Most people close to me know I’m a die-hard technophobe. In fact, I’m practically Jurassic! To this day I’ve successfully resisted owning any electronic or battery-operated devices viewed as common and indispensable by many people, including alarm clocks, cell phones, and watches. The watch that my friend Brian gave me on my birthday last year still sits in a drawer untouched.
Recently, while reading John Mayer’s Playboy interview, one particularly biting remark (out of many caddish comments) he made about his ex-girlfriends – that describing Jennifer Aniston – jumped out at me. I thought, “Ouch!” and then, “That’s me!”
<<One of the most significant differences between us was that I was tweeting.
There was a rumor that I had been dumped because I was tweeting too much. That wasn't it, but that was a big difference. The brunt of her success came before TMZ and Twitter. I think she's still hoping it goes back to 1998. She saw my involvement in technology as courting distraction. And I always said, "These are the new rules."...>>
Although Aniston’s life and mine are worlds apart and we probably have next to nothing in common, her feeling about her significant other’s level of involvement in technology happened to be exactly the same as mine – “courting distraction.” It also wasn’t lost on me that if I ever date again, my inability to make peace with technology will be one more item on a long list of all the things that would count against me on the “fit-to-date” scale.
Many people are surprised, even shocked... when they realize I’m serious about not owning a cell phone. “How do you survive without one when you have four kids?” is a question I get asked often. I guess my children have less influence on me than they should! They probably see me as impossibly intransigent, hopelessly quaint, and terribly outdated, but they must not have minded my quirkiness all that much because I rarely get complaints about my stubborn refusal to keep a cell phone handy.
Like most of their contemporaries, each of my four kids has his/her own phone. Although they’re not quite as promiscuous about cell phone usage as many kids their age seem to be, they do have an easy relationship with technology and regard the many gadgets they own as their fun and friendly companions. Me, I can’t even elevate them to “necessary evil” status! For a short time, at my sister’s insistence, I'd attempted to carry a cell phone around with me for emergencies. It felt like being married to someone I loathed. Having to remember to charge the phone every day, take it with me where I go, decide whether I should leave it on or silence it… things that quickly become automatic for a lot of people, proved to be too much of a hassle for me. I failed to see the purpose and value of all that work, especially when the intended reward was to obtain the feeling of being plugged in. Unlike most people, I hate that feeling. It actually induces stress in me. I would rather stay unplugged, which is why I still manage to leave blank the secondary phone # on the many forms I’m required to fill out everyday.
One time someone from a delivery service that failed to get a second contact number out of me was so incredulous about my situation that she actually came out and asked (good-naturedly) why I didn’t own a cell phone. My honest answer was that I didn’t want to feel accessible to everyone all the times. “It must be nice,” the person mused, “but you can also choose to turn your phone off or not pick up a call.” I know! But I’d rather preserve what little freedom I still have from what seems to me like a relentless encroachment from the technology monster, even though it might just be an illusion I harbor in this day and age.
As someone who absolutely detests gadgets, I definitely feel bombarded by new inventions seemingly designed to spook me… the dizzying array of hand-held devices that suck time away in a vacuum: cell phones, Blackberries, iPods, iPads, iTouch, and their inane info. stream – Twitter. I’ve already succumbed to facebook, and for me that’s enough! At least, this medium occasionally provides nutritious food-for-thought, unlike Twitter, which invariably churns out junk-food morsels. Like everyone else, I’m not above frittering a good chunk of my time daily on emailing and net activities not related to my work. It amazes me that with all this connectivity, people have any time left at all for real, human interactions. I wonder what it will be like 10, 20 years from now, when my children have children of their own! I wonder how their childrearing would be impacted by the new technology available then, and if everything in their lives would end up being virtual.
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