I have no phone. I have no internet connection. I am twenty-eight years old, a so-called digital native, and the wired world is my God-and/or-Jobs-given birth right. And yet like US Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who yesterday said she has given up e-mail, the text message and the tweet, I have been slowly but surely disconnecting for a couple of years now. However did this come to pass?
It all began three years ago, when I lost my BlackBerry on a Denver microbrewery tour. My brief but debilitating addiction to the device—the CrackBerry, we junkies called it back then—came to an end the following morning when I replaced the Bold that beer stole with a cheap T-Mobile flip phone. This thing was very nearly useless: it couldn’t receive e-mail, access the internet, take photos, tweet, or in fact do much of anything. And I found, to my surprise and delight, that when it came to this lack of utility, I was thrilled.
Life with the phone was a revelation. Otherwise familiar situations began to take on new and strange characteristics. I attended dinner parties at which I conversed, not with virtual interlocutors I’d never met, but with the other guests. Gatherings with friends ceased to be mere photo opportunities, exploited at arm’s length and instantly uploaded. It became impossible to provide a running commentary on my travels to my Facebook friends and Twitter followers, impossible to remove myself from the moment for a moment in the hope that it might later be liked or retweeted. It seemed somehow perverse.
Things got even better upon my return to Australia, where the flip phone refused to function at all, at which point I decided to give up on contemporary telephony altogether.
Don’t get me wrong. Unlike Napolitano’s, my e-mail inbox was always open. You could tweet at or poke me, even endorse me on LinkedIn, though why you would want to or what that actually means remains entirely beyond me. But the future of telecommunications had become, for me, a thing of the past.
Calls from work asking me to come in early? Missed the lot of them. From telemarketers? I was impervious to the auto-dialer. The numerous, highly insistent voicemails from my bank, its collections department, and the private debt collection agency employed by my bank’s collections department? Well, those went to my girlfriend’s phone, actually. But while she was deeply annoyed by the calls, they never inconvenienced me.
But my friends and colleagues were having none of it. Almost immediately upon my phone-less return from the northern hemisphere, they started trying to bring me back into the fold.
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There was the Ericsson studded with glittery stickers, foisted upon me by one friend as soon as I was off the plane. There was the slow-loading Google Phone that another pressed into my palms with great earnestness sometime later. One well-meaning workmate, obviously in thrall to the devil, offered to lend me his old iPhone 3G and the almost perfectly cubed, matte-finished box has been sitting in my apartment ever since. Its contents are listed in fine print on the side: one iPhone 3G, one AC adaptor, burdensome toil, sickness that brings death unto men, and a myriad other pains.
What my well-meaning friends and workmates don’t understand is that, by insisting I take on their old and usually malfunctioning models, they are merely serving to illustrate yet another reason to avoid getting involved in this racket in the first place: planned obsolescence. George Monbiot, writing recently in The Guardian, provided one more. “If you are too well connected, you stop thinking,” he wrote. “The clamour, the immediacy, the tendency to absorb other people’s thoughts, interrupt the deep abstraction required to find your own way.”
Monbiot doesn’t know how right he is, or how broadly his argument can be applied. Late last year, I moved into an apartment without an internet connection and didn’t bother to get one installed. I may never get one installed again. My attention span—destroyed by a childhood of television and an adolescence of hyperlinkage and tabbed browsing—is slowly strengthening. With social media’s snide self-regard and intransigent partisanship reduced to a mere distraction during working hours, my mood, too, has markedly improved.
True, I have not sworn off social media altogether—fifteen thousand-odd tweets stand as testament to that—and am unlikely to do so any time soon. Nor is it lost on me that my denial of the accoutrements of the age is itself a luxury of it. Those on the other side of the digital divide—a larger number than we often admit—should be so lucky as to suffer from constant access and information overload. Napolitano has an entire staff at her disposal. I at least have a choice.
Nevertheless, it is a choice I have made. My digital footprint, such that it is, is increasingly pointing away from the web. And from the smartphones. And the white noise. And that strikes me as a positive direction.
The Sydney Morning Herald, 28 March 2013
