MY ADDICTION.

When I woke up this morning, I yawned, and with my eyes still closed, fumbled on the bedside table for my phone.

This is a daily ritual – I usually pick up my Blackberry first to check the blog, BBM and Whatsapp messages. I’ll then go back to sleep for ten more minutes before I finally wake up, do my make-up and pick up my iPhone. My iPhone is my Instagram phone. After an hour or two of checking the feed and posting pictures, I’m ready to come downstairs and start the traditional day.

But this morning was different. I opened my eyes in panic when my fingers failed to locate anything in the shape of my phones or MiFi. Where were my phones? Where was my internet? I immediately got up and turned the room upside down starting from stripping the duvets off the bed. I apologized to my husband as I roused him from his side of the bed. I still couldn’t find them after rummaging the closet and drawers. I also noticed the jacket I’d worn last night to Ejiro’s house with my husband wasn’t there as well. I threw a wrap around my pyjamas and headed downstairs as the confused man just looked on in silence. I found the jacket on the couch in the sitting room and found the phones and MiFi in the jacket’s pockets. I heaved a deep sigh of relief. My phones and internet were safe. I would not have to be cut off from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and my beloved blog indefinitely while I sorted out the headache of getting new internet and recovering my social media to new phones. I went back upstairs and continued my day in the usual fashion.

The morning’s incident came back to me in the slow moving traffic as I was driving home from the office. Why was I so instantly alarmed at the thought of temporary disconnection from the internet? Was it really that deep? When did I start being this way?

I definitely hadn’t always been like this. In fact I remembered a time when there was no Facebook, no Twitter and definitely no Snapchat. All we had then was Yahoo Messenger (which we sporadically visited at cyber cafes) and the Nitel landlines (which only the very rich had in their homes and even then was shared by the family). I am thankful I grew up in that age, not because I don’t appreciate the wonderful interconnectivity of today, but because I was privileged to experience the great human moments and interactions naturally without passing through an electronic medium.

I particularly enjoyed writing letters to my uncle who was a lecturer at A.B.U Zaria. Exchanging letters with Uncle Isaac is one of the strong memories of my childhood. We continued this tradition till it petered out when I started university. I guess the wider use of email and the proliferation of new cyber cafes effectively pulled the plug on traditional letter writing because of its several advantages like speed of delivery, accuracy of delivery and prompt delivery reports. Also, more and more people in the world are sending and receiving emails from personal computers and portable devices. Unfortunately my Uncle Isaac is among that tiny percentage of people who never got conversant with using email. The professor had retired before email became the main channel of sharing official information. Uncle Isaac sometimes checks his email with the help of his grandchildren but how can I transfer the warmth of a crinkly paper to the impersonal computer screen. How do I compare the wracking of my brain to find words that would impress Uncle Isaac to the autocorrect and short form sentences like LLNP or GBU of today. How do I replace his old letters I so much cherish in my file with an email from my inbox folder?
I always took pictures with my parents and siblings at every New Year. We also took pictures at family events and pretty much at every milestone like birthdays, graduations and weddings. We had thick albums where we stored these photographs and shared them with friends and relatives when they came visiting. The advent of camera phones and most importantly Instagram is responsible for the relocation of those albums to dark store rooms and the eventual deterioration of some of the pictures. Of course Instagram is so much a better alternative because I am able to share my pictures (and other information along with them) with millions of people at the same time, and also because I can take pictures and edit out the pimples (yeah pimples happen sometimes!) before uploading. But there was a nostalgia attached to the memories of the old album pictures because every picture told a story about the event at which it was taken. Nowadays on Instagram, I and the millions of other subscribers don’t always need an event to prompt the taking and posting of a selfie. Instagram has its virtues but one of its failings is that it serves our vanity way too much. Can the great memories those albums served to preserve be substituted by Instagram’s filters?

I remember the days of secondary school, friends and all. I went to a boarding school and made most of my closest friends in that time. We spent our free time writing and miming songs - we all had songbooks back then filled with Mary J Blige’s, Janet Jackson and Salt n’ Pepa songs. Those were fun times, finally discovering my own (kind of) people. We talked about careers – Uduak had always wanted to be a doctor, and she eventually became one. I’d always wanted to be an author, well now I’m blogging.  Despite the odds, we‘d all turned out fine. As I sat in the car that evening surrounded by slow Lagos traffic, I wondered whether my over a thousand friends on Facebook could even marginally pass for the lifelong friendships I’ve enjoyed with my secondary school friends. Would I have preferred the endless tweets of endless tweeps to the friendly gossip of my girlfriends back then when we teased ourselves about boys?

Even though I sorely miss Uncle Isaac’s letters (we talk on the phone now), and the memory of my twin sister pinching me just before the photographer said ‘say cheers’ in January 1992 (it made me appear on the picture with a frown), and the laughter of Uduak and my other friends who live in distant cities, I still appreciate that the world is truly a global village largely because of the new/social media I’ve just taken out time to flog. Youtube, Facebook, MySpace, Keek, Vimeo, Instagram, Yahoo Messenger, Whatsapp and Twitter have made millions of  people accessible to each other in real time and opened new media frontiers, even though without people truly meeting themselves and expressing authentic human warmth. It is a paradox that as good as the internet and it’s social networks have been to me, it cannot adequately replace the fulfilment of actual human interaction. And given my reaction in the morning when I thought I’d lost my phones, it is clear I am addicted to the multitudes of friends I have across social media. Friends from my more popular other life in the virtual world.

I have decided to take regular internet fasts from time to time where I’ll just unplug from the matrix and only deal with real people. My iPhone just dinged and yes I’m going to check who just liked my last post but once I get home and park, but after I’ve rested, I’m going to start writing a letter to Uncle Isaac.