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

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. "The Winter of Our Disconnect is the story of how one family survived six months of wandering through the desert - digitally speaking - and the lessons learned about themselves and technology along the way. At the same time, their story is a channel to a wider view - into the impact of new media on the lives of families, into the very heart of the meaning of home."--Publisher's description. The author 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 Who we are, and why we pressed "pause" Power trip : the darkness descends Boredom for beginners My iPhone/myself : notes from a digital fugitive The sound of one hand doing homework Loss of Facebook : friending the old-fashioned way Eat, play, sleep The return of the digital native.