The Winter of Our Disconnect (15 page)

In the early years, once my workday was over—basically, whenever the kids rolled up from school or sports—so was my e-mail attention span. It never really occurred to me to go racing back to Outlook after dinner or before bedtime. My home office was nice and all, but it definitely wasn’t a place I wanted to hang out in once the sun went down. Even in the more recent past, when I’ve had access to a laptop and wireless broadband, I wasn’t much inclined to schlep Della around the house.

Once I hooked up with iNez, those relatively functional patterns dissolved. Now that I had the freedom to walk around in-boxicated all day long (and all night too if I wanted), my info-neediness went through the roof.

Going free-range, while it is very, very good if you are a chicken, is not necessarily so great in other categories of existence.

The whole thing made me think about my mother smoking in the garage. When I was in high school, my parents both decided to quit. My dad simply threw away his Kents, bought a pair of Nikes, and never looked back. My mother did things differently. She believed in preparations. For her, setting the table for Thanksgiving on Halloween was as close to “cold turkey” as she ever cared to get. My mother attacked her nicotine addiction in much the same spirit as she prepared a holiday meal: very, very gradually. In the last stages of her withdrawal, when she’d finally declared the house a smoke-free zone, she still allowed herself to smoke in two places: the backyard (where the neighbors could see) or the garage (where the dog crapped obediently on spread newspapers). It was a toss-up which environment was less appealing. I can still see her sitting on the concrete step in her winter coat, puffing on a Carlton with concentration.

Then, I just thought she was a nutter. Now I see the menthol in her madness. By tethering her habit to a specific, not entirely hospitable place—by putting clear spatial boundaries around it—she was gaining mastery over it. There was no possibility of lighting up automatically anymore. Every cigarette was a conscious decision—and a confining decision. By cooping herself up in the garage, she was segregating the act of smoking from associations with anything else, except smoking itself. There was nothing else for my mother to do in the garage
except
smoke. When she was finished, she reintegrated. She came, as it were, home.

Well, in the old days that’s the way e-mail used to be. It was like that cigarette you smoked on the step in the garage. It was a habit that knew its place. In fact, you might even say that in the old days that’s the way work itself was.

The fateful interface between wireless technology and miniaturization—of which the smartphone is the most recent apotheosis—has untethered work from its sense of place. Offices, desks, paper? Old media, all of them. All the world is an office now, and all the men and women merely telecommuters ... whether we want to be or not. “It’s a Pavlovian response,” insists one recovering CrackBerryhead. “The bell goes off to indicate a message. I walk like Frankenstein across the room, arms out—‘Must . . . check ... messages.’”
⁸

Of course, it’s not that simple. Not even the App Store has figured out a way to disable our free will. Yet. Nevertheless, the weirdly hypnotic pull of the e-mail alert is among the most successful attention-seeking strategies known to humankind. Like a ringing phone, or a newborn baby’s hiccuppy cri de coeur, it is very nearly unignorable.

AOL Mail’s fourth annual E-mail Addiction Survey, published in July 2008, found nearly half of the four thousand e-mail users surveyed considered themselves “hooked”—up 15 percent from 2007. Fifty-one percent check their e-mail four or more times a day, and one in five do so more than ten times a day.

In the Age of the Smartphone, those figures look almost comically undercooked. (Tellingly, AOL hasn’t bothered to do a survey since.) Now we don’t actually “check” our e-mail at all, but just sort of inhale it continuously throughout the day.
⁹
We approach our messages as demand-feeders—in exactly the way I’d once been advised by a lactation counselor. “Stop thinking of breast-feeding in terms of ‘feeds,’ ” she urged. “Nursing should be as natural and as frequent as breathing!” It sounded both lovely and terrifying. Perhaps unsurprisingly, suckling all day on one’s in-box is too.

The survey did find that more than a quarter of respondents had been so overwhelmed by their in-box they’d declared “e-mail bankruptcy,” or at least considered it seriously. I was fascinated to read that, because that’s exactly what I’d done at the start of The Experiment. Finding out there was an actual name for it made me feel less freakish. And then I read that “20 percent of users said they have over three hundred e-mails in their inboxes!”
¹⁰
Three hundred? With an exclamation point, no less? Who were these pussies? At the point
I
declared bankruptcy, I had 9,637 messages. Now, that’s a figure worth punctuating.

I didn’t close my account entirely but set up an automated out-of-office reply, effective January 4, 2009:

Clicking on “apply and save” was like going into freefall. The sheer audacity of it made my head spin. I felt defiant, reckless—as if by disconnecting, even temporarily, I were doing something illegal and perilously beyond the pale. And so I was, as responses to my (admittedly dramatically worded) announcement made clear. I’d worried about inconveniencing people, but the possibility of spooking them never occurred to me. Oops.

My family was the first to freak. “We thought you’d disappeared!” my mother cried. (Was it my imagination, or did she sound just a teensy bit disappointed?)

“We got some kind of weird bounce-back message about your e-mail being down,” complained my sister in an accusing tone. Other people rang to say how sorry they were that I’d lost my job. WTF? Since when did going offline equate with being unemployed? I fumed. Then the answer occurred to me: probably about ten years ago. Considered objectively, the inference that being disconnected equaled being disenfranchised was a pretty logical leap.

Putting my home phone number out there was another of the experimental risks I felt I had to take. We’d had a silent number for many years, ever since my book
Wifework
sparked a series of abusive phone calls from ex-husbands—and not even my own ex-husbands. But it had been years since I’d been seriously troubled by hatemongers. I figured getting the odd unwanted call was a small price to pay for unyoking myself from the burden of those nine-thousand-plus messages. And, anyhow, it seemed doubtful that anybody who didn’t know me well would have the chutzpah to call my home number.

Yeah, well.

The first weekend, I received a call from a reader wanting to discuss that Saturday’s column. It was painful, but I survived. I even managed to sound brisk—an effect I’d been trying and failing to achieve for, oh, half a century now. I braced myself for a barrage of similar home invasions. I never got a single one.

It’s interesting how few of us scruple to set up a private e-mail address, yet are willing to defend our home phone numbers to the death. For some reason, we don’t regard unwanted e-mails as invasions of our privacy, or incursions on our headspace, in quite the same way. Which is weird, because in lots of ways e-mails are much
more
intrusive than home phone calls.

If you work on a computer all day—as so many of us do—e-mail messages explode in your face constantly, like tiny hand grenades hurled by an unseen enemy. Thanks to the hypervigilance of our Outlook accounts, messages from anybody, from everybody—friends, colleagues, bosses, randoms—bleat insistently for our attention all day long, elbowing their way onto the very pages of the very documents we are attempting to process. Sure, it’s just a two-second flash in the corner of the screen. But how it haunts one’s consciousness!
^b

Phone calls—even if you do happen to work from home—aren’t remotely similar. For one thing, friends don’t ring you in the middle of your working day to tell you a joke (let alone five friends, let alone a bad joke), or pass on a nugget of homespun philosophy, or describe an impossibly cute kitten/puppy/toddler/ferret. Retailers don’t ring you with deals expressly designed for “customers like you.” Colleagues don’t ring you with verbatim replays of conversations they’ve had with other colleagues. And nobody, but
nobody
, ever rings you, says “yep,” and hangs up again.

For the purposes of The Experiment, just to be on the safe side I decided to disconnect our home answering machine. I’d always kind of resented the answering machine and the way it shifts responsibility for making contact from the caller/petitioner to the receiver/ petitionee. I was happy to deal with the occasional inconvenience of missing a call if it meant a holiday from playing telephone tag with people I’d likely never wanted to speak to in the first place.

Long story short: I probably did miss a lot of calls, and probably 99 percent of them were truly, madly, deeply miss-able anyway. The 1 percent that may have changed my life indelibly must remain in the category of what Donald Rumsfeld has taught us call the “unknown unknowns.” I’ll never know what I don’t know about those calls—or even if there were any. I wouldn’t say I’m exactly cool with that. I’d say I’m
euphoric
with that.

But back to our e-mail story. Heaven knows, you don’t need an iPhone, or any other smartphone, to become hopelessly hooked on e-mail or to experience big-time boundary issues between work and home. But it helps. The (slightly sepia-toned) AOL study found that nearly two-thirds of people check their work e-mail over a typical weekend, with one in five doing so five times or more. Twenty-eight percent admitted to sneaking a peak at work e-mails while on vacation (and the remaining 72 percent were probably lying). Among respondents living in New York, a quarter wouldn’t vacation anywhere they could not access e-mail.
¹¹
Just a couple of years on from that survey, it all sounds so quaint. When astronauts can tweet from space, as they did for the first time in January 2010, it’s hard to imagine where on earth—or around it—a signal-free vacation spot might be. (“Hello Twitterverse!” wrote space station resident Timothy Creamer, aka Astro TJ, from the vastness of the heavens. “We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station—the 1st live tweet from Space! :) More soon, send your ?s”
¹²
Kinda gives you goose bumps, doesn’t it?)

The AOL study, waaaay back in aught-seven, found only 15 percent of e-mail users used a mobile device to check messages. But of those, nearly a third (30 percent) confessed that, as a result, they feel “married to the office.”

Possibly because they are sleeping with it, though not having sex with it (LOL). Seriously, it’s not just me. It turns out that fooling around with your smartphone in bed is probably the second most widely indulged secret shame of modern times. AOL found that 41 percent of mobile e-mail users freely admitted snuggling up to their cell phones while they slept. Sixty-seven percent check mail in bed, 25 percent while on a date, 50 percent while driving, and 15 percent in church. (The Lord works in mysterious ways. Why not through Outlook?) Oh, and remember the bathroom thing? Which made me feel so shameful and perverse and wrong? Well, I’m not saying it’s a nice look to check your in-box while you’re on the outbox. But learning that 59 percent of my fellow smartphone users are doing exactly the same thing in there definitely made me feel less unclean.
¹³

In 2007, smartphones were still prestige gadgets. Only people of a certain class got to read their mail in the john. A year later, 10 percent of Americans owned a smartphone. By March 2010, Nielsen forecasts were estimating that one in two would have one by Christmas—just in time for a blazing yuletide log-in.
¹⁴

Uncovering a whole covert world of fellow Outlook abusers made me feel less debauched. But it also sparked an auditory hallucination of my mother saying, “If everyone else was jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do it too?”

Knowing that people
are
using technology in a particular way begs the question, how
should
we be using it? Or, for that matter, shouldn’t be. Checking your e-mail while riding your bike, or showering, or voiding your bowls, may be unsightly or extreme. But is it wrong? Once I broke up with iNez—rather callously shutting her down and stuffing her into an unmarked pigeon hole in my home office—I had tons of downtime in which to contemplate that question.

 

 

Like any other smartphone—generally defined as a cell phone with PC-like capability—the iPhone suffers proudly from “feature creep.” As well as its super-screen abilities, it incorporates an organizer, a GPS, conversion calculators, an alarm clock, and a truly vertiginous array of downloadable applications—as of this writing, fifty thousand and multiplying Malthusiastically every minute—from iLickit, a game that literally involves players licking a picture of a food item with their real-life tongues; to FlyChat, a kind of antisocial social media utility that sends users’ messages to complete strangers, for no apparent reason; to more sober applications for doing just about everything from online banking to detecting speed traps (“Trapster”) to keeping track of your (or a significant other’s) menstrual periods (“Lady Biz”) to playing your choice of diabolically annoying sounds—think baby colic, jackhammer, slurping (the eponymous “Annoyance”).

Bizarrely enough, I found being cut off from the actual phone part of the iPhone—the most prosaic and least alluring of its multitudinous charms—was the easy part. It also had the biggest impact on my life—my parenting life especially. I’d anticipated this to some degree. On a day-to-day, hour-to-hour basis, calls to or from my kids accounted for upward of 80 percent of my phone traffic. I accepted from the outset that disruptions to my parental peace of mind would be unavoidable. What I never expected was that My Big Hang Up would actually
increase
that peace of mind. My unexamined assumption that more contact must produce better parenting (and generate less anxiety) was just that: unexamined. My dependence on the phone was something that had grown up organically over the years, spreading its tentacles imperceptibly, like a nail fungus.