My Tablet, My Soul

Last updated on: October 16, 2015 at 8:08 am by Anne Kennedy

My Tablet, My Soul 2015-10-16T08:08:24-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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I am greatly desiring to do seven good links, having stored up for myself both good blogs and good articles, but as I fight against the reality of the gray dawn, I must admit that I cannot actually link anything in any reasonable way on this particular device. I might could try, but it would take fifteen hours.

Every morning, in the way way way too early hours, I flail around in the dark to find my original iPad mini mushed in with a pile of books on my bedside table. And my glasses. And I pour out an ablution of tea onto the tray and the floor because I can’t see and I’m still essentially asleep. Once I’ve managed to turn on the device I wander around on Facebook, trying to be realistic to myself about that fact that I Can’t Do Links. Later in the day I complain bitterly about how crotchety and difficult my iPad is becoming and Matt gives me a dull and unsympathetic stare. “Write on the computer,” he says, with no understanding or grace in these matters. To which I reply, “I can see that words are coming out of your mouth but I can’t really understand what they are. What is this computer of which you speak?”

My whole life is held in the depths of this little sparkly machine. My entire book, piles of Sunday school lessons, sketches and outlines of stuff I wish I had time to write, all my homeschool reports, and, so help me, the Internet. Gosh, how could l live for a few moments without that. I was holding it, my iPad, the other day and looking at it and was filled with remorse and worry. It’s so convenient to have everything necessary for productivity in one tiny thing. When I’m in the middle of a school day, all the book work and writing and reading is helped easily along by quickly accessed Khan explanations, by snatches of music, by definitions of words and concepts, by the endless tide of human knowledge and experience, all right there, right under the finger tips. On the flip side, for heaven’s sake, I am always completely accessible to the entire world. The demands of everybody everywhere, and the knowledge on all our parts that if I wanted to, I could instantly respond, hangs over my head like that great big sword, whose sword was it, I know I could google it but I’m Not Going To.

I long for the lost days of Bad Productivity, where I could lose an important bit of paper and that would be it, because I wouldn’t have taken a picture of the paper with my phone, so there would be no remedy to the problem of the lost paper. I miss the days of the telephone being attached to the wall, and nobody being able to find you if you were at the store, least of all your thirteen year old daughter with her flip phone and an incomprehensible math problem so that you are flung back against the bin of hams in Aldi, trying to both remember how to factor and what you hoped to cook next Thursday. Once this week I didn’t pick up. “I’m sorry,” I said, facing the look of reproach and despair in her eyes as I dug through my purse past useless and irrelevant pieces of paper that have all already been photographed, “I didn’t hear it.” But I know she didn’t believe me because I was clearly lying.

The shiny presence of my iPad in all my daily moments, the concentrated focus of all information into one small handheld device is both bewitching and exhausting. I never lose it, of course, because I don’t want to, because I am always in need of it, because there is always something that I need to do or know or check on. But sometimes I look at it, lying there, inert, and feel that it is trying to steal my soul.

Surely I never had this sensation with a computer. I would have to go to it, even a laptop, and sit there on its own terms. If I wanted to take it somewhere, like through an airport, its size and cumbersome feel was commensurate with its function. As you are struggling to take a massive laptop out of your bag and remove the shoes of all your children, panting and struggling on both counts, the very physicality of both tasks communicate their proportionate importance. This machine is very necessary. And so are the children. See me struggling along with them both. Whereas, when you go through security now, you don’t even have to take your tablet and phone out. You can leave them hidden and obscure. You shoulder their terrible weight not any longer with the body, but with the soul.

And never mind about the deep, wide, mighty current of Facebook, alerting you, moment by moment, of itself, reminding you of the past, taunting you with the future, sucking away the present. “You know,” said Matt in a flash of blinding brilliance, “in former times God sent the Assyrians, as a judgment upon the world, and then the Babylonians. Now he has sent Facebook.”

“Amen,” I said, and pressed my aching finger over the screen, scrolling up and then down, and toting up for myself the number of likes on my posts for the day.

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