For some, a weekend spent disconnected may seem simple, yet it may be a more herculean task than expected. — Mobile business photo created by jannoon028 - www.freepik.com
CLEVELAND: I’ve long been a bit haughty about social media and cellphones, and the hold they appear to have on so many people.
Not me, I’ve congratulated myself. I like having a smartphone and I’m tangentially conversant with its many wondrous functions, but generally limit its use to making and receiving calls. I’m happy to be untethered from the coiled wire that once limited communication to hearth and home, but otherwise I am not a prisoner of my mobile phone.
Oh, I enjoy the connection with friends old and new that Facebook affords, but mostly indulge through my home computer.
I’ve never understood the lure of the stupefying time-waster Twitter, and while I do have an account, my last “tweet” (a despicable word) was about 10 years ago. It informed anyone inclined to follow me not to bother, because there would be no further tweets to follow. I’ve also signed on to Instagram but seldom look at it, and never on the phone. Same with LinkedIn, which I joined many years ago only because a friend lost his job and asked me to be part of his network. Never look at that, either.
I have never downloaded the first song on my phone, don’t watch movies there or play video games at all, and I still prefer to use that paper thing called a “map” when I want to get somewhere. If I’m present when something newsworthy happens, mine will not be among the forest of arms holding up phones to record the action. I don’t know if selfie sticks are still a thing, but in any case, I don’t own one and never have.
So, rugged individualist that I am, I carry a cellphone, but don’t consider it an appendage. Or, so I thought. Then about six weeks ago, most of our family – my wife and I, daughters, sons-in-law and grandkids – gathered for a long weekend at a beautiful big A-frame tucked back in the woods near Salt Fork State Park, a couple of hours down Interstate 77.
The first thing we noticed when we got there were clouds of mosquitoes.
The second was the lack of bars on our cellphones.
That’s right: no service. No Internet of any kind.
At first, it seemed cause for celebration. There would be no work calls or other interruptions for the adults. The kids would not be clamoring for their iPads, from whence they would disappear into the netherworld of impenetrable (to me at least) video games. We wouldn’t be alone in a crowded room, each staring at our little glowing devices, only half hearing anything someone wanted to say.
But eventually, I began to notice something: Much as I’d been judging my brethren for their inability to set their phones down for any length of time, I had somehow become one of them. My head understood what “no service” meant, but my hand kept going for my phone.
I was astonished at the number of times I moved to check it: To look in on my fantasy baseball team. To see if someone had answered a text. To find out if I had any recent emails. To settle a disagreement over something remembered differently. To check the weather forecast. To search for a nearby restaurant.
Most of these were just reflexive moves built up over years of habit – so automatic that I did it without even realizing it. The frequency of my instinct to seize cellphone in hand was surprising, startling, and a bit troubling.
“Hungry,” is how Ezra Klein of The New York Times described it in an insightful essay on the hold the internet can develop on our brains, to the point that, “Many times I’ve walked into a public bathroom and everyone is simultaneously using a urinal and staring at a screen.”
A couple years ago, Klein wrote, he’d gotten around to reading Nicholas Carr’s 2011 Pulitzer-Prize-winning book on the topic, The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. Carr had begun to worry that the way his brain worked seemed to be changing due to constant use of his cellphone. But his brain, Carr finally decided, wasn’t just drifting. It was hungry.
“It was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it – and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became,” Klein quotes from Carr’s book. “Even when I was away from my computer, I yearned to check email, click links, do some Googling. I wanted to be connected.”
Back at the A-frame, we talked about it. We laughed when we realised that we were all going through the same withdrawal, and feeling ... disconnected. It was an uneasy sensation, knowing that things were happening outside our conclave, friends were texting, news was occurring, and the world was moving on without us.
The world, in our case, was just a quarter mile down a winding driveway. If we stopped at just the right place, a couple of bars showed up, and we were back in business. A couple of us couldn’t resist – if only to make sure we didn’t miss the daily Wordle. The Rugged Individualist was one of those who made a daily morning trip before the crew awakened, parking next to the road like a spy getting his secret orders.
But overall, being disconnected turned out to be a good thing, for all of us.
Eventually, the urge to Google sports scores settled down. There might be new text messages awaiting me, but my brain started to catch on that I wasn’t going to see them – not now, anyway. And that was fine, because we’d gone there to enjoy being together. The more the pull of our electronics started to fade, the more together we actually were.
The adults talked, made eye contact. We stopped surreptitiously glancing at our phones the moment there was a lull in the conversation. The kids left their iPads in their bags. They played together, interacted more.
It was a good, freeing feeling – one that we agreed we wanted to have again. We resolved to recapture it on our next family vacation, finding another spot with no service, or checking our devices at the door if we don’t.
Like actual hunger, saying no to cellphone hunger takes more willpower than one might think. That may be why, when restaurateur Tim Love decided to open a no-phones-allowed Italian eatery in Texas, he established a rule requiring patrons to pack away their phones in little locked bags.
Out of sight might not be completely out of mind, but it helps. A friend’s daughter deals with the problem of runaway connection hunger by occasionally stashing her cellphone in a drawer. And her brother recently quashed his own hunger pangs by swapping his smartphone for a flip phone.
I’m not ready yet to do anything that dramatic, but I do plan to take more frequent vacations from the Net. And if anyone wants to go back to the A-frame, I’m ready to spend some more time in the land before constant connection.
As long as I can get to the end of the driveway each morning so as not to break my Wordle string.
That’s one hunger I refuse to quell. – Cleveland.com/Tribune News Service
