Germany -- on being disconnected in a connected world

It’s so easy to take connection for granted. Sure, there are places, like the bush, where you expect to feel isolated from technology. But finding yourself in a foreign country where you don’t speak the language and everyone else is connected — now that makes for the kind of cognitive dissonance that triggers panic attacks.

I realised on my arrival in Germany this morning just how easy it is — still — not to be connected, and how profoundly alienating that feels. I’m here to address the sixth Deutsche Welle Forum Medien und Entwickling on the impact of digital media on journalism and development, so being disconnected is oddly appropriate — a reminder of what the world was once like for most people.

It started when I decided not to take my MTN phone with me. I’m too scared of the costs of roaming so elected to take my spare Samsung Omnia Windows phone instead, and get a German sim for it. So when the plane touched down at Frankfurt at five this morning, the only way to connect the world was via WiFi with my iPad. The first time I tried that was when I arrived at Cologne station to discover that it’s a big place and my contact hadn’t actually confirmed who was going to pick me up and where. The Vodafone outlet was still closed, so I couldn’t buy a sim. I tried the T-Mobile public phones, but the operator told me the system was rejecting my credit card and didn’t accept Maestro. I couldn’t get the damn thing to accept coins either, so that was that. I was effectively stranded with no way of getting hold of anyone.

When I was finally able to buy a sim, it didn’t help, because one contact had given me the wrong number, and other wasn’t answering her phone. Eventually I caught a train back to Bonn station where I found a McCafe with WiFi. Only you had to have a special VIP password to access that, so that didn’t help either. I wandered the streets for a while before I found the hotel where they’d told me I was staying. It turned out not to be the case, but at least I managed to get the iPad to connect long enough to download the mail from the German contact who’d changed the plans that morning, and which of course I knew nothing about because I couldn’t log in. Long story short, I eventually found the hotel, but still can’t get the phone to do anything except make calls and send texts because it’s connecting to wrong proxy server and I don’t know enough to fix the damn thing. It’s like 1996 all over again, which as it happens is the last time I was in Germany.

It’s a salutary reminder of how easy it is to be disconnected. I cannot describe the relief I felt at being able to log on to Twitter today, connect with my virtual world and read that my opinion piece appeared in the pages of Business Day today. I felt, in a strange way, that I’d come home, and perhaps I had. I want, desperately, to be connected, and it’s pointless pretending otherwise. I want to be confident that I’ll always be connected — and it turns out that confidence is misplaced. Scary stuff.