Posted by Elizabeth

From time to time, the Internet connection at my house comes to a sputtering halt.  When that occurs, the following transpires:

1. I madly hit the “Refresh” button on my web browser and frown at the little “!” mark in the bottom right-hand corner of my laptop’s screen.
2. I call Maikael in a panic – sometimes in the other room, sometimes at work – who suggests I reset the router.
3. I nervously pull unmarked cords out of a little black box, not unlike a member of an inept bomb squad.
4. I hold my breath, waiting for the string of little green lights to begin their dance across the router once again, wondering what evil deed I performed in a past live to deserve this.  I begin making bargains with The Man Upstairs.
5. When the lights blink back on moments later I utter a genuine sigh of relief, do a little happy dance, and hop back on Facebook.

This is how it goes nine times of out ten.  But sometimes – sometimes! – the router refuses to reset.  Sometimes I call the cable company and there is no good answer as to what is wrong.  “You’ll just have to wait for it to start working again,” they hopefully offer.  When this happens, I nervously pace the room, wondering if it will be minutes, hours, or, god forbid, DAYS until I’m connected to the virtual world once again.  It’s times like these that I must walk myself off the ledge and remind myself that I didn’t use email until I went off to college.  Somehow I managed to lead a productive life for 18 years without the help of the Internet.  Certainly, I reason with myself, I can go 18 hours without being connected.

I freely admit that the “important” task that a failed Internet connection interrupts typically involves email or a social networking site.  And yet, as unreasonable as it sounds, this temporary failure of technology feels monumental, sending me into a tailspin.  It looks like I’m not the only one who feels this way.  According to a recent article on technological failures, “when gadgets let us down, we feel frustrated, stumped, upset, scared, we feel stupid, like we did something to mess it up, and we feel helpless…Those are all the same feelings you have when you are depressed.”  In other words, when we become dependent upon something that fails us, without any clear answers, our sense of order crumbles.

My theory?  “Technoflubs” remind us of how little control we have over our lives.  Not only do we lack the control to make the technology perform 100% of the time, we usually lack the skills to fix them when something goes wrong.  We are at the mercy of our gadgets:  what could make a person feel more helpless?  Like most things in life, our expectations are inflated.  It’s unreasonable to expect that devices will always work, and yet we become completely despondent when they fail.  Last night I was downloading a song from the iTunes Store and, with five seconds of download time remaining, the connection mysteriously came to an abrupt halt.  I spent the next 30 minutes trying to resume the connection, madly pressing buttons and sighing audibly.  I blamed myself for trying to plug my iPod into the computer during the download process, which had obviously caused some sort of cosmic interference.  (“Isn’t it possible that the iTunes Store is simply down?” asked Maikael.  Impossible.)  Finally, Maikael said, “Why don’t you just go to bed and try again in the morning?”  Even when I realized that I was trying to will something into existence, I literally had to tear myself away from the computer.

Lately, I’ve become acutely aware of not just my overdependence on but addiction to technology.  As you may have gathered, my specific Achilles heel happens to be email and Facebook.  Except when I am sleeping or away from my computer – which isn’t very often – I am constantly connected to both of these virtual worlds.  And I don’t like it.  This addiction has surprised me, because I wouldn’t classify myself as an escapist or a technology fetishist.  Normally I prefer to live my life grounded in reality.  I think, for me, both of these modes of technology represent staying in touch, an especially important task with so much of my support network spread across the globe.  While I can’t see myself eliminating either of these technologies from my life, I could stand to drastically limit my time on the Internet.  After all, I can still stay in touch without being in touch.  I know this.  I’ve made all sorts of sophisticated plans with myself to reduce my usage, and I’m usually good at achieving a goal that I’ve set my mind on.  But with this particular issue?  I haven’t made a lick of progress.

Life in Pencil is all about rewriting your life in the way you’d like it to read, and this is something that I’d really like to change.  Perhaps if I reframe this as a habit rather than an addiction it would be easier to tackle?  They say that habits take 21 days to change, but I know myself better than that.  Although I am not a particularly religious person, I am going to use the starting and ending points of Lent, a symbolic time in which we focus on our temptations, to carry out my plan in earnest.  Lent begins next Wednesday, so that gives me a week to prepare and 46 days to accomplish my goal.  Next Tuesday I’ll bring to you my personal “rules” for the Technoless Challenge.  And, if anyone else is interested in taking the same challenge, leave a comment and let me know.  Or, if you have another “temptation” or bad habit that you’d like to address over the same period, let me know that, too.  I have some ideas brewing…

Here are some interesting blog entries and articles on the effects of technology dependence:

Kristen @ Motherese wrote about real versus virtual connection in Are We Tuning Out By Tuning In?
Nikki @ Generation V wrote about her own technology addiction in This Virtual Life
And of course there’s the article that inspired this post in Why So Much FAIL in the Digital World?

Guess what, folks? Phase One of The Waiting Game is coming to its exciting conclusion!  Tune in FRIDAY for the dramatic – and it is dramatic – reveal.  I promise this is not a shameless ploy.