HOLLY NADLER

508-274-2329

(hollynadler@gmail.com)

Here’s a question for the new year: Can you rescind a New Year’s resolution? Obviously, we are permitted — encouraged — to make resolutions, and statistics show that people hold fast to them for all of seven days. That’s just about the right amount of time for strapping on those new, unbroken sneakers and jogging around East Chop, the chill-factor winds whistling at your face until you’re ready to snap your nose off like a stalactite before you say, “Hey, maybe this isn’t such a good idea.”

My resolution, like presumably tens of millions of other Americans’, was to stop being a blockhead and actively to pursue the highest, latest technologies. The higher and later the better. There’s a new program for gauging what Pluto’s doing since he’s been x-ed out of the solar system? I’ll take it! Or how about a vibrating Morse code that sends us text messages in movie theatres? That way we can learn through our thigh that our nephew is buying watermelons. No need to squint at a small screen when, at that very moment on the large screen, Rooster Cogburn saves little Mattie from a thrashing.

The cultural pressure to be wired to the tonsils and connected to the point that we have flat screens for WiFi in every room of the house is so strong that those of us who can’t even program our digital heating systems have found our self-confidence flagging like a punctured balloon. The message is clear: If we don’t own an iPhone and subscribe to such apps as my friend’s which shoots him updates every time an earthquake occurs in any part of the world, then we’re not going to make it. Not professionally, not socially, in fact we may even die soon. From despair. That we’re so left out. That we’re walking around without the protection of all the latest gadgets.

Can we just make a resolution, in defiance of the billions of dollars of advertising that’s accountable for this apotheosis of the 21st century as a time when the most electronically fortified people rule the world: How about we let each individual decide, at his or her own pace, how many screens, big or small, this person chooses to replace the real world of squirrels making a condo out of a hollowed tree, and Victorian gables trimmed in a shade of bright bluebell, and an attic window that reveals, through the dust on the window panes, a gray wicker chair and a cracked statue of Apollo gazing through the glass?

Along with resolutions come predictions. I predict that more and more of us will start leaving our cell phones (or iPhones or Blackberries) at home. Unless you’re planning to hike K2 or Annapurna or trek through the Darien gap, chances are you won’t really need to contact anyone. And for those friends who leave guilt-mongering messages “WHERE ARE YOU?!” well, these people should have their own phones soldered to their wrists. That way we can identify them as Xtreme connectophiles and refuse to give them our own numbers.

I also predict that a national practice will arise to switch off our modems over the weekend. Not just Sunday, that blessed day of rest, but Saturday too.

A final prediction: You know these kids of ours, aged anywhere from five to thirty-five, who hold their smart phones in their hands at all times, the way they used to carry Teddy bears and binkies? You know, these young’uns who’ll talk to you with an open computer in their laps, deigning a second of eye contact between long and languorous glances at the screen? My prediction is that, as soon as they hit their mid-thirties, more than any other generation in the history of mankind, they’re going to have a massive What’s It All About, Alfie? breakdown. Their electronic doodads will be tossed away or buried in mass ceremonies. There won’t be enough Walden Pond-sides to contain all their small cabins and rows of beans. Henry David Thoreau, while already vastly admired by many of us, will be elevated to the status of a Buddha or a St. Francis. And then those elders who are still alive can breathe a sigh of relief and say, “I’m glad I never read an e-book.”

Okay, what else is going on?

For the following announcement, I recant everything I’ve already written in this column. Lynn Ditchfield wants us to know that classes in business and computers and children’s book writing and storytelling and many other things through the Adult and Community Education network will start on Jan. 10. To enroll you can log on to acemv.org.

At the Oak Bluffs library, the children’s program will unfold like this: Wednesday, Jan. 12 at 10:30 a.m. will be story time for the up-to-age-three set and New Books! is at 11:30 for ages three to five. Thursday, Jan. 13 from 6 to 8 p.m. is Teen Wii Night, and Friday, Jan. 14 from 6 to 8 p.m. is Tween Wii Night. (Wow! when I was growing up, we didn’t know we were tweens, we just thought we were horrible little people.)