There are many things the digital age has delivered that make life better – my vote is for livestreams of baby giraffes taking their first steps – but there is a cultural shift due to modern technology that I am sure will send us all to the funny farm. We expect to never get it wrong.
This epiphany arrived for me last week when one of my kids was unsure about whether it was a PE uniform day at school. There was quite the tizz at my house, text messages to and fro, cross-checking of data on the school’s Compass app in between anguished putting on and taking off of sneakers. I remembered the time I went to school in civvies, thinking it was magical non-uniform day, when I could finally show the world that I had specialised interests and wear my ripped Meanies T-shirt and self-customised Converses. It wasn’t. I did feel embarrassed but I did not die.
Then there was the time I left my French horn at home on the day the school band was due to play at assembly (confession: the French horn is one instrument you can stuff your hand right into so no one actually hears you play, and my entire French horn career was spent doing this, so forgetting it was a mere visual problem, not an aural one). I did not die on this occasion either.
Before phones, I got lost more times than I can count (I still do, but now Google Maps shows me exactly how far I have ventured into bushland), including at least three times that I missed whole days at university because I couldn’t find a lecture theatre, and a domino effect of lateness thwarted my will to go on. I still graduated.
Oh, and the calamities of arrangements! Those mornings you would make your way to the botanic gardens to meet your new English lit friend on a Tuesday for breakfast but the arrangement was for Wednesday and your friend got gastro anyway, but you only got the message on Thursday when your flatmate remembered to tell you. We endured.
Those days are gone. Now, there’s a panic to get it perfect. Apps such as Waze ensure we can crowdsource the absolute best route, BOM ensures we can know there is exactly a 23 per cent chance of rainfall at 2pm tomorrow, and school WhatsApp groups mean we can feel actual terror every few minutes about whether our child remembered their art smock.
The other day, I heard of a parent being scolded by their school for sharing tracking data about the school bus. She had put an Airtag in the kid’s bag, lest she not know if they had arrived at school. I am pretty sure that’s what roll call has always been for, but tech has also reduced our appetite for waiting.
I can feel the influence of my age as I write this, the romanticising of your youth so that the moments of deathly shame blur and turn into funny little stories. But, honest to God, things were better then. We wore the wrong uniform, we turned up at the wrong place, we missed the bus, and we forgot the time of our netball grand final and the team had to forfeit and Janice Binlop, the captain, never spoke to us again and made sure we could never exit the boom gate at Westfield, which she came to operate years later. Worse things have happened.
Things were better back then because we weren’t constantly checking the pings on our phones for the multiple group chats. Yes, we were getting it wrong and dropping our kids in the no-park zone, or walking the dog down to the oval when a cricket game was on. But we were fine. We. Were. Fine.
Our heart rates were normal because our phones didn’t constantly tell us exactly how late we were going to be. We lived in innocent ignorance of all we were getting wrong, or were about to get wrong. I am reminded of a joke my late grandfather, who had been a peasant in Lithuania, used to tell, which I now understand to be less a joke than a talisman for the anxious madness of the digital futuretimes. “What do they do in America when it rains?” he would ask. “They let it rain.” Boom boom.
I know, the digital age has also brought great improvements to safety. Some say we now have fewer serial killers operating because surveillance and tracking data makes it easier to spot them, for example. And yes, it’s brought greater efficiency, with the ability to have a bot annotate a meeting for us so we can be fully available to the thousands of emails in our inboxes.
I reckon the losses outweigh the wins. We are drowning in notifications. Let’s bring the cortisol down. I say, let the kids get soaked, forget your jackets, wear Crocs to the athletics carnival, bring a cake to work when the meeting is next week, and altogether sing: Let’s get it wrong!
Nicola Redhouse is a Melbourne writer and author of Unlike the Heart: A Memoir of Brain and Mind.
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Nicola Redhouse is a Melbourne writer and author of Unlike the Heart: A Memoir of Brain and Mind.
