Writing on the Internet about taking a break from the Internet is sort of like announcing the start of your veganhood from a cheese cave in France. But I just moved to a new city and it feels like the right time to make some new habits.
Existing habits include: looking at way too many blogs in Google Reader; more facebooking than is strictly, or even laxily, necessary, as evidenced by use of facebook as verb; and frantic bag-digging whenever I hear that glassy little ping of a text message. This last is perhaps most problematic. For one, I keep my phone on silent most days, so I’m leaping at other people’s pinging. How attuned must I be to this sound? How well-trained and pathetically Pavlovian? And then, after the phone is dug out from the bowels of the bag and the screen is not lit up with a new text, how sad that I feel disappointed? Also, on the phone the other day, my mother said, with a sigh, “Maybe I just need to learn to text so I can keep in touch with you and your brother.” Must we reduce our mothers to straining over non-qwerty-Razr keyboards just to know our lives?
Yesterday I read Laurie Winer’s review of William Powers’s Hamlet’s Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age (on my iPhone, of course–satisfying heft of the Sunday paper not included. The fact that I almost used “natch” instead of “of course” is perhaps the surest sign that things are grave on the internet-overusage front). An excerpt:
Powers suggests that evolutionary programming may be partly responsible for the drive that has many of us constantly checking our digital screens. We are wired by nature, he notes, to pay attention to new stimuli, thereby helping us to respond quickly to predators or to nab a potential meal. The biochemical effect of the iPhone ping, in fact, might be injecting my brain with what one scientist calls a “dopamine squirt.”
How adorable! I picture it sort of Hershey’s kiss-shaped, but more colorful, this little brain squirt that floods at the whoops and pings my iPhone makes when receiving and responding to birth announcements, plans to meet, puppy photos, encouragements, passive aggressive asides, tiny little emoji monkeys and martinis.
A few months back, I touched the page of a hardcover book, expecting the text to scroll. Gary Shteyngart admits to almost doing this in his lucid and lovely essay, “Only Disconnect,” which describes so perfectly the way that the iPhone moves to the front of the screen, forcing everything else out of focus:
The device came out of the box and my world was transformed. I walked outside my book-ridden apartment. The first thing that happened was that New York fell away around me. It disappeared. Poof. The city I had tried to set to the page in three novels and counting, the hideously outmoded boulevardier aspect of noticing societal change in the gray asphalt prism of Manhattan’s eye, noticing how the clothes are draping the leg this season, how backsides are getting smaller above 59th Street and larger east of the Bowery, how the singsong of the city is turning slightly less Albanian on this corner and slightly more Fujianese on this one – all of it, finished. Now, an arrow threads its way up my colorful screen. The taco I hunger for is 1.3 miles away, 32 minutes of walking or 14 minutes if I manage to catch the F train. I follow the arrow taco-ward, staring at my iPhone the way I once glanced at humanity, with interest and anticipation.
Here is an actual thought that occurred in my brain yesterday: Instead of looking for a yogurt shop with my Yelp app, I will look with my physical human eyes when we get off the train. I should throw my iPhone in the river. But I won’t. For now, I’ll commit to an “Internet/iPhone Sabbath,” inspired by the Sabbath Manifesto; a friend who told me she takes Wednesdays off from the Internet; and the fact that while there isn’t even one chair in my apartment at the moment, there’s already Internet, and it arrived the day after I did.
The plan already feels like it’s on shaky footing. I haven’t (for work-related reasons) chosen a day of tech-rest yet; my iPhone is nestled safely next to me in my bag, ready to be fondled at the slightest ping; and I am, after all, about to post this to the Internet. Then I’ll go back to reading about immortal jellyfish (immortal jellyfish!!!) and cocoa-bean-megahoarders and then, maybe, I’ll go outside for a little while, or underground, where the pings can’t reach me yet.