I left my cellphone at home. Racing out to an appointment mid-afternoon, and then I was off to a writers symposium that began at five, there was no time to retrace my steps, although I thought of doing so and knew that I’d be caught in hideous peak hour traffic and would no doubt be late. So, reluctantly, I accepted that I was going into the world naked, so to speak.
And naked I felt. As others around me clicked – taking photos, tweeting comments and images, uploading same – I sat there, feeling powerless and cut off. I did ask one of my friends if I could use her phone to alert my nearest and dearest that were there to be any emergency, to please call said friend, but that was the limit of reaching out in any digital sense.
As I said I have two cellphones, numerous email addresses, I tweet, Facebook, use Google+, I blog, enjoy BBm messenger and Whatsapp, I use Gchat, the occasional old-fashioned SMS, and I even pick up the phone, reluctantly. In short, it’s easy enough to get hold of me – so prompt and reliable am I that if I fail to respond to an urgent message within a few hours, friends become concerned and phone to see if everything is alright in my world.
There’s a reason for this. I was a teenager in the late 1980s when my grandfather died. He’d been rushed to hospital a few days previously; the night he passed on my mother and I were at a friend of hers having supper. Pre-cellphone days and neither one of us had thought to leave the friend’s phone number with my grandmother.
When we got home close to midnight it was to the frantic ringing of the phone and the news that my grandfather had died.
The hospital had been frantically calling my grandmother, and my grandfather had died alone. I still feel sad and a profound sense of loss in recalling that night. I have no doubt that our being there would not have influenced the outcome, but he died alone. I often wonder what he thought as the hours passed and no-one arrived. Did he sense it was his time? Did he hope we would arrive? Did he think back on his long life? Orphaned in Poland at the age of five, he and his four other brothers ate potato peels out of dustbins.
They were the lucky ones: he and his two brothers were rescued by Isaac Ochberg and taken to South Africa where they grew up in an orphanage, and he became a successful businessman. The oldest brother, deemed too old to be rescued, had to stay behind. His fate remains unknown.
And this is partly why I have a horror of being incommunicado. I never want this to happen again.
I stayed at a game lodge in the Kruger last year and was horrified to be told that there was no cellphone signal. This was conveyed to me with a broad grin by one of the managers, implying that now I could truly get away from it all. Hell no! I don’t want to get away from it all.
On game drives we had intermittent reception and I spent the time hurriedly reading and replying to mails. In fact my publisher needed a response to a query and I was able to let her know that I’d reply properly when I could.
I don’t want to be out of touch. I like knowing what’s happening, I like receiving messages and emails, reading Tweets, responding, uploading my photos to Facebook. It gives me a sense of connection, community, togetherness.
We didn’t always have this – but now that we have the option I wouldn’t have it any other way.
There are times when it verges on the ridiculous certainly – I recall being at the Sunday Times literary awards and the whole table, bar one, was tweeting and Facebooking what was going on. It was like a scene in a comedy.
But I’d still rather have it this way. People make friends and forge bonds through social networking – local writers Lauren Beukes and Nechama Brodie have written about their deep friendship that was born out of Twitter.
We need social media, we need connections, if not smartphones and Facebook, for example, wouldn’t have turned out to be such roaring successes.
Another local writer, Beth Shirley, made an off the cuff amusing comment that you should never date anyone unless they’re on Twitter or Facebook, because how else are you supposed to spy on them?
We laughed. But it encapsulated how far we’ve come. Almost as though you don’t exist unless you have an online presence. We’re living in a world where nothing happens unless it’s been shared in some form or another.
I like that.