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 [Paperback]

Susan Maushart (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 20, 2011

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.)
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From Booklist

Australian journalist and single parent Maushart reports on her family’s decision to take a figurative six-month voyage into an unplugged life—easier said than done when your family consists of three teenagers! No wonder she describes the “voyage” as The Caine Mutiny, with her playing Captain Queeg. As it happens, the voyage is relatively storm free, though there are some squalls at the beginning. Maushart nearly goes through withdrawal after turning off her iPhone and finds that her work takes twice as long without a computer. In a way, the kids are more adaptable (perhaps because their mother offers them various bribes). They quickly learn how to do homework without access to Wikipedia and discover such joys as playing the saxophone and having sing-alongs. Interspersed with the family’s experience is a great deal of timely information about the impact of electronic technology on Generation M (8- to 18-year-olds), and not all of it is pretty. Nevertheless, the entire family is relieved when the experiment is over but delighted to discover that it has introduced them to ‘life itself.’ --Michael Cart

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: Tarcher; Reprint edition (January 20, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585428558
• ISBN-13: 978-1585428557
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #675,985 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars smart and funny, a must read for the digital generation January 20, 2011

By K. Reddy

Format:Paperback

For those of us glued to our smart-phones 24/7, this is a must read. I laughed so hard while reading it that I actually forgot to check my text messages for a few hours. Maushart's 6 month device-free experiment proves that, while technology is necessary for some tasks, our obsession with it is distracting us from more rewarding aspects of life. Her wise words will stick with me, and remind me to unplug - at least once in a while.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Hilarious, Intelligent, Informative, 5-STAR January 20, 2011

By Chick

Format:Paperback

I laughed my way through this book. It's brilliant! If you can only read one book this year, let it be this one. It's a vacation in and of itself.
Oprah, People Magazine, USA Today, and Reader's Digest all say it's fabulous. I agree!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Funny but also eye-opening January 26, 2011

By Bri212

Format:Paperback

I read an excerpt of this book on Salon, and it proved to be as fun and fascinating in full. How this author got her kids to go along with unplugging for six months is still a mystery to me, but it's inspired me to try a Facebook fast myself. A truly engrossing read.