The other day I called someone up. An acquaintance, of sorts. Someone I’ve spoken to by e-mail countless times over the past two years, discussing work. Halfway through the conversation, it became obvious that we’d never actually spoken before.
“We must have spoken at some point,” I say, a little awkwardly.
“Yes,” she says, meaning no. “Maybe, a year ago?” Meaning never.
There’s nothing shocking in that. I’m sure you’ve experienced much the same situation yourself. But surely the fact that it isn’t shocking is something we should be shocked by? Why is it acceptable to not actually speak to the people we deal with on a daily basis? Why do we prefer faceless anonymity? Is it cowardice, or mere laziness?
Of course, the stock defense is efficiency. We’re so busy, the line goes, that we don’t have time for idle chitchat. We live — as we’re constantly told — in super-accelerated times. But no one seems to have decided what to do with all this extra speed in our lives, apart from e-mailing each other amusing YouTube videos. We’re so intent on consuming the new that we don’t give ourselves the time to properly absorb it, let alone reflect upon it.
Ironically enough, this is something I’ve been reflecting on a fair bit recently. For a variety of reasons, top of which was an almost perfect alignment of stress-inducing greatest hits (trying to move house while my wife was pregnant, and having to deal with the worry of unexpected complications) I felt the need to slow down a little. And there doesn’t seem to be an app for that.
I’m not just being facetious: More and more people appear to be thinking the same thing. Mobile phones have made us permanently contactable; remote e-mails mean that the work week stretches into the evenings, the weekends and even holidays. Under the barrage of tweets, Facebook invitations and instant messages, it has become almost impossible to switch off. The idealized version of social media is that it is like a river — you can just dip your toe in or you can dive in and get fully and joyously swept along with the current. Increasingly, I felt like I was drowning.
Already, as I discovered while wasting time on the Internet, a report by Leeds University, England, has claimed a link between increased Internet use and stress. Recent research by Microsoft reveals that 99 percent of men use the Internet every day, 80 percent would feel lost without it and 18 percent checked social networks on their phone before they had even got out of bed. Cosmopolitan even found that three out of four teenagers claim to feel stressed if they’re not online.
But the Internet isn’t the problem: It’s the people on it. In other words, me. I spend so much time on my laptop that my wife’s taken to calling it my “square-headed girlfriend.”
So I decided to do something about it. And in true self-help style, my road to redemption began with a single step: I quit Twitter. I’d already been worrying about how easily I let myself get swept up in predictable online flash mobs of moral outrage. For a nanosecond, joining a campaign against a particular newspaper columnist might have seemed like a worthy thing to do. But step away from the stampede of indignation and you realize you’re just another one of the dumb cattle they’ve successfully prodded. And I’m not convinced by the supposed innate liberalism of Twitter — not if a vigilante campaign can become a tweeting trend.
But the tipping point came when someone who I thought I admired started announcing to me in 140 characters or less that Marvin Gaye was overrated. Pathetic, I know, but the mere fact I’d allowed myself to get annoyed by something so petty only hardened my conviction. It was obvious that I was the only one making myself angry. So I decided the best option was not to look, and canceled my account. And then I just kept going. This need to wipe the slate clean, to de-clutter — or at least de-complicate — my life, took over. I needed a holiday from the world of stuff. So I decided on a very literal form of regressive therapy: I was going to go offline, to see if I could last a week without looking at a Website or checking my e-mail; to somehow re-connect by disconnecting.
Symbolically, my iPhone was the next thing to go (partly thanks to a friend’s disdainful description of it: “Are those the things I see men stroking like little pets on the tube?”). My constant, portable window to the Internet was too much of a temptation to carry round with me if I was to seriously attempt life offline, so I “de-simmed” it. (This is not an easy exercise in itself — you need a paperclip to get the sim card out and, as I discovered, paperclips aren’t as abundant as they used to be in pre-digital days).
If quitting Twitter and ditching the iPhone was relatively easy, Facebook made it as hard as possible, tugging on all the virtual heartstrings they could dredge up from their data. Having selected “deactivate account” from my settings, I was faced with a gallery of family and friends who I was told would miss me. Fortunately, as someone had tagged the contents of a barbecue grill with my friends’ names, this was less of an emotional strain than was intended (“Andrew will miss you,” pleaded a photo of a forlorn and slightly singed chicken drumstick). To alleviate my worries, I was given a final reminder: “Remember, you can reactivate at any time ...” But by then the deed was done.
Next came the hard bit. For this to really work, I shouldn’t tell anyone what I was doing. But then again, one of the great things about setting yourself an arbitrary task is that you get to decide on the ground rules, set the parameters and cheat accordingly. So I e-mailed a friend to explain why he wouldn’t be getting any more e-mails from me for a while. His reply was to the point: “How on earth will you do any work?”
It was a fair question.
So I decided I’d wean myself off. On the first day, I allowed myself to look at my inbox, but not to send any replies. To start off, it was a doddle. I walked around the office and talked to people. I delegated. I rang people up. The first person I called — honestly — rang off with the words, “Thank you so much for calling me.” See? Being offline was making me a nicer person already. And it’s amazing how quickly misunderstandings can be defused when you put a voice to an anonymous e-mail. For a start, there’s no sarcasm font on e-mail, and typing “ha ha!” does have the tendency to make you look a little unhinged.
But I won’t pretend it wasn’t without its difficulties. As time went by and I got into the habit of checking in with the people I needed to talk to, hopefully pre-empting any electronic conversations, I found ever more subtle pitfalls lying in wait. For instance, I’d never before considered the implied rudeness of talking to someone when you’ve clearly avoided reading their last e-mail. I soon learned to brazen it out by saying, “Oh sorry, I’ve not opened my inbox yet.”
It wasn’t long before another one of those acquaintances-I’ve-never-met asked, “Don’t you have it on in the background all the time?”
“Er, no, I find it easier to just check it occasionally — otherwise I never get any work done.”
“That’s a really good idea,” they said.
Come to think of it, it is a good idea.
You only have to go back five years for the digital landscape to alter radically. Back to a strange offline world: pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter. (Interestingly enough, the latter predates the former. At least I’m pretty sure that’s true. Obviously I haven’t been able to Google it). YouTube, which now has “well over a billion views a day” only came into existence in Feb. 2005. Crucially, five years ago was also before third-generation phones had taken their hold: When reading breaking news, checking your location on a map or updating your friends on your lunch wasn’t something most of us did with a device we carried around in our pockets, if at all.
And I have fully embraced this new technology. I’m now of the generation that actually has a genuine circle of friends made on the Internet. I discuss TV shows live on Twitter with them. I share photos and random thoughts on Facebook.
I write several blogs. I’ve found myself inadvertently becoming part of an online community that works both as a support group and constant source of light relief — people I hold genuine affection for, resulting in long-standing friendships and at least one job.
But it’s alarmingly easy to disappear completely. Or, more to the point, to live like we all used to. I swapped Facebook updates for lengthy phone calls (often via a phonebox; 50 pence [US$0.77] gets you nowhere these days). I read more, I cooked more, I wrote a few postcards (and managed to forget to leave enough space for the stamp). I drew. I went on long walks.
I drove to the seaside and ate chips on the beach. I watched more curling in the Winter Olympics than I would have thought humanly possible. I rediscovered the rare thrill of staying up until midnight on a Saturday night to see if my football team had won or — better yet — only finding out when I opened the Sunday papers.
But, most of all, I did nothing — and it was great. I could physically feel my head rising above the water again as the stream of information subsided. My wife told me I was more fun to be around, probably because I wasn’t tutting at my phone every ten seconds.
Obviously, however relaxing, doing nothing isn’t that much of a challenge. So, entering into the new spirit of face-to-face interaction, I went into the local branch of my bank to get some advice on savings accounts for our baby-to-be. You want interaction? They have meet-and-greeters at the door these days. Did you know that? I didn’t know that. It’s like entering a posh hotel, right down to the people complaining about interest rates.
“Hello sir!” beamed the efficient-looking lady, efficiently. “What can we do you for?” I swear she said that. And she had a clipboard, in case I needed prompting. “Hi,” I beamed back. “I’d like to talk to someone about opening a savings account. I’m a First Direct customer and I’m not sure ...”
“Ah,” she said. “Let me stop you there. If you want to discuss a First Direct savings account, you’ll need to call them.”
OK, that’s within the rules. So I called my bank. Obviously, First Direct’s entire USP is that you deal with them on the phone. And they’re very good at it. Their call centers play on the personal touch that most banks lost years ago (I switched to them after my previous local high street bank literally became a trendy wine bar). But still, it’s good practice. The nice First Direct lady (comforting Scottish voice) cheerfully chatted away to me about savings accounts, and soon went off piste, doling out free baby advice, telling me how to deal with everything from in-laws to modern prams.
Eventually, I had so much friendly advice that it was hard to make sense of (including “Ooh, you’re going to have to put away 50 percent of your earnings for the next 25 years! Ha ha!” which would have looked downright rude on an e-mail). So I asked her if she could send me the details.
“It’s all on the Web site, sir.”
“Yes, but I’d really like to be sent it, so I can take some time to read through it.”
After a brief, affable lecture about how paperless banking helps the environment, she relented; but not without one parting shot.
“If you do decide you want to go for an ISA, don’t forget you’ll have to set it up online.”
Of course, it’s virtually impossible — not to mention pointless — to live and work entirely offline in 2010. But if I was hoping to achieve anything from what had now developed into two weeks offline, this was it: If you’re finding life on the information superhighway is getting too much, just pull over to the hard shoulder and stretch your legs for a bit. It doesn’t have to be for a fortnight, but you can manage an hour. And all of a sudden, what with the speed we all work at these days, that seemingly insurmountable problem will have passed you by.
You need to reclaim the Internet — to remember it’s there to make your life easier, not to complicate it further. I’ve learned to no longer jump to attention at every “ping” in my inbox. I’ve returned to my iPhone, but I’ve pin-protected the Web browser, which acts as an extra idiot-proof barrier, and set my e-mail so that I have to manually “push” new messages (and it sounds rather quaint describing it that way, like I’m trying to squeeze it all through a virtual letter box). What’s more, I’ve started buying a proper newspaper every day from a man who looks me in the eye and says, “Good morning sir.”
I try to reply to e-mails with a phone call. I’ve been welcomed back to Facebook with a delighted automatic e-mail, but I’m keeping it strictly friends and family. And I use my work e-mail for what it was intended. It has been a hard lesson to learn, but just because a river is there you don’t have to throw off all your clothes and jump in.
A postscript — two weeks on
After two weeks, when I turned my e-mail back on, this is what I found in my inbox:
WORK: 307 E-MAILS
73 of which were an ongoing conversation between friends I’d been cc’ed into, discussing a leaving gift for a friend (sorry I missed it, Jimmy).
Almost exactly the same number (75) were from colleagues specifically discussing work.
53 were press releases that could conceivably have been of relevance to my job (and, as I work on an entertainment title, I’m including one headed “Danny Dyer fancies Ginger Nicola from Girls Aloud!”)
Of the rest, 80 percent were unsolicited press releases and spam, while the remainder were e-mails from friends or general internal announcements.
HOME: 471 E-MAILS
85 were from people I actually knew. (Including one apparently from me, generously offering myself 84 percent off Viagra pills — which seemed an oddly precise number).
386 messages went directly into my junk folder (including this spam from an online marketing company: “E-mail Productivity — save at least half hour per day. Almost all e-mail users are spending too much time on too many e-mails ... ”
GRAND TOTAL: 778 E-MAILS
Nine-tenths of which I could happily delete without reading beyond the subject line.
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