While I am far from being a technophobe, I have done much to distance myself from the world of cellphones. I suspect this is mainly because I do not wish to be in constant contact with people. I kind of enjoy being unreachable at moments. In fact, when I met the woman who is now my wife, I did not even own an answering machine, and had the annoying (for her!) habit of simply not answering the phone if I didn't feel like it. "If it's an emergency, thay will call back and let it ring", was how I would rationaize it for her. Made her crazy, even if she too is not a cellphone person.
Likewise, I went through an extended period of time, perhaps 10 years, where I did not own a TV. It made for a completely different living room alignment of furniture, one where chairs pointed towards each other instead of towards the black eye.
But the internet is a whole other beast. It can swallow up whole days, it seems. Two hours gone in the flick of an eye. Some of it useful, even vital. But let's be honest about things. One would be hard-pressed to label Netflix as vital to one's life.
Last year, I put my family through a social experiment, where we cut internet for six months. Understand I have three teenagers. I labeled it as an economic issue to make it more sellable, but there were underlying reasons at play. I wanted to see what would happen to our family structure, and I needed to acknowledge my own addiction to the many-tentacled beast. My kids were grudging accomplices. My wife, no problem.
People thought we were crazy. Teachers were aghast. At times I felt like I was doing a book burning, the skepticism was so high. Yet somehow we soldiered on. The kids would sit outside the library at night to get wifi. We all had access at school, at work, and at most public places. Marks did not suffer, friendships were not lost, work quality did not diminish. It was simply that at home there was a little dome protecting us.
I cannot say it 'brought us together." I think we are already close by many measures, and at the same time all very busy with our own lives. But it certainly was fun to have everyone sitting on the couch, talking about things or just reading. What was funny was when people visiting would be forced into this state, not having the reflex of pulling out their gadget as an option. Slowly they would adapt, and slowly they would relax. Lulls had to be accepted as part of the natural flow of conversation.
The experiment came to an end, and for some time we kept wireless out of the house, which forced people to sit at the desktop computer. But over time wireless crept back in, and now things are back to the way they were. Part of me misses that time.
I sat down to write this particular blog entry because I was musing on the fact that I miss the period in my life when I read voraciously. (Ironic, huh?) Four hours a day, many days. John Irving was my man. Damn, he can build a sentence. The internet effectively sucks all the time available in a day for reading. Oh sure, I read articles and the like. I even read real books. But it takes me far longer to get through them, and I abandon many more than I used to. Getting lost in a great book is a beautiful thing, and reading a printed page is far more engrossing than an internet screen. But the siren call of the online world is a powerful song. I am the internet's bitch, no doubt about it.