THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONNECT
By Susan Maushart
Profile Books. 278 pages. £11.99
ISBN 978 1 846 684 647
Would you dare to do it? If you were the parent of three teenage children, would you dare to disconnect TV, computer and ban mobile phones for six whole months?
Susan Maushart, an American mother living in Australia, did just that and lived to tell the tale of what became known as The Experiment. This book is the story of that six months. It tells of the horror, disbelief and sometimes envy of other parents. It tells of the sulks and moods, the rants and the strops of the ‘deprived’ teenagers. And it tells what happened, to their schoolwork, their sleep patterns, their eating habits and so much more. Read it. This is no gooey winning-through story. There are highs and lows. There is profit and loss.
If the book were just that account I would recommend it wholeheartedly to any parent (with a warning about occasional ‘language’). This is not a Christian book, but it speaks truth. But The Winter of our Disconnect is more than narrative. As Ms. Maushart logs the effect of this detox on her own attitudes and behaviour as well as those of her children, she also investigates research into the effect of internet and high-tech gizmos on our lives. This book is packed with really interesting statistical findings from a wide-ranging global body of research. Some of it is surprising. Some of it is what you would expect. Some of it is frankly scary.
No nostalgia
Two things make this book particularly noteworthy. Firstly, Susan Maushart is no nostalgic wannabe 1950s housewife. She loves her iPhone, even confessing to sleeping with it under her pillow. She is a journalist: the worldwide web is her bread and butter. So she does not automatically make the assumption that new-fangled equals bad. She correctly identifies the printed word as media. It is a recorded fact of history that when Gutenberg set up his printing press, there were those who held up their hands in horror and said ‘no good will come of it’. So Ms. Maushart avoids the trap of generational antipathy. Instead, she is genuinely curious about the effects of different kinds of media on our lives. And she is honest about the outcomes. Is her daughter spending time more profitably when she is lying on her bed reading rubbishy magazines than when she was continuously tinkering with her profile on Facebook? Ms. Maushart discovers that to create a vacuum is to invite it to be filled and it might be filled with something less attractive. Didn’t Jesus say something rather like that?
Secondly, Maushart scratches beneath the surface. Many Christian parents have rightly been concerned about the content of media, whether TV or internet. But that is comparatively simple to control. There are checks that you can put in place. But what about the effect of the various kinds of media themselves? How, for example, has texting changed the way the rising generation regard commitment? How has Facebook altered our understanding of friendship?
These are questions we should be asking and this book makes a pretty good fist of answering them.
