The Digital Cottage

I’m writing this from an old cottage in the New Hampshire Highlands that we bought years ago when our kids were tiny, with the expressed intention of having a place for family time away from the blare of electronic media. In the mid-nineties, that meant NO television. For a few years, the plan worked. We had a landline phone, a mediocre stereo and, in the summer, a radio on the porch for Red Sox-by-moonlight. The children read Potter (Harry and Beatrix), played games, hiked, swam and built a monster tree house. Life was simple.

Then the technology began to leak in…

Along the way my employer forced a series of cell phones on me. I had managed to keep them confined to my car, each new car I bought would be immediately defiled by men with cordless drills, ruthlessly attaching brackets and fixtures to the shiny new dash, ripping up new carpets and upholstery to fish wires, cutting holes for the spiral antenna. All this, before the car’s first scratch. My commuting time was no longer my own, and the electronic perimeter had been extended, but it stopped at the end of the driveway.

Then came Game Boys. We drew a hard line (refusing to supply the batteries) and won a temporary victory. That victory was short lived though, because Motorola stopped making hard-wired car phones and my next car came with a clamshell phone. The electronic perimeter grew as the phone snuck into our cottage by way of my pocket, in hindsight, a fateful step.

Laptops came next. A “for work only” rule was established. Work only soon had to include homework. Lines began to blur. Laptops became private movie screens. We issued an edict, movies must be shared! We bought an inexpensive but elegantly designed DVD projector and screen at Costco and set it up in a basement room full of scruffy old couches. We issued another edict, one-movie-per-evening, and got immediate buy-in from every kid in the neighborhood. It turns out that they liked technology that feels kind of low rent; solid victory by compromise!

iPods followed, with their isolation-in-plain-sight social challenges. We bought an adapter for the mediocre stereo and ruled that iPods equal music and music must be shared. That treaty has held successfully for years. We listen to some (non-misogynistic) Rap and the kids cheerfully download and share Jazz, Folk and Southern Rock. Another victory by compromise!

We have held the line on TV. New Year's guests have been caught trying to watch bowl games in secret on a smuggled in 3-inch Sony. But the mountains pretty well block any broadcast signals, so the TV ban doesn’t require any heroics.

We’ve learned a lot about technology by fighting it at the cottage door. It’s pervasive and it leaks in everywhere. But, it it’s not always the enemy. It’s a (very powerful) tool and it can be thoughtfully managed.

Eating corn-on-the-cob around the porch table on a summer night is a good thing. Miles Davis playing in the background on the mediocre stereo makes it taste even better. Whether the music is on vinyl, or CD or playing on an iPod doesn’t matter. Technology is the simply the corn, Miles supplies the butter.