Tweet: Time to Detox

Maybe it’s time for a major power outage – time to peel our attention away from that tiny Twitter feed, turn off the laptop and reconnect with the real world? But then again, if that happened you might miss Keely’s new article!

For 2011, I’d like to propose a detox.

Not the glamorous kind- the type where “exhausted” celebs get a ready excuse for reprehensible actions and bizarre freakouts (although I’ll take one if we’re handing those out, too.)

I’m talking about a break from the constant communication and gadgetification of our daily lives. At least mine.

The other morning I realized I had been thumbing my iPhone for a solid five minutes- while my head was still on the pillow. Then I felt shame. What could possibly be so crucial as to preempt getting up to pee? I am not an on-call neurologist. The Victoria’s Secret coupon offer could have waited. No one was posting anything good that early on Facebook. (Slackers.)

The day progressed from there with a nonstop tango of emails, updates, downloading- and I even made a phone call. As soon as something funny, sad, or bizarre happened, I sent it out to the cosmos. In the short span of time between changing my daughter and lifting her down to the floor, I checked the status of my blog with one hand.

I am too easy contacted. And vice-versa. People know that within moments of sending an email, text, picture message, or no less than four methods of instant chat, I am viewing it. And here’s the kicker- I am not important. Oh, sure, my daughter and husband would [be obligated to] disagree, but the majority of the time I’m being pinged to view the [awesome] antics of a kitten.

Occasionally I’ll fall asleep to half-conscious thoughts scrolling like lines of nine point text in Times New Roman.

In the early nineties, the newspapers and really primitive AOL chat rooms were abuzz with the theory that kids wouldn’t be able to sit through anything longer than five second TV cuts. The MTV Generation, they called us. (Ha! Little did they know that we wouldn’t be able to sit through anything that wasn’t reality based. The train-wreckier, the better!)

Did you know that ninety percent of our waking time is consumed with at least one instant communication gadget? Okay, I just made up that statistic because I was far too busy laughing at peopleofwalmart.com to Google a real number.

I had a daydream while in the passenger seat on our holiday travels; it involved a massive power outage, a nationwide signal fail, and a complete reliance on carrier pigeons- for just one week. How awesome would that be, I wondered? Maybe I’d become a little less tweaky about the proximity of all these super slim and expensive gadgets. Perhaps I could just enjoy a hilarious moment with my toddler instead of filming it, snapping a pic, uploading it, sharing it, forwarding it, obsessing about why people hadn’t yet commented, calling my husband to make sure he’d seen it, sending it to Walgreens for printing, and then blogging about it. (Meanwhile, my neglected child is Tweeting that she’s wandered into traffic.)

And absolutely- maybe a full week detox would be a little much to just jump right into. Perhaps a day. But the temptation is too great for it to be anything other than forced cold turkey. Sure, I’d have Phantom Thumb, but it would allow the ol’ neurons to rest and formulate thoughts without the sounds and colors and…

…that’s about when I realized that I had been constantly hitting Refresh Location on my map app for the entire drive up the Indiana highway.

Maybe I’ll just start with an hour.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 6th, 2011 at 8:39 am. It is filed under Being Mama, Motherhood and tagged with Reconnecting, Technology, Time. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.