Almost offline

November 2020

Exactly ten years ago, I wrote this column from a family holiday in a cottage on the English coast with no phone, no internet, no television and negligible mobile phone reception.  I was interested that it was the grown ups who suffered the withdrawal symptoms, and were marching around looking for a signal, fretting about their email, whilst the teenage youngsters who, at the time, we were all worrying were becoming badly affected by this new temptation called the world wide web, just got on with mucking about in boats, doing jigsaws and laughing.  I reflected that life without electronic connections had attractions.

We have taken that cottage for the same week every year for 27 years  and we’ve just repeated the experience. Many of the same people who were with us ten years ago joined us, and some now have children of their own, all under five years old.  This newest generation has no notion of what life is like without the internet, and think that having long video chats with Grandma is how it’s always been..

The cottage is still on the periphery of the electronic world, and the mobile phone signal is still dreadful.  That may change soon, incidentally; the Chairman of a major mobile phone network has bought a house there, and I can’t help speculating that the signal strength may soon miraculously improve.

However, one of the charming owners of our cottage called before we arrived to warn me that Wi-Fi had been installed, and hoped I didn’t mind.  She sounded a little embarrassed, I thought, and said that I was welcome to unplug the router and hide it if I wanted to.  She said that one of the previous tenants had done just that – not because her children were using it, but in order to force her husband to engage with the family.

I muttered grumpily about ‘change and decay in all around I see’; I may have mentioned the ravens leaving the Tower and similar,  but in the end I decided that the time had come to admit that nowadays we know better how to mange such matters and I risked leaving the Wi-Fi on, with all the concomitant cultural perils.

To my relief, it all worked out rather well.  It was good, for example, to be able to read our newspapers on tablets at breakfast, without having to drive a few miles to pick up a copy.  My son in law, a solicitor, was grateful to be able to unobtrusively check work emails and similar from time to time, without needing an expedition to do so.  It was reassuring to know that we had Netflix or iPlayer (via tablets) in reserve in case of emergency child-related need.  In the event we were lucky with the weather, and all five of the children were perfectly happy playing with each other or the grown ups and certainly happier than being stuck in front of any screen.

I think the lesson we learned is rather encouraging; we seem to be acquiring the ability to moderate our dependence on phones, laptops, tablets and the rest, and that the trick is to use the internet properly, for our benefit, and not allow it to suck us into the morass of addictive games, endless scrolling and mindless nonsense.

As my daughter, the mother of three of the under-fives, wisely pointed out, the internet is like a machete: you can use to cut a safe path through the jungle, or as a weapon when you’re leading a national uprising.  Either way, it’s not the machete’s fault.  So it is with the internet; a force for good, if manged and used properly. It’s up to us all to make sure that the young know how that’s done.

Some relevant links

Teach children to use the internet – the NSPCC’s advice
CLICK HERE

If you are very short of a thing to do, and  want to read the piece I wrote ten years ago, it’s here.

Check mobile phone coverage.  It’s poor.  https://checker.ofcom.org.uk/mobile-coverage