Internet Rehab

When she realised she was checking Twitter before brushing her teeth in the morning, Atreyee Majumder figured she had to sober up. Especially if she wanted to finish her PhD thesis in this lifetime

This was going to be a piece on how I withdrew from the internet. It still is, but the plot has thickened. I had taken a decision to take a break from the networked world in an attempt to recuperate that old feeling of knowing your mind in a single frame, in a single moment. The feeling of knowing thought unfettered by pings, likes, tweets, comments. The inordinate insecurity of the life of a PhD candidate (yet to prove one’s hidden genius to the rest of three people in the world) coupled with the luxurious environment of an opulent East Coast American university where even hot-dog sellers offer wifi, had made a certain kind of internet citizenship first a norm and then a bane in my life.

A usual day began with someone declaring on Facebook—before even having brushed in the morning—that a highly regarded philosopher was highly over-rated. Facebook friends, some known to each other only through the internet, either located at equally elite universities on the other North American coast, or at Chicago or Duke, would immediately make adequately wry remarks about the cleverness or idiocy of the original provocateur. Their European counterparts in Geneva, Berlin or Paris would drop by with a couple of cynical words in Continental languages. There would be the odd days when someone non-academic would intervene, saying all this jargon made no sense and that s/he felt quite happy that some Maoist, or Islamic fundamentalist or equivalent got killed. A JNU-type would jump in and jam all servers with the length of his comment about all things neo-colonial represented by America. He would then proceed to correct all American spelling on the thread. Having acquired a day’s reserve of self-esteem, all would proceed towards morning.

It was under these circumstances that I realised my growing dependence on such exchanges for the nurturing of my growing intellectual ego. This, coupled with tardy progress in producing a 1,000-page masterpiece of a doctoral dissertation, propelled my decision to ‘deactivate’ my Facebook account. A friend explained how I could even have it ‘deleted’ through a complicated procedure to ensure I didn’t waver in my resolve in future. But I decided against deletion, knowing that if I needed someone’s contact details, I could re-activate it and retrieve those.

A month later, Google Plus arrived on the scene, and some friends—mostly Stanford types who had early-bird access—sent me invitations. With the zeal of a freshly sworn-in celibate, I resisted all social networks. As I readied myself to head towards 18 months on the ‘field’ in West Bengal, I needed the contacts of some activists and journalists in the region. This led to a re-activation. I retrieved the addresses in five minutes, but remained on Facebook for another hour, hungrily figuring out who has been fighting with whom over what intricate point of the telecom case, or the aesthetic appraisal of Delhi Belly, and who was never ‘liking’ but always ‘commenting’, who was always ‘liking’ and never ‘commenting’.

I was overwhelmed with shame and guilt at the close of that hour. I said to myself, on a note of gravitas, that surely I could make do without piercing analysis of the Cannes releases, wry political commentary, or the realtime earthquake death toll in all its capacity to evoke shock and awe.

Information was, after a point, an impediment to thought, said I, soberly. It had corrupted the pristine mindscape. Much like brutal infrastructure projects that bulldoze their way through thick jungles, destroying peaceful habits and habitats of the wild, promising the magic touch of development, leaving behind nothing but ugly rubble and Vodafone signboards. I was, in this case, the angry conservationist of the mind. Drawing boundaries to recreate the pristine landscape of my dreams. I was trying to strengthen the walls of my inviolate fortress that was still bleeding from the lacerations of the internet.

Since July, I have been living in the mofussil environs of West Bengal in pursuit of what anthropologists call ‘fieldwork’. The two contemporary oxygen-masks that keep journalists, activists, development programme folks and researchers who head out of their metropolitan homes into murkier waters alive and breathing are cellphones and internet data-sticks. This life-support system keeps one tweeting from the wilderness. The mobility offered by these instruments is less crucial, I believe, than their transformation into a bodily appendage. In order not to throw my family off completely, the cellphone remained on my body. I opted out of the data card.

The terrains of South Bengal are not entirely off the charts of modern telecommunication. A landscape that is brimming with the excitement of borrowed technology, all cellphone stores here promise repair services. This part of the world embraces technology. Most people I met here were connected through technology—mostly cellphones, and some via the internet. Most wrote my number diligently in a dog-eared phonebook when I offered them my cellular contact.

One can access email here in tin-shed cyber-cafes amid clicks and grunts of young men experiencing mouse-orgasms with every refresh. There is an official computer at the place I stay, which affords me 10-minute sessions of email on its good days. When its modem is in a bad mood, I trek to the orgasmic environs of a download-every-minute cyber café.

This is it, I told myself. I have shaken the venomous grip of the network off my neck. Here I was, living in a ruinous timespace of obsolete technology—feeling like I was listening to music on cassettes or using floppy discs. I would now be free to navigate the world with eyes, ears and dreams—and not with links, posts and tweets.

 

Yet, my ex-landlord from the United States had to be contacted every day on the status of a cheque for the return of a deposit on my apartment. Wire transfers from the US had to be tracked on the web portal of my bank account. This was not the stuff of cyber cafes and public computers. HTTPS might just be a typographical whim, I thought. I would even be okay with someone knowing the stuff of my emails.

The curious case of internet divorce was beginning to raise its real ugly head now. The internet was not only participating in my life as an aide to flirtation and information-vanity, but as a monitor of my economic life, mapped as it was on the web through institutions, people and places. And it could not as easily be undone as hitting the ‘deactivate’ button on Facebook. I carried residues of the network on my mind and body, as I realised I had lent my mind and body to the internet. It had always been a two-way interaction. I now woke up to realise that it was not for me to unilaterally pull the plug.

But I wasn’t going to give up so soon. I carried on with my 10-minute hiccups in the cyber café, praying at every http for divine intervention towards the safety and security of my web-residue.

And many of my friends here in mofussil-land stress the new-found joy of cyberspace when I ask how best to contact them. “The easiest way is, of course, on email. Here is my rediffmail ID. By the way, you have access to internet, no?” I smile sheepishly. “Can I have a phone number as well? I promise not to bother you too much on the phone.” One man’s venom was another’s manna. But I carried on undeterred, like the desert soldier. The low notes rang through my mind a little more sharply as the days went by. People’s faces resurfaced in sharp detail. I read a road accident story in the newspaper with greater interest. Drank sugary chai with joy. Smiled at people noticing the exact number of wrinkles that their eyes broke into. Got faster and faster at Sudoku. Read neon signs with wonder. Played carom. Badly. My mind is fenced now, said I to myself, triumphantly, and the lacerations of Guardian blogs and intelligent tweets will vanish with time. I have only to keep walking slowly and drink lots of water.

Then came the moments of professional anxiety and social alientation. Why do mofussil-walas not get my subtle humour? Why can’t the crafty politico come back with some sharp New Yorker type repartee?  Is everyone going to a conference that I don’t even know about? Cold sweat. Is there some pathbreaking paper that has kicked up a furore in the academy? Shiver. Have I forgotten how to make intelligent conversation subtly interspersed with references to the latest Twitter face-off? Mamata had fought with the Centre over FDI, eliminated the Mahatoes from her friends list, hugged Shah Rukh Khan at the film festival; Aishwarya Rai didn’t actually have triplets; Aamir and Kiran have had a surrogacy-assisted baby. Updates came from a friend. Street Wall Occupy—disconnect. Koala very what? My panic quotient soared as I measured my growing ignorance of the wider world. As also my social alienation—such and such had taken to Buddhism, another had had triplets.

Before going home to Bangalore for a bit in November, I lined up five Skype appointments with friends abroad to make the most of a wifi environment, and stayed up until the wee hours of the morning explaining (with some vanity) the curiousness of life lived on rationed internet time.

A couple of days later, in a moment of pristine insecurity, I decided to revive my dormant Twitter account, with some piping hot YouTube references and smart comebacks at famous intellectuals’ tweets. In case they forget I existed and could make very smart comebacks. I was only pretending to be out of the game, I was not actually out of it. Should I buy a data card? ‘No, no, no’, said the same voice that had driven me away from the sex toy shop in Manhattan on an unfortunate winter afternoon. No more penetrative sex for Laptop.

The thing with the running-water approach to consumption (what with wifi networks at airports and cafes ensuring that one need never turn the tap off) was the resultant psychological state, where the soft sound of inflow, in this instance, of megabytes of stimulation per second, turned into a condition of being, or a condition for being. I will continue my bucket therapy on the internet bruises, said I, on a note of gravitas. One forgot the old days of having to walk to a faraway well with a matka, or line up before a public tap and fill up one’s buckets for a day’s usage.

Well, Laptop and I are alive and well with our 10-minute bucket-fills of internet data, much as we long sometimes for the torrential jet in which Chrome pages would open all at one go—replete with old friends, potential lovers, job offers, intellectual masturbation, blind dates, credit card statements and tributes to Dev Anand.

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