Midnight. A message pops up on my computer screen from my little cousin in Brussels. He’s 20 something and fun. This sudden message popping phenomenon is new since Facebook decided to link the message feature to chat and to make ‘connected to chat’ the default when you log in.
Translation: the 500+ people on my Facebook can pop into my life at any given time and begin a conversation with me. I don’t like this feature. I like to decide when and how I make myself available and to whom. David, my cousin is furiously typing one random line after another and by the time I am finished uploading a piece to my new blog, I have an accumulated clump of unread/ unresponded texts on my screen. Based on the inane nature of his comments and the higher-than-usual ratio of typos, he is clearly inebriated. It’s 6 am in Brussels and he admits to being drunk and having just walked in from an ‘awesome’ party.
“Do you have What’s App” he asks.
“No,” I curtly, answer, vaguely annoyed by his intoxicated state. Before I bid him goodbye, I decide to ask him what is What's App.
“It’s the coolest app. It allows you to text anyone in the world, for FREE.”
Now, he is talking. My entire family is split on three continents. Within a matter of minutes, I download the app onto my iPhone and resume our distorted conversation via texting. Quickly, I locate other relatives on What’s App. The next day, my niece, also in Brussels texts me she has a new boyfriend and wishes I could meet him. Now, I am in the know, thanks to this new app.
The ways in which I am connected to people via technology has become overwhelming and I don’t realize how just dependent I am on the zillion and one gadgets that have seeped into my everyday life until one day my iPhone slips out of the back pocket of my jeans, right into the toilet. For two weeks, I am relegated to using a flip phone. Remember those? With a tiny, microscopic screen, NO internet access and no keyboard.
The first day of my new flip phone life, I get completely lost on my way to a party (no more GPS on my phone, no more Google to find a new address, no more hundreds of phone numbers of people to call to help me out of my problem). I pull over holding the useless phone in my hand and realize I have to set it aside and actually use my own brain to find my way again.
Yesterday, I left my phone (glossary: when I say phone: you can now assume I mean an iPhone and would never use that term loosely to refer to anything less) in my car for two hours. This is an aberration and never happens but the heat wave has negatively impacted my judgment. (Side note: yes, I am that woman who is attached to her phone 24/7 except I’ve recently stopped sleeping with it and actually charge it a few feet away from me now because a friend told me she’s convinced the electromagnetic emissions are really killing us slowly. If she’s right, I am screwed.) By the time the scorching summer temperatures have fallen in my apartment and I’ve resumed the ability to think long enough to realize my phone has been away from me for two hours, I find a list of unresponded texts, voicemails, emails, Facebook notifications, Words with friends’ move and now What’s App messages that have accumulated in my absence.
Suddenly, I am overwhelmed with the task ahead. Identifying the nature of the missed calls comes first, followed by checking the unread texts, two of which refer to yet unheard voicemails. One friend texts me: "Well, I guess you don't want to talk to me." Technology has made all of us, whinier, and more dependent on each other. God forbid I leave my phone out of the bathroom so I won't risk losing it in the toilet.
I notice three of my Words With Friends partners have made a move in my absence. For those of you who have no idea what I am saying: I am playing Scrabble with friends and complete strangers alike from all over the world. This practice began when one of my former students told me I should download the app. Why not, I thought? How bad could playing a harmless game of Scrabble with one of your former writing students really be? I remember thinking the poor kid would be at a disadvantage. Why would we she want to play with her former Writing College Professor? Wouldn’t that be a recipe for a sure loss on her part? I accepted the invitation. From her first move, I realized I was in unchartered territory. She opened the game with something like Benames 7 letters with an extra 35 points for using all letters on her first turn. I was screwed. Dictionary.com definition of benames: “before 1000; Middle English; see be-, name; replacing Old English benemnan; akin to German benennen, Swedish benämna" What was happening here? I thought something was off but I kept on playing. Every word she used seemed well beyond her grasp. Granted she had been one of my best students and received a well-deserved A but clearly, she was beating me into the ground with one obsolete, esoteric word after another. After my first defeat, I text her these simple letters: W T F?! She responded with a ☺ followed by a confession that she was using an app to cheat on Words With Friends. “The app gives you the best words combo for your letters.” What kind of world was this?
Last spring, I attended a friends’ memorial on UStream, (http://www.ustream.tv/) a website that allows you to use a live web stream from an event. Unable to fly to California for the memorial, I was grateful for the technology that would connect me to this important event. I registered on the site two days before the memorial and looked around. Quickly, I became mesmerized with the live stream from an eagle’s nest in the Midwest. Overnight, I became attached to these eagles whose lives I could observe at every moment. The first morning, I simply watched the eaglets rest for a few minutes. The level of activity of eaglets in a nest is pretty minimal so I had to resume working. But before I went to bed, I checked on the page to see their little feathery bodies fast asleep, their wings covering their beaks, something I could clearly discern thanks to the infrared technology used with the cam. This was a beautiful thing. I checked on the eagles daily for almost two weeks before getting bored.
We live in a brave new world of constant interconnectedness. I can stay wired to my friends all over the world, some of whom were not even human.
The day of the memorial, I joined a few hundred others from as far as Australia and Britain and paid our respects to our friend who had recently died. We watched and heard the memorial while chatting with each other in a separate live chat window on the side of the screen. Thanks to the web, we were not going to miss a thing.
In a few days, I will be making my yearly trip to a music festival completely off the grid. This annual pilgrimage to the middle of nowhere Michigan where I have ZERO cell phone reception and ZERO internet access (for two weeks,) always brings perspective on every aspect of my life including my increasing dependency on technology. In those Michigan woods, I will have to relearn, as I do each year, to approach each and every one of my challenges with the sole use of my body, including my brain and let go of my usual reflex to any problematic situation by saying there’s got to be an app for that.
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