Read The Winter of Our Disconnect for Free Online

at that point was attempting to make a living renting virtual real estate on Second Life. But even among the yay-sayers, there was a widespread view that we were “going back to the seventies,” or even going back to the nineteenth century.
    What was that about?
    In fact, most of the technologies that today rule our lives, just like the children that today rule our lives, emerged in the 1990s and early noughties. That means a lot of our media are teenagers too. Some of the most mesmerizing of them all—the iPod, the Nintendo Wii, Facebook—are barely toddlers. No wonder they’re so damn attention-seeking.
     
     
    Early on in The Experiment, we are in the car on the way to school when my fourteen-year-old reminds me to contact the school secretary, urgently, about my change of phone numbers. “I told her you didn’t have a cell phone anymore and she got really mad,” Sussy tells me. “She said, ‘What if there’s an emergency?’ ”
    A stab of guilt goes through me like an overamped ringtone. “What did parents do ten years ago in an emergency?” I ask, feigning calm.
    “Ten years ago,” she replies coldly, “mothers stayed at home.”
    When I spoke to the school secretary later, she laughed. “I don’t have a cell phone either,” she admitted.
    “Wow. Well, what do you do in an emergency?” I couldn’t resist asking.
    “What everybody used to do ten years ago. If there’s a real emergency, don’t worry, we’ll find you.”
    The assumption that uninterrupted access to electronic information and entertainment is every child’s right—and every parent’s responsibility—has taken hold at a very deep level. Yet it has happened in the proverbial heartbeat.
    Our own family’s first dial-up account went online in 1996—and by Australian standards we were early adopters. Today, only 25 percent of American households do not have Internet access at home, according to 2010 figures from Nielsen NetRatings. In 1996, families were just discovering e-mail, and the more adventurous kids were test-driving the new search engines and stumbling upon free game sites.
    Today, the average American child spends almost as much time online as he or she does sleeping .
    Although the first IBM PC hit the market in 1981—think “Bette Davis Eyes” and Charles and Diana’s wedding—most families didn’t buy their first home computers until the late eighties. They were massive clunky things, with spooky green screens and less memory than an advanced Alzheimer’s victim. The first “kids’ computer” we acquired ran on Windows 98, and, as every grown-up knows, 1998 was, like, five minutes ago. When my eight-year-old daughter’s friend customized the desktop and font colors for us, we stood around, wonder-struck. “She’s a genius!” we agreed.
    I bought our first cell phone in 2001—for my then-ten-year-old daughter, Anni, whose classmates gathered round in awe, begging for a demonstration. Today, the average high school kid spends an hour and a half text messaging each day, according to the 2010 Kaiser study. I didn’t get my own phone for a year or so, and when I sent my first text message, I considered it a technological triumph second only to opening an e-mail attachment. iTunes was launched in 2001 too—although it took our family five long years to discover it—and the BlackBerry smartphone, albeit featuring a pretty dumb monochrome display, followed in 2002. By 2008, when the iPhone made its Australian debut, I had evolved from mild technophobe to a fully fledged geek. I had one within twenty-four hours.
    Remember Game Boy? It may not have changed the world, but it sure revolutionized the family fly-drive vacation. It was first released in 1989. Nintendo 64, somewhat confusingly, came out in 1996, ten years before the release of the Wii. GameCube, Xbox, PlayStation, and their multitudinous handheld spawn—along with the other big names that have given joystick to the world—are children of the