The Winter of Our Disconnect (35 page)

 

 

 

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!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

 

 

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 s
creens 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 subscription. 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.

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.

» Notes

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 M
²
: 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.

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.