And once you have that village, here’s an idea: organize get-togethers for trading tips about the tools of modern life. At a “SkillShare” event held in our area, people came together to make the digital era a little more collaborative and humane. A story in the next day’s newspaper summed it up: “An eighth-grader taught the Nintendo Wii system, two high school boys lectured on Facebook and cellphone features, while a middle-aged man demonstrated how to cut meat.” If that’s a glimpse of the future, we’ll all be fine.
The above suggestions are mostly small and incremental, but there are more ambitious ways of applying these ideas. A few years ago, my family and I embarked an experiment aimed at loosening the hold that screens had on our life together. It incorporated some of the ideas discussed above, and it worked so well, it became a permanent feature of our lives. Here’s what happened.
Chapter Thirteen
DISCONNECTOPIA
The Internet Sabbath
My family’s home life isn’t all that different from the lives of our friends in big cities. We’re tucked away on a quiet street in a small, remote town, but it’s not the study in bucolic disconnectedness it seems. The world has changed dramatically in the last two decades.
Remember the telegraph-era businessman whose mind was “continually on the jump,” yanked away from dinner with his loved ones by sudden interruptions from far away? That’s what home life is like now for everyone, parents and kids alike. In our case, as our son, William, grew older and developed his own screen interests, more and more it seemed that what we did “together” was the Vanishing Family Trick—we went off to our respective screens.
There’s a school of thought that says this is just fine, because digital screens are actually bringing families together. “Technology is enabling new forms of family connectedness that revolve around remote cell phone interactions and communal internet experiences,” concluded a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, part of the nonprofit Pew Research Center. The study maintained that having multiple computers in one home “does not necessarily lead family members to be in their own isolated technological corners.” Rather, it found “many instances where two or more family members go online together, or one calls another over to ‘look at this!’”
In other words, the Vanishing Family Trick is even more amazing than it appears. Like the illusionist’s lady who disappears from a black box only to materialize on a silken rope lowered from above, the family that disperses at the call of the screen winds up reuniting in a completely different location—on the screen itself! The more we vanish from the fireplace, the closer we become.
But it’s not true. My family has been enjoying digital experiences together for years, and they are usually fun and often memorable. I have no doubt that, years from now, one of the moments I’ll remember most fondly from William’s early years will be three of us sitting at the screen together singing along with the Numa Numa guy, “Numa Numa, hey! Numa Numa, hey!” We gather all the time for music videos, comedy sketches, nature clips, presidential speeches, you name it.
The point isn’t that the screen is bad. The screen is, in fact, very good. The point is the lack of proportion, the abandonment of all else, and the strange absent-present state of mind this compulsion produces. “Earth to loved one, are you there? No? Me, neither.” We were living for the screen and through the screen, rather than for and through each other
Like the self, the family is a small unit within a much larger crowd, a unit with its own inward life. To flourish and grow, that life requires time apart. Otherwise, both self and family become crowd-dependent, defining themselves in relation to what’s out there rather than what’s right here. Thoreau said that the man who goes desperately back to the post office over and over hasn’t heard from himself in a long while. The more the members of a family go back to the screen, for whatever it is they seek there, the less they truly hear from one another and the weaker their life together grows.
“Look at this!” is fine. We all enjoy shared spectatorship. But a family isn’t a spectator sport. It’s all about participation, engagement, connection of the most intimate kind. At our screens, we’re all facing outward.
The question was how to turn ourselves around. One option was to configure the physical spaces in the house to create physical Walden Zones dedicated to disconnectedness. In our case, we already effectively had such a zone—it was rare that anyone used a digital device in the living room—but we were being pulled out of it nonetheless. We needed something more comprehensive.
In setting up our home lives, most of us focus only on the physical spaces. We don’t give much thought to the temporal dimension, how time will be organized. But we inhabit time together, too, and time can be shaped to serve our needs and goals.
We’d been doing some home renovating, and for inspiration I’d read A Pattern Language, a classic architecture and design book from the 1970s written by an architect-philosopher named Christopher Alexander and a few coauthors. The book’s basic premise is that there are patterns in the way people around the world have built houses and communities through history. These patterns recur over and over across different cultures and epochs because they reflect deep human desires and needs.
One pattern is Alcoves. A room with alcoves allows a family or any other group to be physically together, while offering each individual the opportunity to be partly by him-or herself, in an alcove. Another recurring pattern, called “Private Terrace on the Street,” applies the same need for balance to the exterior of a dwelling:
We have within our natures tendencies toward both communality and individuality. A good house supports both kinds of experience: the intimacy of a private haven and our participation with a public world. But most homes fail to support these complementary needs. Most often they emphasize one, to the exclusion of the other: we have, for instance, the fishbowl scheme, where living areas face the street with picture windows and the “retreat,” where living areas turn away from the street into private gardens.
We were living in a fishbowl arrangement ourselves, I realized. Rather than picture windows, it was our screens that faced the world, tilting the balance toward the crowd. To solve this problem architecturally, the pattern people have settled on through the ages is a terrace configured so one can watch the street from a position of relative privacy. Homes in many traditional cultures have some version of a private terrace facing the street, and they also figure in modern homes. When Frank Lloyd Wright designed a house for a busy street, he sometimes gave it a front terrace with a masonry wall high enough to provide a sense of separation.
As an antidote to our fishbowl, couldn’t we use time to turn the whole house into a private terrace, where we could be together in a more private, inward-focused way, while still not being completely cut off from the world? Martha and I decided to try a simple experiment, based on the traditional notion of the weekend as time apart. We would turn off the modem at bedtime Friday night and leave it off until Monday morning. Thus on Saturday and Sunday all three family computer screens would be disconnected.
Though this felt like a radical step, it wasn’t as if we were going truly off the grid. We would still have our mobile phones. Neither of us used our phone much for e-mail or Internet, for which they had limited capability anyway (they weren’t true smart phones), and we agreed to keep it that way. We did use them to text, but we’d never been texting maniacs. The television would remain plugged in, which we knew wouldn’t be a problem. For us television had always been a mostly communal experience, a way of coming together rather than pulling apart.
The modem was the true conduit of our crowd life, the digital water main, and for two days a week it would now be off. We agreed to stick to this plan for several months and see what happened. It would be a positive, Franklinesque ritual, in that we were focused not on what we were giving up but on the benefit we hoped to gain, a more cohesive family life.
We called it the Internet Sabbath. “Ye shall k
indle no fire throughout your habitations upon the sabbath day,” says the Book of Exodus, and that’s basically what we were doing with our screens. They might still be glowing, but without a connection they wouldn’t be much of a draw.
The beginning was hard. That first Saturday morning, we woke up in a place that looked just like home but seemed altered in some hard-to-express way. It was as if we’d landed on another planet where the aliens had built a perfect replica of our life, but it was just a stage set and we knew it. Something wasn’t right. When you’ve been in screenworld for a long time, you really lose touch with the third dimension. The rooms were so still and silent, everything in them frustratingly inert and noninteractive. I could feel my mind crawling the surfaces of things, looking for movement, novelty, feedback. Why isn’t that coffee table searchable? We were all jonesing for the digital juice and repeatedly found ourselves heading off to our respective corners, only to remember that there was no point.
Beyond the mental adjustments, there were logistical issues. We told friends and professional contacts that from now on, if they e-mailed us on the weekends, they wouldn’t be reaching us right away. If it couldn’t wait until Monday, they should call. Some were surprised and intrigued by our scheme; a few were incredulous. Since we both worked from home, we were shutting off the flow of information not just into our family life but into our work spaces as well. How would we get by?
The rules specified that if we really needed something from the Internet, we could go into town and use the public library’s computers. The point was to keep the house itself disconnected. We did wind up using the library terminals occasionally, especially in the early months. Later, we got into the habit of anticipating digital needs ahead of time and taking care of them on weekdays. If someone we care about had a birthday coming up, for instance, we made a note to set up the e-card in advance. When a school project was due on Monday, the online research had to be done by Friday evening. In short, we learned to be a little more organized, an unexpected fringe benefit.
Still, we all grumbled. There were lots of specific things we missed right away. No spontaneous Googling to look up a needed fact. No online bill paying, a job I used to perform almost entirely on the weekends. No instant retrieval of driving directions or movie times. If William had a team sports event and it was raining, we couldn’t check our inboxes to see if it had been canceled. He missed his online gaming sites. Martha missed e-mail more than I did. I couldn’t listen to Internet radio and especially lamented the loss of a certain jazz station out of LA.
But as the weeks and months passed, these went from genuine annoyances to minor inconveniences to nonissues. We’d peeled our minds away from the screens where they’d been stuck. We were really there with one another and nobody else, and we could all feel it. There was an atmospheric change in our minds, a shift to a slower, less restless, more relaxed way of thinking. We could just be in one place, doing one particular thing, and enjoy it.
Now and then, we made exceptions. One weekend several months into the regime, a hurricane was bearing down on the Cape and family members were calling to see if we were evacuating. Should we plug back in to track the storm or sit it out and hope for the best? Not a hard call: we plugged in.
One Saturday night, William and I were watching the classic 1950s horror movie The Blob through our cable provider’s on-demand service, when disaster struck. With eight minutes left in the movie and Steve McQueen trapped in a diner that the Blob was about to swallow whole, the screen went dark. When we tried to start the movie again, we found it had disappeared from the on-demand menu. We called the local Blockbuster, but it didn’t have the movie in stock. Our only option was the Internet, where we figured there might be a watchable online version.
So we did it. We broke the Sabbath for the Blob. We found a grainy bootleg that someone had uploaded to YouTube in segments and watched the ending. The need hadn’t been urgent by any definition. Under the terms of the Sabbath, it was a grievous sin. But, I told myself, it was done in service of the kind of family togetherness we’d been hoping to encourage. The fact that we’d agonized over it demonstrated to me how far we’d come. Rationalizations, I know. But once we found out what happened to Steve McQueen—phew—we did turn the modem back off.
Donald Winnicott, one of the great Freudian psychoanalysts of the last century, wrote an essay called “The Capacity to Be Alone” about how young children develop emotional self-reliance. He said a baby learns to be alone not through true isolation but by being “alone” in the presence of its mother. This occurs when the mother is nearby but not paying close attention to the child. Sensing this, the child begins to grasp its own separateness from her and to understand that it can be alone and still feel protected and safe.
It seems paradoxical that one can learn to be alone by being with someone else, but Winnicott contends that the power of aloneness is rooted in this very paradox. Without the existence and knowledge of other people, aloneness would have no meaning. Thus, it’s only when the child experiences being alone in this way, with its mother somewhere nearby, that it can grasp the meaning of solitude and embrace its selfhood. Children who don’t make this discovery never achieve full maturity, Winnicott said, and lead “a false life built on reactions to external stimuli.”
There’s a parallel to what the Internet Sabbath did for us. We weren’t infants, but we had become dependent on external stimuli. And over time that dependency had turned our family life into something that wasn’t really us, not the best part of us, anyway. It was a false life, a life less true to our nature as human beings and to the real purpose of family. In turning off the modem, we weren’t making the world go away. It was still out there. But like the inattentive mother, it wasn’t interacting with us, wasn’t making funny hand gestures and googoo sounds to keep us stimulated and entertained. In effect, we’d recognized that our screens were infantilizing our life together. And now we were reacquiring, as a family, the “capacity to be alone” that we had lost. It was like growing up again.
None of our online relationships, and nothing else about our digital life, was being sacrificed on the altar of the Sabbath. We were just giving up a series of particular connected experiences that would have unfolded during that forty-eight-hour stretch, almost all of which could take place during the week. The digital medium allows everything to be stored for later use. It was still out there, it was just a little further away. The notion that we could put the crowd, and the crowded part of our life, at a distance like this was empowering in a subtle but significant way. It was a reminder that it was ours to put at a distance. Like Poe’s sailor, we had studied the whirlpool and decided that this little move could save us. And it was working.
After six months or so, we reached the point where, instead of dreading the weekly cutoff, we looked forward to it. One Friday night, Martha said she needed a special exception the next morning. There were some urgent work-related e-mails she had to answer before Monday, and she couldn’t rely on the library, where the screens are often busy. I skipped my rendezvous with the off switch and went to bed. When I woke up the next morning, I checked to make sure we were still on for a connected morning. “No,” she said blearily from under the blankets. “It was so depressing, the thought of waking up on Saturday to e-mail, that I stayed up late and got everything done.” I made for the modem, but she’d already taken care of it.
We slowly came to understand, in a visceral way, the high cost of being always connected. At the same time, because we were now away from our connectedness on a regular basis, we grasped its utility and value more fully. We now experienced the two states in an intermittent rhythm, so each could be appreciated in contrast to the other. When I returned to my screen on Monday morning, I was still in a Sabbath state of mind and could do my digital business with more calm and focus, at least for the first couple of days. The inner stillness tended to fade as the week progressed, and by Friday I was ready to go “away” again. A few times, we’ve sneake
d in a spontaneous one-day Sabbath during the week, when one of us needed to clear out the digital fog for an important task.
We’ve been at it for a few years now, and it’s become almost automatic. Sometimes we forget to turn off the modem on Friday and it doesn’t make a difference. Having fallen out of the habit of using our screens on those days, it doesn’t occur to us to try. An artificially imposed regime has simply become the way we live. On the weekends, the house is a kind of island away from the madness, our disconnectopia. And the good energy we gain from our time there flows over into the rest of life.
This is not to say we’re lying around doing nothing. Martha and I still work a lot on weekends, and we keep a full schedule of family activities. The Internet just doesn’t figure in any of them. Though digital devices are meant to impose order on our lives, when you remove them, a more natural kind of order returns. It’s far easier to be in a room with others and stay there. It’s easier to maintain eye contact and have meaningful conversations. It’s even easier to be apart from one another. When one of us does drift away from the group, it’s to be truly alone with a book or music or just our own thoughts, which now feels healthier. To put it another way, both togetherness and solitude used to be problems for us. Now neither is.
We aren’t the only ones who have discovered this. Friends occasionally send us articles and links about others who have tried similar regimens, sometimes calling them Sabbaths. Mark Bittman, a food columnist for the New York Times, wrote about a “secular Sabbath” he’d instituted after he checked his e-mail on an airplane flight and realized he was a techno-addict. He’d sworn off for one day a week and now, after six months, was amazed at the transformation: “This achievement is unlike any other in my life.” Author Stephen King said it was when he realized he was spending “almost half of each day’s consciousness” facing screens that he decided to cut back. “I don’t think any man or woman on his or her death-bed ever wished he or she had spent more time sending IMs.”
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