Computer games that help kids learn to read, or add and subtract, or problem-solve are no more the equivalent of “Video Hits” than Hamlet is the back of the Lucky Charms box. Reading books to our toddlers—or watching television as a family—is no substitute for taking them to the park or the pool. But to imply that media are so detrimental to our children’s well-being that they need to be banned makes SpongeBob SquarePants look like Buckminster Fuller. And if that seems like an aggravated case of the pot calling the kettle black [and white], so be it.
Media of all types—screen-based or otherwise—are as much a part of modern life as cars and planes or dishwashers and vacuum cleaners. Or, for that matter, junk food, alcohol, and tobacco. We may sometimes yearn for a simpler time or place, a safe haven completely out of range of whatever siren song we fear will lure us to our doom. Heaven knows, I understand that longing. Ultimately, however, and no matter how strongly held our convictions, we must live in this world—the one to which, for better or worse, we find ourselves tuned. “When one arrives at the point of reflecting about the prefer-ability of the past to the present,” observes Patricia Meyer Spacks, “it’s time to change direction.”2
As a strategy for managing the long-term media ecology in our homes, bans and blackouts are probably as effective as the Three-Day Lemon Detox Diet is for lifelong weight control. As a consciousness-raising exercise, on the other hand, extreme measures can be illuminating indeed. No amount of talk (let alone yelling) could ever have persuaded Anni, Bill, and Sussy of the extent of their media dependencies as eloquently as even a week of information abstinence. But by six months, the time had definitely come to return to what our culture (rightly or wrongly) has decided is “normal.” Even Thoreau left the woods eventually.
A week or two after the Richard Florida conversation, I booked a flight home. “You dudes will have your cash bonuses to celebrate the end of The Experiment,” I reminded the kids. “This trip will be my reward.” What I didn’t say was that it would be half holiday and half reconnaissance mission. I wasn’t ready to do anything drastic. But I felt I needed to do more than imaginatively project myself back to New York. I needed to be on the ground again.e
I left four weeks after our own Independence Day celebrations. I was nervous about leaving them, but the kids were openly ecstatic at the prospect of managing the house on their own—and with it, of course, their media—for the first time ever. “Aw, don’t cry, Mum!” they called as I climbed into the cab for the airport, amid a flurry of hugs and sodden tissues. “We’ll Skype you every day,” Anni reminded me.
“And we’ll upload photos to our Facebook pages every day too,” added Sussy (obviously forgetting she’d refused to “friend” me for fear I’d become a stalker).
“Please, please don’t forget the Internet phone,” I begged. “It’s there for a reason, guys. Use it!”
I flew directly to North Carolina to visit my parents at what I still thought of as their new house. (In fact, they’d retired to Pinehurst seventeen years earlier.) “Get it over with early,” was my thinking. My expectations couldn’t possibly have been lower, yet I think we were all pretty shocked at how it went. Which is to say, wonderfully and without a hitch. And with an enormous sense of ... dare I say it? Connection. But then, as my father observed, it had been a quarter-century since we’d last spent any time together, really together. Saying good-bye to them felt awful and suddenly . . . I don’t know, wrong. Like having a limb amputated while it was still perfectly sound.
I came up to New York on a train—a deliberate choice again. Air travel was much too abstract for my purposes. I wanted to feel the country, to see it trundle past at a pace I could assimilate and ponder. I wanted to sit in the dining car and drink coffee. To admire the conductors in their handsome uniforms, making jokes as they sauntered up and down the aisles punching tickets. To watch families unpack cold chicken suppers from a basket, and hunker down for the night in their seats, with pillows brought from home.
iNez was with me the whole time, of course, as was Della, my laptop. But I never even considered plugging in or logging on. In fact, I barely read my book. Instead, I listened to the train whistle fading into the thick Southern night air, and took in the names of cities I recognized like school friends.
It was exactly as Thoreau had exhorted. Somewhere along the line, I’d become my own telegraph.
Making the move back home to New York after twenty-four years in Perth probably sounds like an abrupt change of channel. In fact, it was more the next logical step in a journey I’d been taking for years. The next ripple in the pond. Like Thoreau, we’d headed into an experiment in living that had forced us to experience life itself in a way I’d forgotten was even possible. In the end, paradoxically, it taught me that the only way forward was to go back again.
I felt I understood Walden as perfectly as I ever would, sitting in Starbucks on Twenty-third Street, Skyping the kids with the news of our newest experiment. “Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live,” Thoreau had reflected in the final chapter of Walden, “and I could not spare any more time for that one.”
» Afterword
Whenever I tell people about our Experiment, the first thing they want to know—after “How much did you pay them?”—is “What did you learn?” If you’ve read this book through to the end, you already know the long answer—but just to be safe, here it is in tablet form.
The Ten (okay, Eleven) Commandments of Screen Hygiene
Thou shalt not fear boredom.
Thou shalt not “multitask” (not until thy kingdom come, thy homework be done).
Thou shalt not WILF.
Thou shalt not text and drive (or talk, or sleep).
Thou shalt keep the Sabbath a screen-free day.
Thou shalt keep thy bedroom a media-free zone.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s upgrade.
Thou shalt set thy accounts to “Private.”
Thou shalt bring no media to thy dinner.
Thou shalt bring no dinner to thy media.
Thou shalt love RL,f with all thy heart and all thy soul.
» Notes
INTRODUCTION
1 Donald F. Roberts, Ulla G. Foehr, and Victoria Rideout, “Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-olds,” The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, March 2005.
2 Victoria J. Rideout, Ulla G. Foehr, and Donald F. Roberts, “Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds,” The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, January 2010.
3 Sydney Jones and Susannah Fox, “Generations Online in 2009,” Pew Internet & American Life Project, January 28, 2009.
4 Victoria J. Rideout, “Parents, Children, and Media,” The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, June 2007.
5 Alexandra Rankin Macgill, “Parents, Teens and Technology,” Pew Internet & American Life Project, October 24, 2008.
6 Michael Bittman, James Mahmud Rice, and Judy Wajcman, “Appliances and Their Impact: The Ownership of Domestic Technology and Time Spent on Household Work,” British Journal of Sociology, 55, no. 3 (2004), 401-423.
CHAPTER ONE Who We Are, and Why We Pressed “Pause”
1 Tamar Lewin, “Parents’ Role Is Narrowing Generation Gap on Campus,” The New York Times, January 6, 2003.
2 Australian Bureau of Statistics, ABS 8153.0, Internet Activity Australia, 2008.
3 gigaom.com/2010/05/12/us-broadband-demand-bounces-back/.
4 Nielsen Wire, January 22, 2010.
CHAPTER TWO Power Trip: The Darkness Descends
1 Tracey L. M. Kennedy et al., “Networked Families,” Pew Internet & American Life Project, October 19, 2008.
2 John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (New York: Basic Books, 2008).
CHAPTER THREE Boredom for Beginners
1 Patricia Meyer Spacks, Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
2 D. D. McNich
oll, “Cool’s Out for Some Time,” The Australian, February 4, 2009.
3 Spacks, Boredom.
4 Ibid., p. 10.
5 Ibid.
6 Cited ibid., p. 21.
7 Hilary Osborne, “Parental Guidance: Running Cost of a Teenager Is Now £9,000 a Year,” The Guardian, March 2, 2009.
8 Tamsyn Burgmann, “Teens Willing to Risk Personal Safety to Defend iPods from Muggers,” The Canadian Press, November 17, 2008.
9 Michelle Higgins and D. J. Booths, “Wii and Other Cool Stuff,” The New York Times, May 25, 2008.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
CHAPTER FOUR My iPhone/Myself: Notes from a Digital Fugitive
1 Quoted in Adam Bryant, “He Was Promotable After All,” New York Times, May 3, 2009.
2 Maria Puente, “The Popularity of Twitter Has Some Relationships in a Twist,” USA Today, April 17, 2009.
3 Tony Norman, “Man Versus Machine: Who’s Winning?” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette , March 10, 2009.
4 Galen Gruman, “Can Your iPhone Replace Your Laptop?” InfoWorld, October 5, 2009.
5 Nick Thompson, “Use of Tech Gadgets May Become an Addiction,” Wired, November 15, 2008.
6 Ibid.
7 Gary Mazo, Martin Trautschold, and Kevin Michaluk, CrackBerry: True Tales of BlackBerry Use and Abuse (Charleston, SC: BookSurge, 2008).
8 Ibid.
9 “AOL E-mail Survey: More Than Half of Users Admit They’re ‘Hooked’ on E-mail,” Wireless News, August 2, 2008.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 www.smh.com.au/technology/enterprise/astronauts-tweet-from-space-20100125-mt9k. html.
13 Wireless News, 2008.
14 gigaom.com/2010/03/26/1-in-2-americans-will-have-a-smartphone-by-christmas-2011/.
15 Soren Gordhamer, Wisdom 2.0: Ancient Secrets for the Creative and Constantly Connected (New York: HarperOne, 2009).
16 “Four in Ten Young Adults Are Mobile-Phone Addicts,” Science News (University of Granada), February 25, 2007.
17 Kate Stone Lombardi, “Parents’ Rights (and Wrongs),” The New York Times, July 30, 2006.
18 Bill Marsano, letter to the editor, The New York Times, July 20, 2006.
19 Puente, “The Popularity of Twitter Has Some Relationships in a Twist.”
20 News & Notes, National Public Radio, August 14, 2008.
21 Mary Schmich, “Cell Phone Users: The New Drunk Drivers,” Chicago Tribune, April 3, 2009.
22 John Naish, Enough: Breaking Free from the World of Excess (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2009).
23 James Harkin, “Tweeting Is Changing the Way We Think,” The Times (UK), February 18, 2009.
24 James Harkin, Cyburbia: The Dangerous Idea That’s Changing How We Live and Who We Are (London: Little, Brown, 2009).
25 docs.yahoo.com/docs/pr/release1 183.html.
26 Christopher Muther, “Dial ‘S’ For Shame! Embarrassed by Our Clunky Old Cell Phone, the One That Doesn’t Do Anything But (Gasp!) Make Phone Calls? You’re Not Alone,” The Boston Globe, November 13, 2008.
CHAPTER FIVE The Sound of One Hand Doing Homework
1 Don Tapscott, Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008).
2 Quoted by Laura Bickle in “The Cyber Family,” Today’s Parent (Toronto), 26, no. 1 (June 2009).
3 Cited in Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan, iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), p. 120.
4 Ibid.
5 Cited in Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” The Atlantic, July/August 2008.
6 “Memory and Books, 1477,” Medieval Sourcebook: Accounts of Medieval Literacy and Education, c. 1090−1530. www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/medieval-memory.html.
7 Cited in Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (New York: Prometheus Books, 2009).
8 Malcolm Gladwell, “Brain Candy: Is Pop Culture Dumbing Us Down or Smartening Us Up?” The New Yorker, May 16, 2005.
9 Roberts, Foehr, and Rideout, “Generation M.”
10 Small and Vorgan, iBrain.
11 Quoted in Claudia Wallis, “The Multitasking Generation,” Time, March 19, 2006.
12 Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass, and Anthony D. Wagner, “Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, August 2009.
13 Quoted by Ruth Pennebaker, “The Mediocre Multitasker,” The New York Times, August 30, 2009.
14 Ibid.
15 Lee Shumow, Jennifer A. Schmidt, and Hayal Kackar, “Adolescents’ Experience Doing Homework: Associations Among Context, Quality of Experience, and Outcomes,” The School Community Journal, 18, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2008).
16 Cited by Catherine Woulfe, “Schools Slash After-Class Work,” Sunday Star Times (New Zealand), March 3, 2009.
17 Ibid.
18 Rick Docksai, “Teens and Cell Phones,” The Futurist (Washington), 43, no. 1 (January/February 2009).
19 Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”
20 Ibid.
21 Jackson, Distracted.
22 Ibid.
23 M. Asselin and M. Moayeri, “Toward a Pedagogy for Using the Internet to Learn: An Examination of Adolescent Internet Literacies and Teachers, Parents, and Students’ Recommendations for Educational Change,” Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Association of School Librarianship, 2008.
24 Shumow, Schmidt, and Kackar, “Adolescents’ Experience Doing Homework.”
25 Docksai, “Teens and Cell Phones.”
26 Michael Osit, Generation Text: Raising Well-Adjusted Kids in an Age of Instant Everything (New York: AMACOM, 2008).
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Tamar Lewin, “Study Finds Teenagers’ Internet Socializing Isn’t Such a Bad Thing,” The New York Times, November 20, 2008.
30 Ibid.
31 Small and Vorgan, iBrain.
32 Selene M. Finch, “A Qualitative Phenomenological Analysis of Modern Communication: Instant Messaging’s Importance for Adolescent and Young Adults,” doctoral dissertation, University of Phoenix, September 2008.
33 Docksai, “Teens and Cell Phones.”
34 Ibid.
35 Wendy K. Kleinman, “Reading, Writing and iPods? How School Erases Boundaries,” McClatchy-Tribune Business News, February 18, 2008.
36 Ibid.
37 Wallis, “The Multitasking Generation.”
38 Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30) (New York: Tarcher, 2008).
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid.
CHAPTER SIX Loss of Facebook: Friending the Old-fashioned Way
1 Quoted in James Harkin, Cyburbia: The Dangerous Idea That’s Changing How We Live and Who We Are (London: Little, Brown, 2009).
2 Quoted in Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”
3 Small and Vorgan, iBrain.
4 Oscar Ybarra, Eugene Burnstein, Piotr Winkielman, Matthew C. Keller, Melvin Manis, Emily Chan, and Joel Rodriguez, “Mental Exercising Through Simple Socializing: Social Interaction Promotes General Cognitive Functioning,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34, no. 248 (2008).
5 Small and Vorgan, iBrain.
6 E. Orr, M. Sisic, C. Ross, M. Simmering, J. Arseneault, and R. Orr, “The Influence of Shyness on the Use of Facebook in an Undergraduate Sample,” CyberPsychology and Behavior, 12, no. 3 (2009), 337−340.
7 “Social Isolation Leading to Violence/Recent Spate of Random Attacks Carried Out by Introverts of All Ages,” Daily Yomiuri (Japan), July 11, 2009.
8 Ibid.
9 Small and Vorgan, iBrain.
10 Ibid.
11 Rebecca Berg, “Autism—An Environmental Health Issue After All?” Journal of Environmental Health, June 1, 2009.
12 Roberts, Foehr, and Rideout, “Generation M.”
>
13 “Girls Trapped in Storm Drain Use Facebook to Call for Help . . . Instead of Phoning Emergency Services,” Daily Mail Reporter (UK), September 8, 2009.
14 “Social Networks Anonymous,” The Economist, February 2009.
15 Bessie Recep, “You Were Cuter on Facebook,” Cleo, October 2008.
16 “Primates on Facebook,” The Economist, February 2009.
17 Neil Seeman, “Facebook and Friendship,” National Post (Toronto), September 15, 2009.
18 www.insidefacebook.com.
19 Clive Thompson, “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy,” The New York Times, September 7, 2008.
20 Ferris Jabr, “The New Rules of Social Networking,” Psychology Today, 41, no. 6 (November/December 2008).
21 Mara E. Zazzali-Hogan and Jennifer Marino Thibodaux, “Ethical Issues to Consider When ‘Friending’ Witnesses Online,” New Jersey Law Journal, August 31, 2009.
22 Laura Saunders, “Is ‘Friending’ in Your Future? Better Pay Your Taxes First,” The Wall Street Journal, August 27, 2009.
23 Cited in Recep, “You Were Cuter on Facebook.”
24 www.cyberbullying.us/research.php.
25 Australian Communications and Media Authority, “Click and Connect: Young Australians’ Use of Online Social Media,” July 2009.
26 Horatia Harrod, “The World’s Photo Album,” Sunday Telegraph magazine (UK), March 22, 2009.
27 Thompson, “Brave New World.”
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2006).
CHAPTER SEVEN Eat, Play, Sleep
1 “Australian Family Dinners End in Arguments,” Herald Sun (Australia), July 2, 2009.
2 Shira Feldman, Marla E. Eisenberg, Dianne Neumark-Sztainer, and Mary Story, “Associations Between Watching TV During Family Meals and Dietary Intake Among Adolescents,” Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, 39, no. 5 (September/October 2007).
The Winter of Our Disconnect Page 27
