One of my daily goals, as burdensone as it might sound, is to have fewer than 2 messages on my 3 active email accounts (2 university and one personal). I am also quick to delete my iPhone and phone messages, so that by the end of the day, in the words of Simon and Garfunkel, "I have no deeds to do and no promises to keep." However, this ongoing effort to depopulate myself does not always leave me, as the song offers "feeling groovy."
Twas the day after Christmas that I decided in a moment of sparkling clarity to 'depopulate myself', and finally be rid of the 'Cloud' that I had installed on my iPhone-that newest 'must-have' piece of electronic magic that promised to keep me in touch and connected everywhere, all the time with everyone. However, since I did not have the newest marvel, the iPhone 4S, but instead its meager predecessor the Iphone 4, as I later found out, I really never was fully connected to this invisible digital source of all things good in the universe. All I received were constant error messages warning me to 'check my connection'. Now, there's a metaphor waiting for a home if ever I heard one.
Maybe it was time to 'just say no'!
So, there I sat, poised and relaxed on my porch, contemplating my impending freedom from tyranny. I lept into the abyss! I deleted the Cloud from my iPhone....and along with it went every single and last damn one of my contacts! In a nanosecond, all of the names, phone numbers and email addresses of friends, acquaintances, colleagues and clients-along with account passwords, login codes and social security numbers that I had fastidiously accumulated over the past two years were gone. Irretrireveable, at least to a digital immigrant like myself. I actually panicked. My breath drew in, my mind went blank, my already too-high blood pressure soared.
I was alone, lost, disconnected, locked out- banished from the Cloud. Be careful your wishes.
Kenneth Gergen, a psychologist and social constructionist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructionism) out of Swarthmore, wrote a fascinating book entitled, "The Saturated Self:Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life". http://www.amazon.com/Saturated-Self-Dilemmas-Identity-Contemporary/dp/0465071856/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1325246241&sr=1-1. In it, he analyzed the history of the construct of 'self', and suggested that with the advent of industrialization, mass transportation, digital technology and the Internet, each person has become connected, or potentially connected with every other person everywhere...instantly. The voices in our head, the beliefs we cherish, the feelings we feel, our very sense of who we are...all are the result of the myriad interconnections that form the very foundation of selfhood. He called this phenomenon the 'saturated self'. According to Gergen, this saturation comes at a very high cost...confusion, inner chaos, mental, physical and emotional fatigue and the sense that we are, to coin a psychoanalytic phrase, "drowning in a sea of objects."
It was my hope that fateful day, that by disconnecting myself from the Cloud, and all of its known and unknown interpersonal moorings, that I could breath, center myself (whoever that may be or has become) and rest my homeless mind. Truth be told, the silence and poignant sense of disconnection was frightening, so I quickly and desperately attempted to repopulate myself by sending out a blast email to anyone I could, asking them to send me their cell numbers. Most of them likely thought this to be an attempt to hack their computer and steal their identity (note the irony there). I swiped up my wife's phone and desperately went through her contact list in hopes that in the marital merging of our identities, that we had merged at least a few contacts. I took a shallow breath as I began to feel less depopulated. Off we went to the mall (where better to refuel my illusory connection to humanity. Ironically, there was an AT&T store there, and I explained my mishap to the 20-something wunderkind, who with the push of a button, restored my entire contact list.
In an instant, my people-meter rose from empty to ful,l and the existential crisis that forced me to contemplate my abject sense of isolation and loneliness in an incomprehensiblly vast universe swirling around me at the speed of light, passed as quickly as it had come, and I was once again whole. Lost self found!
Damn it!