Can I really do it?
Can I disconnect myself for four months?
'Can I disconnect myself?' Those words would have sounded funny twenty years ago, and completely foreign before that (they sound a little like a line from a Talking Heads song), but we are wholly 'connected' now - to everyone we know and countless people we don't know and might never meet, to places we are not likely to ever visit and things happening there that in no way affect our lives. The Internet has contributed to our species' most profound round of evolution since our muddy thumbs first wrapped around a fiery torch, and it is with no small amount of doubt, and trepidation, that I wonder if I can manage to disengage the rapid flow of information that has become so integral a part of our daily lives - the updates, the headlines, the live tweets, tickers, alerts, feeds, posts and podcasts - for any extended period of time.
Can I disconnect myself?
It occurred to me at the tail end of last week's post that I should try on 1/48/50; try driving 14,000 miles across the fruited plain with no television and no Internet whatsoever. I've since found it's hardly a novel concept. It's been done, and written about, countless times as a matter of fact. But I'm not discouraged; it only illustrates my point that so many others share my disquiet over all this connectedness. I wouldn't be rehashing an old concept, I'd be stepping into a community, a village, a reservation, its inhabitants all gripped by the same strong impulse to try a different way.
I'm not discouraged, but also not convinced I can do it. I'm talking absolutely no TV or Internet. That's no joke. Especially the Internet. The television I can do without; most of what I find there these days just makes me angry or depressed. But no Internet means coping with the abrupt discontinuation of a way of life, a routine that I've grown quite accustomed to.
For starters, I'm a news junkie, have been since I was a kid, and I have been living large since the advent of the 24-hour news cycle. No Internet on 1/48/50 will change that in a drastic, albeit temporary, way by removing the Huffington Post, the Drudge Report, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, CNBC, NPR, WPR and myriad other informational/opinion websites from my daily diet. It will mean feeling stranded in my brain, left knowing all sorts of things are going on out there, somewhere, but not immediately knowing the what, where, when, how and who. It will mean discovering a way to content myself with finding out a day later, and not thinking of it as a day late.
I've heard it argued that it's unwise to disconnect so completely in this day and age. It's a complicated world after all, more tightly knit and strung than ever before. But that's really more of an excuse than an argument. The world has always been 'complicated', violent, unhinged, collectively closer to murder and mayhem than peace and harmony, and yet for almost 4000 years people traveled great distances with no connection with - or to - what lay behind or ahead. The 24-hour news cycle's biggest impact in the last twenty years has been getting us to believe that knowing what happened is not enough; we absolutely must know what's happening. But we don't really, and we sure as hell don't need to know what will happen. As evidenced time and time again by the follies of our overeager Fourth Estate, what will happen too often turns out to be merely what may happen, then in an instant what could have happened, but didn't.
As I'm a news junkie, I'm also a weather nerd, and no Internet will mean no Weather Underground. I guess there is a very simple answer to this: look out the fricking window! If I want to know what the weather's doing, or what it will be like in a certain area of the country on this road trip, I will have to look up at the sky and figure things out. This shouldn't be a difficult thing. I used to pride myself on knowing about weather, knowing the various types of clouds and conditions and what each signified, figuring out what the day held in store by utilizing methods of observation in place long before Doppler radar. When did I become dependent on peering Rasputin-like into my phone for a glimpse into the future? And for that matter, when did the weather become something we need to track days and weeks in advance? Essentially, the only thing any of us ever need to know is whether we are being rained on at any given moment, and that, again, can be discovered with a half-second glance out the window.
No Internet will mean no MapQuest, and on the surface this seems like a big deal. I will be driving 14,000 miles, after all. But Rand McNally still puts out a print edition, don't they? (Actually, I better check into that, maybe they don't...not a lot of print anything left these days.)
No Internet will mean no YouTube, but what am I really losing there? People trying to do the cinnamon challenge? Someone's pissed off cat? A bear attack? Bum fights? Trick shots from half court? Epic Rap Battles of History? (Actually, that would be hell...but it's just for four months. I can do it. I'm tough.)
Most damnably, no Internet will mean not being able to blog about the trip as I'm taking it, to share photos and observations about the photos with whoever cares to take a moment or two to check them out. But again, is real time necessary? Can't I absorb it all and share it later? More than ever, more than anything, we - as a species - have become hopelessly rushed into everything we do.
And what about my cell phone itself? That is, the part of this little mini supercomputer in my pocket that actually places and receives calls? I keep thinking it makes sense to have it with me, but people have been traveling long distances with no connectivity for millennia. Christopher Columbus sailed into - literally - the unknown without it, as well as countless other explorers and adventurers on land and by sea. There is nothing unknown where I'm going (other than, perhaps, myself), this trip will not even take me out of the country. Do I really need my cell phone? Better question: can I live without it?
My gut response to that is of course I can. But keeping a cell phone with me isn't about keeping myself accessible to the outside world so much as keeping the outside world accessible to me. With so many cell phones, there are far fewer pay phones than there used to be, barely any at all, and far fewer land lines, I'm sure. And I don't want to ever find myself unable to call out if I need to. I will probably keep a cell phone with me, as a kind of sidearm. But maybe for 1/48/50, I'll leave my smart phone at home and buy a prepaid.
No TV. No Internet.
Can I do it?
Can't I disconnect myself?
I'm not making any promises. That question might not get answered until the moment I set off.
