Taking my family into the heart of darkness

It's a funny thing to be blogging about, but I've pulled the Internet plug at my house.  As we decided to ditch television about five years ago (and have only ever been sorry during the Stanley Cup Playoffs), my house is now cut off from the outside world except via telephone (which nobody uses anymore it seems), print media, and word of mouth.

Initially, this was something I did not out of any deep reflection on the philosophical ramifications of cyberlife.  It's rather a long story, but it won't be unfamiliar to readers with kids.  On the weekend, most of my children lost their minds at more or less the same time for reasons that in one way or another could be connected to internet access.  My four year old son wanted access to his Club Penguin account.  My 12 year old daughter wanted to spend 8 hours per day on MSN messenger.    I'm not even sure what my other kids wanted to do as they'd drop the screen as soon as I was in the same room.  There was yelling, unhappiness, battles over cyber-time that erupted into yelling and shoving. In one case an adult child of mine descended into fits of kicking and throwing around her school books.   So  after watching this circus develop for a couple of days, I just got up and pulled out the router and I hid it.

Now, life at home is different.  For one thing, several of my children are no longer speaking to me.  There are other positive changes as well.  We're all reading a bit more.  We're spending more time outside the house.  We live in a lovely central neighbourhood that either accidentally or perhaps by ancient design stumbled upon all of the right planning principles to urge neighbours off the front porch and into each other's interesting lives.  We're getting out from behind our terminals and we're going to visit.  Suddenly, more than at any time in recent memory, we have a place. 

I know it won't last forever.  My wife is getting tired of not being able to pay her bills online.  Inevitably, my kids will bring home a school assignment that will require them to conduct what passes for "research" these days and it will need to be done far into the wee hours of the morning.  But right now what seems to be happening is that when my kids need the 'net, they go somewhere else to find it (school, a coffee shop with a wireless zone).  I get my cyberwork done at work rather than at home (sorry editors, but I swear I'm still making good progress on the book).  In the meantime, we're getting the weeds pulled in the yard, we're planning a little social gathering on the front lawn on Thursday night, and we're noticing what the weather is like outside and what phase the moon is in.

Don't tell my kids, but I've actually wondered about pulling the plug permanently.  What if internet portals weren't absolutely everywhere but existed as shared social resources in public spaces?

I know.  Crazy.

Comments

[Andrew Abela]

This is kind of funny.

There was an episode of South Park (that actually hasn't aired in Canada yet, but you can always watch it on, well, the internet) about what would happen to society if the internet had stopped working. I think it was episode 6 of season 12 if you are interested. I'm not sure if South Park's humour is too low brow for you, though.

Basically, they found out that there was a small amount of internet in San Francisco. Families all flocked there to ration the one terminal they still had that worked relatively well. It was more like a refugee camp, though, than the type of public space social resource you refer to.

[colin]

I'm not a regular viewer, but I've seen a few episodes and confess that when my little daughter decides to wear her winter hat backwards I've called her "Kenny". Another take on this with a somewhat higher "brow" comes from Bill McKibben, the noted environmentalist and author of "The End of Nature." In his book "The Age of Missing Information" he compares his experiences spent watching 2400 hours of television with a one night camping trip on a mountaintop. He summarizes:

"...We believe that we live in the 'age of information,' that there has been an information 'explosion,' an information 'revolution.' While in a certain narrow sense that is the case, in many more important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An unenlightenment. An age of missing information."

I hear McKibben has also recently gone off-line completely.