Life, Unplugged
April 4, 2002

Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of community. The theme and recurring mantra of E. M. Forster's 1910 novel, "Howard's End," is the urgent exhortation, "only connect"—to conquer class, social and personal differences through communication. Lurid newspapr headlines remind us every day of the consequences of isolaton. Cut off from their fellow beings, and left too much to their own devices, people are likely to become depressed, suicidal, homicidal, or at the very least, a little wiggy.

Still, there's such a thing as too much communication. While sparkling new technology makes it possible for us to stay in touch with friends, family and business associates every waking minute of the day, there comes a point when you have to wonder if it's such a brave new world, after all.

The first encroachment was the telephone, that most intrusive but necessary device. It's said that writer Dorothy Parker cried "What fresh hell is this?" whenever her phone rang. That's kinda the way I feel. We put off getting a phone answering machine for years; as an unrepentant phone-a-phobe, I couldn't imagine having to catch up with calls I was lucky enough to miss the first time around. I agree with Nicole Hollander's comic strip heroine, Sylvia, whose taped phone machine message says, "Hi, this is Sylvia. I can't come to the phone right now, so when you hear the beep, please hang up." But when my husband (hereinafter referred to as Art Boy) began painting for a living, he was convinvced that every time he set foot outside the house, he was missing important calls from potential art buyers. So he installed the dreaded machine, and even I have to admit it's a convenience.

But these days, the proliferation of cell phones has taken the intrusive quality of the old household telephone to unimaginable new heights. If you've ever been in traffic anywhere near a driver who's yakking on the cell phone, you know what a hazard they can be. However cool or efficient it's supposed to be to multitask, a person engrossed in a phone conversation simply has less attention to pay to streetlights, lane-changers, pedestrians or traffic emergencies. In France, where civilization is a kind of art form, they've made it illegal to drive and talk on a cell phone at the same time.

And it's not just cars; cell phones boldly go where no other device has gone before, infiltrating every aspect of daily life. Joggers at the yacht harbor jabber away on the phone as they run. A passenger on the Water Taxi from the Crow's Nest to Aldo's (a voyage of about four minutes) whips out his cell phone to annoy the rest of us with his plans for dinner with an unseen companion. I've heard cell phones go off in a theater in the middle of a movie, and watched in slack-jawed disbelief as the owner complacently took the call and started up a conversation.

Art Boy was crossing a parking lot outside a supermarket once, when someone hollered, "No, no! Stop!" He came to a screeching halt, only to find an oblivious bystander just behind him shouting into his cell phone. In a discount store, I heard a woman droning on and on in the next aisle. I peeked around a corner and saw her with her phone pressed to her ear, listlessly following her shopping cart around. I went back about my own business, tuning out the steady hum of her monologue, until that hum was interrupted by an agitated, "Wait a minute, who is this? Who am I talking to?" This is certainly not "connecting" in the Forsterian sense. It's random blather aimed at anyone (or anything) that will listen.

Of course, the Internet is hailed as a marvelous communication tool, with chat rooms and message boards creating the illusion of camaraderie. I love email, which allows you to send people unobtrusive messages to be answered in their own sweet time. But back when I was a subscriber to AOL, they devised an insidious service called the Buddy System, whereby a person would be alerted whenever a friend was online to start up a real-time email conversation on the spot. This caused me no end of annoyance. When I go online, I'm working, either looking up movie info or doing historical research. (OK, I do make occasional visit to the Ioan Gruffudd News Page; a girl's gotta have some fun.) It drove me nuts to have my work interrupted by an email window demanding an instant response from someone who just wanted to chat.

The tribal urge to establish community with our fellow beings is a wonderful and necessary thing. But time wasted in idle chat with an electronic device is quiet time stolen from yourself—and that's important, too. Now and then, you owe it to yourself to experience life, unplugged. In this frenzied era of too much input and not enough down time, it may not be such a bad idea to disconnect, at least once in a while. Take a tip from The Coasters—Yakety Yak, don't talk back.