Plugged-in American family needs to unplug

In the afterglow of an eventful Christmas morn, the kids sat around the living room in their jammies, the Wife and I lounging … and no one said a word. For a long time.

Maybe there is a New Year’s resolution in me after all.

Tyler was swiping away at his Kindle, browsing through episodes of Marvel’s “Superhero Squad.”

Riley was absorbed by her iPad, chatting away with other kids on Club Penguin.

Priscilla was carrying on some conversation with one of her dad’s sisters via text.

I was on Facebook … as usual.

Here we were, the modern American family living under the same roof and engaging with others and other things miles away, rather than anywhere and with anyone right in front of us.

My son will be 3 next month. He uses a Kindle passed down from his sister. He plays games, but mostly watches cartoons and TV shows on Netflix.

My wife, she has a smartphone that she answers only when the spirit moves her, but she’s on it when it comes to texting, or using her Starbucks app. She’s the novice among us.

My 8-year-old daughter is a junior techie, reading tons of books on the Kindle (she read a shade under 400,000 words last semester in a combo of e-books and dead-tree versions) and taking part in online kiddie communities, where she chats and types faster than most adults.

With my daughter, all of this occurs in addition to her iPod usage, Netflix consumption across multiple platforms, video games, and now, the iPad her mother and I got her for Christmas.

I am the most fully immersed in tech, but by many standards I’m still kind of e-behind; an e-novice. Yet I’m so connected to my smartphone, I freak out when I can’t find it, when the battery is dead or dying or if I’m close to the end of that month’s data allotment.

I wake up with it next to me, reaching for it almost as soon as I open my eyes, and I go to sleep connected to it as I listen to music with my earbuds.

My calendars from work and my personal life are synced through that phone. I get my work email through the phone and converse with other editors or reporters that way. I communicate with friends almost exclusively by text, going days without hearing a voice through the phone.

It’s an electronic laundry list and a sad example of how web-enabled devices have become so ubiquitous in my daily life. This tech puts the world at our fingertips yet seems to drive a wedge between human beings, and shows some serious flaws in how I parent my children and communicate with my wife.

Using my phone or another device is a lot like feeding a mental illness, and there are many examples of how smartphone usage mimics personality disorders like narcissism, disassociation, obsessive compulsive disorder, attention deficit, even schizoid thinking.

All of these links are anecdotal at best. But this duck quacks pretty loudly, and its saying that having one’s nose buried in glowing glass is further detaching us from the consequences of reality.

Cyber-bullying is a prime example. In a child with perfectly sound socialization skills, who can carry on conversations and who can gauge reactions through facial cues, body language or any human implied signal, bullying isn’t so simple, not when the bullied shows signs of pain.

Yet when the bullying is occurring through cyberspace, anonymously or otherwise, empathy is lost in translation. It’s too damn easy to hurt another person when you don’t have to look at them in the eyes.

Many of the personality defects that others help us keep in check in the sunlight of the social milieu are allowed to flourish in the fluorescence of the Internet, like bad little mushrooms.

The cool detachment and the narcissism of constantly checking a status or refreshing your email or actively “waiting” for a text is a signal to your mate, to your children, to those right in front of you that, “no, you are not more important than what is coming up next.”

I don’t want to be a part of that anymore. I don’t want my kids to be a part of that. Setting limits is important, but how can I expect my two-hour digital rule for Riley to be anything but lip service when I’m the worst offender?

If I must set a resolution, it’s that it’s time to stop detaching and attempt to plug back in to real people and real life, and monitor the kids more closely. Technology is a gift to all of mankind, to communication, education, innovation; an awesome thing. Trouble is, it is so prevalent it starts to feel like the only thing.

This column first appeared in the Imperial Valley Press, Jan. 3, 2014.