The Winter of Our Disconnect: How Three Totally Wired Teenagers (and a Mother Who Slept with Her iPhone)Pulled the Plug on Their Technology and Lived to Tell the Tale

by Susan Maushart

Overview

The wise and hilarious story of a family who discovered that having fewer tools to communicate with led them to actually communicate more.

When Susan Maushart first announced her intention to pull the plug on her family's entire armory of electronic weaponry for six months-from the itsy-bitsiest iPod Shuffle to her son's seriously souped-up gaming PC-her three kids didn't blink an eye. Says Maushart: "Looking back, I can understand why. They didn't hear me."

For any parent who's ever IM-ed their child to the dinner table, this account of one family's self-imposed exile from the Information Age will leave you LOLing with recognition. But it will also make you think.

The Winter of Our Disconnect challenges readers to examine the toll that technology is taking on their own family connections, and to create a media ecology that instead encourages kids-and parents-to thrive. Indeed, as a self-confessed single mom who "slept with her iPhone," Maushart knew her family's exile from Cyburbia wasn't going to be any easier for her than for her three teenagers, ages fourteen, fifteen, and eighteen. Yet they all soon discovered that the rewards of becoming "unplugged" were more rich and varied than any cyber reality could ever be.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101486122
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/20/2011
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	378 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Susan Maushart is a columnist for Weekend Australian Magazine and is heard regularly on ABC Radio as host of the acclaimed online series "Multiple Choice." Maushart has a PhD in Media Ecology from New York University and her book The Mask of Motherhood was hailed by the London Times as "a feminist classic." She lives in Australia but will be returning to live in the Long Island, New York, area this winter.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"The author narrates her story in a breezy, irreverent style, but beneath the humor is much wisdom about what our wired world does for us and to us. No Luddite diatribe, but an insightful tale of the digital dilemmas familiar to many families."
-Kirkus Reviews [Starred review]

 

Editorial Reviews

Writing in a breezy, conversational style, Maushart weaves anecdotes with statistics and cultural studies…she makes an inspiring and entertaining case for the unplugged life…
—The Washington Post

Nora Krug

Maushart (The Mask of Motherhood) embarked with her three teenagers on a six-month screen blackout (no cellphones, iPods, PCs, laptops, game stations, or television) to discover if the technology intended to stimulate and keep us virtually more connected was, as she suspected, making us actually more disconnected and distracted. Ironically, Maushart may have gone screen-dark, but her writing remains riddled with "textspeak"--"LOLs," "WTFs," emoticons--and exhausting chipperness and self-conscious "hipness," which all distract from an otherwise intelligent and eloquent core text. Funny and poignant precisely when it is not trying to be, this book vacillates between diary entries (written longhand) and deeply researched reportage, which brings needed balance to the subject of new media, often touted as either the answer to all of our problems or the accelerant of societal doom. What Maushart's experiment uncovers is a commonsense conclusion: in a world of proliferating demands on our attention, exercising the on/off switch is the ultimate practice in understanding connection. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"The author narrates her story in a breezy, irreverent style, but beneath the humor is much wisdom about what our wired world does for us and to us. No Luddite diatribe, but an insightful tale of the digital dilemmas familiar to many families."
-Kirkus Reviews [Starred review]


 

From the Publisher