I’m reading Susan Maushart’s The Winter of Our Disconnect, about ‘How three totally wired teenagers (and a mother who slept with her iPhone) pulled the plug on their technology and lived to tell the tale’.
First, Maushart describes the extent to which electronic media were an inescapable part of their family life:
At ages fourteen, fifteen, and eighteen, my daughters and my son don’t use media. They inhabit media. And they do so exactly as fish inhabit a pond. Gracefully. Unblinkingly. And utterly without consciousness or curiosity as to how they got there […]
For Generation M, as the Kaiser report dubbed these eight- to eighteen-year-olds, media use is not an activity – like exercise, or playing Monopoly, or bickering with your brother in the back seat. It’s an environment: pervasive, invisible, shrink-wrapped around pretty much everything kids do and say and think.
Then why did she have so many doubts and uncertainties?
“Only connect”, implored E.M. Forster in his acclaimed novel Howards End…
So… How connected, I found myself wondering, is connected enough? As a social scientist, journalist, and mother, I’ve always been an enthusiastic user of information technology (and I’m awfully fond of my dryer too). But I was also growing sceptical of the redemptive power of media to improve our lives – let alone to make them ‘easier’ or simplify them. Like many other parents, I’d noticed that the more we seemed to communicate as individuals, the less we seemed to cohere as a family. (Talk about a disconnect!)
There were contradictions on a broader scale too – and they have been widely noted. That the more facts we have at our fingertips, the less we seem to know. That the ‘convenience’ of messaging media (e-mail, SMS, IM) consumes ever larger and more indigestable chunks of our time and headspace. That as a culture we are practically swimming in entertainment, yet remain more depressed than any people who have ever lived. Basically, I started considering a scenario E.M. Forster never anticipated: the possibility that the more we connect, the further we may drift, the more fragmented we may become.
What’s your experience? Has all this connectivity made us more connected? Happy? Freer? Less alone? More alive? More at peace with ourselves and one with each other?
Bridges and Tangents 
I don’t know if you’ve read a series of postings on this theme, across on the Experimental Theology Blog ( http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com ) ?
The first one is on this link: http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2011/04/angel-of-iphone-part-1-william.html
His blog is ,well worth reading.
Btw, it’s not mine and the writer is not known to me!
Thanks for the suggestion. I enjoyed looking through his recent posts – and I’ve added it to my blogroll!
Whilst all the modern technology does, indeed, enable me to connect with people I would otherwise be unable to connect with, there is a part of me that remembers fondly the days before all this technology. Life seemed slower, less complicated then. It was almost as though people could live fuller, simpler lives. Or am I just getting old?
It all seems pretty necessary in order to be up to speed from a business point of view. Although is this a modern form of slavery? I’ve even just acquired an iphone! (But haven’t yet succeeded in getting my laptop to cooperate in the initialising process. This may be because my laptop is on its last legs. It was in computer clinic last week – which was a wonderful break from cyberspace). And I’m fine with reading items on the internet in the way that I would read articles in a newspaper, or with listening to things in the way that I would the radio. I find youtube a treasure trove of an archive. But as someone who finds even the telephone a bit of stretch from a human point of view, I’m not sure I’m ever going to come to terms with the social dimension of cyberspace.
I’ll wade in first. I think the key for me is self control – I find it so easy to get sucked in to spending far longer than is healthy online – sometimes to the detriment of ‘real life’ relationships.
That said, I have found so many blogs/websites that have been hugely enriching to my faith, relationships, cultural life and I’ve formed some ‘online’ friendships with people in other countries who I would never have known existed otherwise.
I, on the whole, really like Facebook too – for me, it provides a quick and easy way to stay in touch with friends across the globe and stay up to date with their lives. As a busy working mum, it’s a much easier way of keeping in touch than writing long newsy letters although I do still correspond by good old fashioned pen and paper too. Skype is amazing for having easy, free chats with friends and family flung across different continents.
I wonder if the challenge for the younger generation is in how to be discerning with regard to ‘connecting’ online. I feel blessed that the internet/mobile phones etc. really took off once I had reached adulthood meaning that there has always been a certain level of maturity and discernment in the way I approach the new technologies.
My main frustration is with mobile phones – the way that people assume something is wrong or that you’re ‘ignoring them’ if you don’t respond within minutes to a text or missed call. I’ll respond when I’m able to and in my own time, thank you very much!!
There, my tuppence worth…yes, I feel more connected and alive thanks to new technologies!