Screens

We Took a Day Off

Last week by mutual agreement Our Male Character and I took a day off from screens. No phone, no email, no Facebook, no shows, no movies, no internet: nada. And that one day was like the vacation that we hadn’t had in years.

This idea isn’t original with me though I can’t remember where I read it: Using the internet can be like a crumby full time job you don’t get paid for. How much time do we spend sorting, blocking, unsubscribing from stuff we never wanted in the first place? Or scrolling through nonsense just because it showed up and might be mildly interesting? Yesterday I played with my cat for the first time in ages.

One of the most brilliant people in the Antioch / Intercultural Communication Institute’s glorious Cohort 4 was unwilling to stay in touch with the rest of us post-graduation because she didn’t do internet. Not in that way. For her the attenuated quality of such relationships invalidated their reality. I thought this was nuts.

I’ve also read somewhere that, for many academics, their bodies are just vehicles for carrying their heads around. This has been largely true of me, at least of one of me, and it got worse during Covid. I viewed my upstairs sun room / prayer room / office as the command tower from which this disembodied mind carried on its interesting activities. This felt really good until it didn’t.

People have been warning for years about spending too much time online—hence the annoying phone options that track your internet hours. But like the Nanny State the English probably still talk about, the internet itself in the form of your apps and phone features is supposed to police your use of it.

So, just for the record: NO. No, Siri, I will not ask you. No Alexa, I won’t invite you in to monitor our lives. No, apps and bots, I will not allow you to monitor my health or track of my footsteps. Let’s get this straight: you’re the machines, I’m the person. (It was this bad before AI; can you imagine where it will go if we let it?)

On a side note, I recently heard confirmation that our culture has gone from print-based to picture-based, which gives me a new empathy with the illiterate, because I’m illiterate vis á vis pictures.

I’m the last to understand any visual humor, and the funny little squiggles that are suppose to tell how to do things are opaque and meaningless to me. It took me years to realize that that thing was supposed to be a printer or what the hell a hamburger menu was.

Many people in this cyborgian blend of human and machine—well, we can’t really call these things machines, can we? (When I do so, I’m knowingly but subtly insulting them.) But many people are okay with it, and that’s fine. To quote The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, “For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like.”

Just be sure they don’t creep up on you and take over your life, unnoticed and undesired. If you feel as though you have a crummy unpaid 7-day-a-week job scrolling through stuff and updating stuff and deleting stuff, remember that there’s a world outside. And a cat to be played with.