Last week, my 72-year-old father got a smartphone and I went off all social media. The timing was coincidental and wasn’t because I was terrified he’d suddenly go on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and discover that his middle-aged daughter still drinks tequila out of shoes. It was because I had become overwhelmed with information.
To be honest, it was a man from San Francisco with an ageing bun who calls himself a swami and has adopted a Hindi name who drove me off social media. I. Don’t. Even. Know. Him. Yet he followed me on Twitter, with his terrible poems about wombs and pictures of himself taking his man-boobs surfing.
Add to that the Facebook posts from friends of friends about their holidays in Greece with people called Frankie, and incessant tweets containing so many emoticons of hearts and piles of poo I began to believe they were sewage workers who loved their jobs, and it was time to take stock. I craved the real world.
When I was showing my dad around his new phone, I knew we were in for trouble.
“Oooooh, look! I have 14 new messages,” he exclaimed.”
“No, dad,” I replied. “That’s your calendar. It’s August 14.”
He looked faintly gutted. And he sat for an entire afternoon, eating cheese sandwiches and staring at his phone, waiting for something to happen.
“You know it doesn’t make eggs, right?” I told him gently. “It’s just like your old phone, except when it rings, it has a much nicer plingety-plongety sound. And you can get e-mails and stuff.”
He nodded, licked his fingers and theatrically swiped the screen. He got out of the chair, winced and then hobbled to the bathroom, waving his phone. “Just in case,” he said.
That evening, while my former Facebook friends were sharing pictures of cats and my ex-Twitter followers were raging about gender issues and the merits of lentils, I watched my father try to be nonchalant about his new technology.
“You know, I think I’ll get a selfie stick for this,” he said, holding the phone out in front of him and peering through his glasses. “Be good for wildlife photography.” Then later: “So does this thing have a phone?”
He pretended to be watching TV or reading the paper, but kept sneaking glances at his mute new toy. It reminded me of when we got a budgie as kids. Friends had told us budgies could talk and do tricks like hang upside down and fan their wings out. Our budgie must have either been lazy or on drugs. All he ever did was sit on his perch staring into space with weird scaly eyes, and poo a lot. When he eventually died, we found him in that same position, his claws clamped on to the perch in rigor mortis.
I didn’t want my dad to be disappointed. Or get rigor mortis. So I went to the bedroom and dialled his number. A plingety-plongety sound came from the lounge, followed by the sound of scrabbling and excitement. “It's ringing! It’s ringing!” Then: “What do I do?”
He eventually worked it out and we had a nice chat about the weather in the lounge (a bit miserable and exactly the same as in the bedroom), the economic climate in the lounge (the same as in the bedroom) and whether socialism would work in the lounge and in the bedroom.
When I rang off and went through, my father was beaming. “So, how was that for you?” he asked.
“Dad, that sounds weird,” I replied.
And then, suddenly, I missed my online friends: the ones from school who now live on yachts in the Caribbean; the ones who live up the road but who I only see for the occasional shoe-tequila; the ones I haven’t even met, but whose photos of terriers and found trinkets keep me entertained. I even missed swami dude and his daily musings about the auras of sea turtles.
This age of connectivity is a strange thing, but feeling disconnected is even stranger. I’ve missed important events because they’ve only been advertised on Facebook, I have no idea what’s happening in the world and I’m sure Frankie’s friends of friends have now moved on to the Swiss Alps where they’re having the best time of their lives eating chocolate and posing with St Bernards.
However, I’m going to persist with my social media fast. Instead of spending time online, I’ll sit with my parents and have conversations, and drink wine with real-life friends. I'll run with the dogs in the woods and see birds in the sky instead of through a filter. And I’ll keep calling my dad’s phone. Maybe I’ll even drop him an e-mail or text. Just so he knows he’s there.