I’m humbled to see all the positive feedback everyone is giving the book. Maybe they’re just thinking, “Better her than me!” but whatever it is … it’s gratifying all the same. I loved Helen Brown’s piece in The Telegraph because it just so damned well written. You don’t get that much!
The Telegraph’s, Helen Brown, posted the article “A Page In The Life” earlier this week.
As always, below is a short excerpt, accompanied by a link to the full article.
Telegraph :: A Page In The Life: Susan Maushart
Susan Maushart, PhD, is the first grown up I’ve heard use the internet abbreviation LOL (laugh out loud) as a verb. It bobs about in her sophisticated New Yorker’s conversation like an ironic, pink cocktail cherry in an ice-cold Manhattan.
But then, so much of what happened during her family’s six-month “digital detox” found her “LOLing at myself”. Quite often just after she’d thought, “WTF?!” or “OMG!” She picked up the habit from her three children, who were 14, 15 and 18 years old when their mother pulled the plug on all their electronic media.
Photo: Adam Nadel
Was there a trigger that led the academic-turned-author and columnist to silence the computers, phones and iPods that chirped incessantly “like a cadre of evil crickets” in her household?
“No,” she writes in The Winter of Our Disconnect. There wasn’t an epiphany, just a creeping fear that her girls were becoming “accessories to their own social networking profiles, as if real life were just a dress rehearsal (or, more accurately, a photo op) for the next status update”. There was also the fact that she didn’t want to spend any more time staring at the back of her son’s head while he battled muscle-bound avatars in cyberspace and his homework got lost in transmission.
Maushart was also inspired by rereading Thoreau’s Walden, about the American author’s self-imposed exile to a woodland cabin, without what passed for mod cons in the mid-19th century.
If Thoreau could last two years without running water, surely her family could manage six months without a modem? Of course, Thoreau didn’t have teenagers, or a Facebook account to tend…
First, let me apologize for this being the longest comment you’ll probably ever get.
Thanks for your work. You are writing about an experiment, and setting a sort of example for the rest of us to learn from. I think we can all individually do our part to learn on our own about “what we really need” in this world of technological immediacy. I guess my biggest fear is that this kind of cultural critique becomes the casual musing of an older generation losing their familiarity with the world around them — something we do on our own to improve our own lives — rather than a real galvanized movement that’s taken seriously. I can personally unplug, simplify. And it’s great, I’m not trying to question the value of that kind of action.
But here is the reason I fear it becoming a a purely individual exploration. My problem is that I have the unfortunate condition where this issue has become THE issue I care most about. It’s not trivial to me because I feel it’s a global issue, an urgent issue on the scale of phenomenon like climate change, and I’ve long been of the point of view that we are well beyond the “it’s all in how you use it” argument. Here’s where I lose most people, and eyes start to roll. I’m not the Unabomber, I promise. But I do wonder very often about what might have been different if he hadn’t chosen violence as his solution. And that’s where I lose even more people.
We are beyond the “it’s all in how you use it” argument because the lines have blurred. Watching too much TV a few decades ago or even playing too many video games is not in any way comparable. The realms of entertainment, communication and professional and financial success are now very much intertwined, and the term “social media” tells the story; we’ve created a powerful new hybrid. Facebook and Twitter are for real. And on the technology side? Apple & Google are well on their way to impenetrable hardware and software monopolies. And if you want to see something scary, Google “Comcast NBC Universal” and you’ll see the top results are direct from Comcast’s internal blog, reporting on how wonderful this new “partnership” is, and how it’s great for business and jobs in America. What’s not being covered in these top results is how we’ve now just created a way for companies to decide arbitrarily which internet and which television we see. All of this might be somewhat benign if it weren’t for the ubiquity. This is a monopoly on culture that is far more damaging than the advent of advertising. This isn’t just something we experience intermittently. In the first world it’s with us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. For many of us, it follows us to bed, and is there when we open our eyes in the morning. And a very small minority among us is even aware they have the option to turn it all off, and an equally small minority will ever arrive at the realization that they even have the desire to do so.
Maybe more importantly, turning it off isn’t trivial. It has consequences, it is definitely not as simple as it sounds. It varies from industry to industry, but in my line of work, turning it off means a very rapid disconnect from a whole world of professional opportunities. Your value as a professional can be diminished through non-participation. Even your value to your friends can now be diminished if you remove yourself from the stream of communication on something like Facebook. What this all boils down to is that once the entertainment and communication use the same medium, unplugging from one means unplugging from the other. It depends on your network of contacts of course, your age, demographic. But as a rule, “opting out” is not a minor choice when a major cultural framework has been picked up and moved to the medium you are opting out of.
And that’s just the latest degradation we’re facing. We’ve been in an exponentially increasing wave of instant gratification for decades now. It’s as dead simple as the expectation that emails and texts will be answered quickly. You cannot simply regress to the response times of decades past. And yet, if you did so, you might find that you’re no less productive. But you’d be perceived as less productive, or worse, maybe as a nut. In other words, there are consequences. Depending on who you are, today they may be minor, but they are increasing all the time. When new mediums replace old ones, (let’s play “spot the pay phone”) at some point continuing to opt out becomes a pointed effort to remain isolated.
I have a close friend who tries hard to convince me that the best way to combat any of this madness is to live the example, and for the most part I agree. But to me this is a point of view that makes less and less sense as we advance, it becomes simply turning a blind eye. So the point I’m getting to is that it’s not just in “how you use it” but in “how THEY use it,” and not just if you care about more than just the lucky few who have the education, cultural context and willpower to shape their own lives. It matters even if you only care about yourself and your own family, because the mass behavior is going to increasingly affect the opportunities and freedoms of the individual. The argument for “personal responsibility” here has never been more repugnant to me. I have visions of Ayn Rand standing idly by as a generation walks off a spiritual cliff. So for me, the issue is bigger than setting a personal example, because I don’t believe enough individuals even know they have a choice.
I’ve long been aware that this point of view is pretty much guaranteed to marginalize me in the perpetual scheme of capitalism and culture-technology. It’s not going away. But for the rest of my time here on Earth, I have an inclination that I want to do something about it, not just help myself, not just go to Walden pond, (Thoreau in my view was essentially on a privileged vacation, exactly as I’d be if I followed that path.) And not just delete my Facebook account and stop texting and emailing…but to DO something, create something, raise the flag a little bit in a wider sense, help this become a legitimate cause instead of a loose group of muttering forty-something Luddites wearing tin foil hats.
But I haven’t the slightest idea how. Get another graduate degree and double my debt? Start a commune? A cult? I don’t think I have the expertise to write a book. I guess this is a very long-form way to ask for advice. I have to admit it’s almost embarrassing to admit that I feel so passionately about this issue as a larger cause, it just feels like something I want to commit my time to. Cursed, I tell you, I’m cursed!
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