chosen not to see choice.

  Living in Western Australia, to take the most obvious example. There was a time in my life when it was more or less true that I’d had “no choice” about this decision. Back when my marriage ended, when my children were young and vulnerable—not to mention my career prospects—my only real choice was how we’d live here, not whether we would. It now became clearer to me that I’d chosen to pour energy into making it work: caring for my amazing children, making wonderful friends, becoming part of a community I cared about, creating a home, extending myself professionally, seeking to “blend” our lives into a new and stable family unit. I’d tried with my whole heart to put down roots in this, to me, alien soil, and in lots of ways I’d succeeded. But the truth was, those roots never entirely took. They went down only so far and no farther. In recent years, instead of feeling more and more grounded, I’d started to feel increasingly vertiginous. My bio on The Australian’s website joked, “Maushart has lived in Western Australia since 1986, but insists she is only passing through.” The last time I’d seen it, it struck me as less amusing than sad.

  Adding further fuel to the fire that winter was a book called Who’s Your City? by urban theorist Richard Florida. Its thesis—that where you live has a huge (and hugely underrated) impact on life satisfaction—was exactly the message I needed to hear. Or maybe wanted to hear, who knows? Among other things, Florida argues that cities have personalities, just as people do, and that finding the right place to live is akin to finding the right partner to live with. There are good matches, and there are mismatches—and in a world in which affluence and mobility converge to make choice possible, it is an individual’s privilege—nay, responsibility—to get it right.

  I started by searching the index for references to Perth. (There were several, including one study that had found it to be among the world’s most neurotic cities.) Then I devoured the book whole, like one of Sussy’s chocolate cupcakes. I took notes. I highlighted and underlined and wrote in the margins. In the end, I was so worked up I decided I had to take things a step further. I’d have to speak to Richard Florida directly. Working at ABC enabled me to frame my request as an “interview.”

  I did record it in ABC’s Perth studios, from Florida’s office at the University of Toronto. I even used it as part of a later program segment. But really, my conversation with Florida was a private consultation ... and I blurted out as much midway through. I didn’t need a therapist, I assured him. But an oracle would be nice. What did he think? Should I move back to New York, or stay in Perth? Miraculously, Florida was unfazed by the abrupt change of direction. Maybe he gets this a lot. Or maybe as a New Jerseyite who now lives in Canada, he could relate. The fact that he’d actually spent a couple of weeks in Perth recently was a bonus.

  “Listen to yourself!” he admonished me. “You’re a New Yorker! Twenty-three years and you haven’t changed your vowel sounds one iota.”

  It was true. My accent was as stubborn as a three-year-old.

 
“Face it,” he continued. “Perth is a beautiful city. But it’s not really your city—is it?”

  “Well, no. I mean, yes. I mean, I know that,” I found myself confessing incoherently to this total stranger. “But I’m so afraid if I move, I’ll miss it.”

  “Don’t be afraid of that,” came the answer. (Oh, this is what I’d been waiting to hear!)

  “Of course you’ll miss it.”

  Why do we need help in seeing what is glaringly obvious? I reflected later that night as I sat before the fire, the inert bodies of assorted drowsing animals, human and otherwise, scattered around the room like bolsters. “We don’t know who discovered water, but it wasn’t a fish,” right?

  Looking back, I realize my conversation with Florida was a turning point. Yet if anybody had told me then that within four months I’d have sold our family home, bought a turn-of-the-century farm-house on the eastern tip of Long Island, and begun planning our trans-hemispheric repatriation, I’d have suspected smoke inhalation.

  The official Back from Black celebration began at the stroke of midnight, Microwave Central Time, on July 4, 2009. Bill was somewhere between Singapore and Germany that night, on tour with his water-polo club. (Before leaving, he’d asked permission to load up his iPod with the two trillion Miles Davis tracks he and Matt had been collecting. I’d given my blessing. I’d also unearthed the DS from the highest drawer in the craft cupboard where I’d secreted it under a stack of antique cassette tapes six months earlier. “Use this for good, not for evil, son,” I reminded him solemnly at the handover.) We missed him sorely, but we knew that wherever he was, he had his earbuds in—and was happy.

  Sussy and I headed to the ballet to beguile the hours that yawned between dinner and midnight. It was the opening night of Romeo and Juliet and if we skipped the after-party and grabbed a couple of burgers on the way home, I figured we’d arrive with exactly ten minutes to spare to put on our pajamas and jockey for couch space for the big event. Anni was heating up our creepily beloved popcorn maker, Poppasaurus (an orange dinosaur who obediently vomits the finished product into a waiting bowl). Along with my stepdaughter Naomi—the one who sold virtual real estate on Second Life and who, despite (or possibly because of ) this, had been an enthusiastic supporter of The Experiment from Day One—she had already picked up the DVDs whose selection we’d all been haggling over for weeks.

  I’d begun the gala reconnection festivities a full month previously, scouting deals for a new Internet service provider, browsing subscription TV packages, hiring an electrician to repair an accumulation of blown light fittings. I’d also decided to spring for a roomful of new furniture: two oversized sofas with removable cotton covers, a sensible and sturdy coffee table, and an “entertainment unit” ludicrously out-of-scale to our puny television—which I dragged out of the shed exactly five months and twenty-nine days after I’d dragged it in, this time with the help of the Foxtel man. Yes, gentle reader, the Foxtel man.

  Our new broadband provider offered a deal that included a VOIP phone (Voice Over Internet Protocol ) that would allow us to make overseas calls for pennies. I wasn’t sure how reliable it would be. But after that last phone bill, I was ready to try anything. As for The Beast, the day Bill left for Europe, it returned at last from its wanderings—dumped unceremoniously under the carport by somebody’s dad, its tattered little shopping bag of travel-weary peripherals by its side. It’s funny, but it looked shrunken. It was like seeing a house that loomed so large when you were a child and realizing, twenty years later, how cramped and ordinary it really was.

  July 4, 2009

  At 11:50 p.m. precisely, Sussy and self scream through front door and run headlong through the house locating devices, chargers, and remotes. Anni and Nome count us down as we stampede to the TV room in a spray of popcorn, Coke Zero, and pure adrenalin.

  OMG. We made it!!!! And lived to tell/text/tweet the tale!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  July 5

  My entry for this day reads simply “Media hangover.” Well, what else did we expect? Dueling laptops, binge texting, an overdose of reality TV (Wife Swap, Life Swap, Twenty Years Younger) plus a DVD double feature (The House Bunny, Superbad) do not a restful night make. But it was the celebration we had to have, we wanted to have. Damn it, that we deserved to have.

  Not that it was a case of unalloyed hyperconnected heaven. At about five minutes past midnight, the first technical glitch—a badly misbehaving Stepbrothers DVD—reminded us of something else we’d been missing over the past half-year. Frustration. (There’s another good thing about books and newspapers, people. You never, ever have to troubleshoot them.) It brought back the hundreds of hours I’d spent waiting on a seemingly terminal help-desk queue when viruses struck, or worms bored, or signal strength faltered. I remembered the screaming matches I’d had with Bill when our broadband account was “shaped” for exceeding our monthly download allowance. “‘Drugged’ is more like it!” I thundered, as I waited for up to a minute—a minute! for a Web page to load. With shame, I recalled yelling words to the effect that there was no way I was going to get through the weekend at that download speed. Thinking back, it was hard to know whether to laugh or cry or just rip everything out of the wall again before it was too late.

  The next day passed in a static-y blur. Blobbiness reigned so supreme it was difficult to tell which end of the day was up. “Like jet lag,” as Sussy observed, with in-flight entertainment on steroids. We were sleep deprived, of course. It was 3:45 a.m. when we’d finally broken suction on our collective screens—all ten of them, counting laptops, iPods, iPhone, cell phones, camera, and TV. By ten a.m. the girls were back at their stations, watching the entire season of Australia’s Next Top Model (which they’d downloaded overnight), and commencing to mine the educational mother lode of MTV (“Bully Beatdown,” “Get Ready for Bromance,” “If You Ain’t Down with That”). The familiar sound of the instant message alert was heard again in the land.

  Late in the afternoon, I took a long, long walk with iNez. It was such luxury to nestle my earbuds back into their rightful place, to flick to my playlists and podcasts, to encounter once more the exquisite agony of choice. Hitting “Shuffle On,” there was a pause before the first song burst into the space between my ears. It was “Good Lovin’ ” by the Rascals, from the Big Chill soundtrack. Hardly a profound musical statement, but joyous—and in a funny kind of way, apt: “I got the fever, Baby, but you’ve got the cure ... And I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,’ (Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah) . . . Yes, indeed, all I really need . . .”

  I’d be lying if I said I skipped all the way to South Beach. In fact, it was more like a tap dance.

  “‘Screen-time’ can stunt language development and shorten kids’ attention span,” reported The Australian under the slightly hysterical headline “Ban Television for Toddlers” in October 2009.1 In fact, the latest “Get Up and Grow” recommendations by Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital recommend a ban on all screens for kids under two, including DVDs, handheld games, and computers. I’m down with that . . . in spirit, at least. But as somebody who probably has more firsthand knowledge of media bans than most, I have some serious reservations too.

  There are genuine reasons to worry about the media habits of our youngest global villagers. According to figures published in Pediatrics in 2007—and which should therefore be regarded as conservative—the average American preschooler watches TV for an hour and twenty minutes a day. A quarter of five- to six-year-olds use a computer for another hour a day, while a fifth of under-threes, and a third of three- to six-year-olds had a TV in their bedroom. Other research has shown that the average four-month-old spends forty-four minutes a day watching TV. (Then again, the average four-month-old spends forty-four minutes a day watching her fist, so maybe that’s less alarming than it sounds.) By the time that diminutive Digital Native reaches her third birthday, she will be screen-bound a minimum of three hours a day, assuming her family has a pay-TV subscripti
on. Forget about iBrain. Nickelodeon Brain maybe more like it.

  The American Academy of Pediatrics has advocated a TV ban for under-twos since 2001. Recent figures suggest that 70 percent of two-year-olds are in violation of that ban. One recent study found that children aged three to five chewed an average 3.3 hours of visual cud a day, and kids under the age of three 2.2 hours. When children were followed up at ages six and seven, and tested for cognitive development, researchers found each hour of average daily viewing before age three was associated with declines in reading, comprehension, and memory scores. And yet. And yet.

  The research also shows that kids who watch more TV between ages three and five have higher reading scores. How does that work?

  Australia’s Get Up and Grow initiative is part of a broader anti-obesity drive that aims to encourage “activity” among the nation’s children. It’s not just screen-based content that’s in the firing line. The guidelines define drawing, reading, and solving puzzles as forms of inactivity too. How does that work?

  Clearly, the swings and roundabouts of kids’ cognitive response to screens have yet to be fully charted. The ways in which the screen hygiene in our homes may be shaping our children’s social and emotional default settings—and those of the larger family systems to which they belong—have barely begun to be reckoned.