Early in this blog, I wrote about the possibility of driving 1/48/50 - 1 drive through 48 states in under 50 years - with no Internet whatsoever. I considered bringing along a pre-paid cell phone for security purposes (mainly because public pay phones are a quickly dying breed and you really ought to have a ready connection to someone if you plan to be a thousand miles from nowhere for any amount of time), but leaving my big juicy smart phone at home, and refraining from using the Internet entirely - no e-mails, no texts, and especially no web surfing. I'd get my news from TV, or better yet from a newspaper the next day (maybe ditch TV as well...). If I was lost, I'd consult Rand McNally. If I was bored, I'd take a deep breath, take a look around, find something to look at. Or someone to talk to. Something to read, maybe. Or something to write.
Since that first post nearly two years ago, I've many times pondered the pros and cons of attempting such a test of discipline. And in various moments of deep contemplation, if the light outside was just right, if I was well fed and at peace enough to actually picture myself on this trip, I came to the conclusion that while disconnecting myself - er, so to speak - would get in the way of certain things (primarily my ability to keep a real-time account of my travels on this blog, which I'm really looking forward to), there's definitely something enticing (almost sensually so) about being disconnected for that long a period of time, and frequently thought, in an effort to convince myself: am I really seeking a nebulous life, or just throwing that word around...?
But recently I found myself for the first time in a long time without a 'big juicy smart phone', and now...now, I just don't know...
I spend a lot of time on these pages lamenting the world we live in, complaining that technology is dumbing down the experience of Life rather than lifting it up. I've stayed averse to, and skeptical of, the social media purported to be bringing us together, believing it leads mostly to false 'friendship' fertilized by insincerity. And I don't think technology - at least the digital variety - empowers the way Madison Avenue would have us believe. It provides the illusion of power, perhaps, of individuality. We all get a chance to yawp over the rooftops, as Whitman wrote, with our tweets, pics and posts...yep, we're yawping, that's for sure...all yawping our balls off, these days.
By that reckoning, it would seem obvious that a seminal trip like 1/48/50 should be spent eschewing at all cost the virtual world's fallacious interpretation of the word 'connected' and absorbing the real world like never before. In other words, I should be reveling in human voices rather than 'posts' as I go town to town, county to county, state to state (or perhaps just reveling in silence), absorbing natural colors through my imperfect eyes (rather than the unnaturally crisp and luminous hues presented to me in RGB). I should be pondering the uniqueness of the right angle and the architecture it enables, how birdsong has a way of stitching the day together, the fact that trees are a population of living things, clouds are rain in the making, asphalt, rather than automobiles, the reason we are able to drive so fast...the kind of random but important stuff I used to appreciate and ponder in idle moments before I could easily distract myself (from myself) playing Angry Birds, snapping a pointless selfie, watching old commercials on YouTube, or doing a rote (and almost always disillusioning) sweep of my Facebook wall, where, again, everybody is essentially saying and playing and snapping the same thing about everything, and yet for the most part saying, playing, and snapping nothing of import.
It's been pretty to think I would have no problem doing so, that it would be easy, and wholly satisfying moreover, to get back to myself on this trip.
But then last week my cell phone up and died on me...well, not died, exactly, but the charging port became corroded and gnarled inside, a little 7 mm wide nest of split plates and bent wires, into which the charger would no longer fit, thus the device could no longer be charged. I'm not sure just how the gnarling happened; to be honest, I'm tempted to cry foul. It's a top shelf phone, yet I think it's possible the port was defective on the day I got it last August. As to the corrosion, I don't remember ever exposing it to water, never dropped it in a puddle or into snow, never even allowed it to slide into my bathroom sink as I was brushing my teeth...although I guess it's possible coffee was spilled on it at some point, at least once.
Maybe twice.
But that's neither here nor there; the point is, I went three or four days without a phone while I waited for a replacement to arrive in the mail, and I'm not going to lie: living without it was like having to learn to walk again. It was maddening - maddening - the void that was created for having nothing to 'check', no screen to swipe in search of a text, an e-mail, a missed call. And the absence of digitally random but important stuff, like not being able to immediately know what time it is, or what the temperature is, or what the five-day weather forecast holds in store, conspired to create an unnerving sense of disorientation and disconnection, as though I'd woken up to discover the Apocalypse had happened while I was napping.
But the real surprise blow to my sense of ease came on Saturday, when I was faced with a situation that simply hasn't been an issue for a long, long time: driving an hour and half having to listen to the radio! You remember the radio, that 20th century relic that has largely gone the way of 8-tracks, VHS, vinyl, cassette and (any day, now) the compact disc.
How painfully quaint, how excruciatingly adorable, to have to find something interesting to listen to while I was driving! How very 1998 to be stuck enduring commercials, top of the hour ID's and news breaks...to wonder, with no input or control whatsoever, what song would play next, or what the topic of discussion might be, and with no fast forward or rewind options to boot. Yes, I suppose I could have brought along a few CDs, but they're all in storage now, destined to be donated to some second hand store in the not so distant future, where most will probably sit untouched for ages. My entire musical library exists digitally these days, in a world with no moving parts whatsoever, to which my phone is the primary - if not sole - portal.
I found myself flipping restlessly up and down the dial, 'seeking' out something that would be as satisfying - and pair as well with my coffee - as my customary menu of pre-arranged playlists and podcasts, stored on my phone, but now rendered inaccessible. It was a Sisyphean task; the radio landscape in Trempealeau County, Wisconsin is a barren tableau on the best of days.
And that's when it hit me. Control. That's the one tangible and inarguable thing the digital technology surge of the last fifteen years (now found wadded up in our pockets) has provided us, and it's a powerful stimulant. No, I'm not at all convinced technology brings us together. I'm pretty sure it doesn't edify us, or make us more creative, or necessarily smarter or - outside of rare instances - empower us in any manner of lasting influence. But it DOES offer us control over what we hear and see. It allows us to cook our entertainment and information down to a reductive stew seasoned specifically to our tastes, needs and impulses at any given moment. We can now, for the first time ever, experience only what we want to experience, and only when we want and are ready to experience it.
Who knows, maybe that is a form of empowerment after all. But in any case, it's a breakthrough whose monumental significance escaped me until it was suddenly taken away and I faced having to choose between listening to Last Christmas by Wham!, Grenade by Bruno Mars, or a farm commodities report, which even I - the man who likes to believe everything is worth knowing - found boring. I was left to shudder, remembering those dark days of yore (that nobody under 28 will understand), when listening to the radio was mostly sitting around waiting for something to happen, when summer re-runs were the only chance there was to catch something you missed on television, when you had to buy a whole album of throwaways just to hear the one song you liked...when a playlist was a 'mix tape', and kind of a time-consuming pain to do.
And the funny (or shocking) thing is, I still had Internet the entire time! I was never actually deprived the way I would be on my road trip. But merely not having ready access through my phone was, to say the least, jarring.
I'm not saying I won't try to disconnect on 1/48/50, but last week's experience has me thinking it might be harder than I was anticipating.
Maybe that's all the more reason to do it.
