Connected

Did you know that my first semester in college, my roommate and I did not have a telephone?
   Unless you were me or Bob, or our parents, you probably did not know that.  But it’s true.  For 16 weeks we lived in a… rustic* apartment at 30th and Guadalupe in Austin, TX, blocks from the University, and our telephone was the pay phone across the street by the front door of the co-op.  Seriously.  We were not connected in any way, and the Internet as we know it now was then a decade from springing full-formed from Al Gore’s skull.  Bob and I were both eighteen, college freshmen, with less money than the Dragworms**  we chatted with on the way home from school, and we managed to make it more or less successfully for four months without a telephone.
   Imagine that now.
   You can’t, can you?  I almost can’t, and I lived it.  Right now I’m sitting at my desk, my computer connected to the Internet, with my smart phone about a foot from my hand.  I am ready, at a moment’s notice, to be interrupted by anyone else’s whim.  You want to text me?  Do it.  You want to send me an e-mail on any one of the seven or so accounts that I monitor regularly?  Make my day.  IM?  I’m waiting for the flashing light to distract me from what I could be accomplishing.  There’s even a desk phone a foot in the other direction, so people from work can call me looking for the person who had that number last.
   Connected?  I’m the spider at the center of the web, baby.  Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Blogspot, Hotmail… I got it all.  Except Pinterest, because I’m not a chick.  If news breaks, I’m on it.  If there’s a celebrity nip-slip, I’m right there.  Up-to-the-second political theater?  I got a front-row seat.
   But what does all that effort get me?
   Sure, I’m connected, but to what?  I read two news sites several times a day, and I notice that more often than not the top stories are exactly the same.  They’re wire feeds, from real journalists at the AP and Reuters.  Two large web sites, providing this service to me for free, don’t even create the content they pipe to my brain.  Yes, my family can text me and I can text right back, but is that any better than a phone call?  Or a visit in-person?  I read what my former colleagues in LA have said they like to have for dinner, but I don’t know my neighbor’s name.  And while I appreciate being able to stay connected with friends all across the globe, when have Facebook and Twitter been anything but an excuse to avoid doing something you’d rather not do?
   I think back to that time when I was a brand-new freshman at a great-big University.  I was a blank slate.  I didn’t know what to expect, I didn’t know what was expected of me.  I talked to my family infrequently, on a pay phone 75 yards from my front door and across a major thoroughfare.  I was forced to rely on myself, to decide what was important to me and to make it happen because there was no one else around to look after me but me.  I made new friends, I figured out how to succeed at school, and I encountered Austin’s seamy underbelly and emerged unscathed.  I did a lot of living those 16 weeks and lot of growing up.  All without obsessively consulting other people about it, without a device tethering me to the firehose of largely-pointless information that makes up the Net today.  I had to internalize the experience, I had to mull it over, make my own sense of it and incorporate it in my life.  I had to think about stuff instead of blindly reacting to it.
   I should start doing that again.  You probably should too.

*  the polite term for ‘roach infested moldy cracker box with a backed-up toilet that used to be the HQ for the local pot dealer.’  But all that’s another story.
** homeless mental patients released from the State Hospital about 12 blocks North of the University and pushed out the gates with a change of clothes, a pair of shoes, fifteen dollars and a hearty handshake.  Really.