giving up the internet for the next month coz of exams! D: text me if you need me :) x
- Tim Else (@_timmytim), 11:17 AM May 19th, 2010
END OF EXAMS! :) hellllo twitter, i missed you ;)
- Tim Else (@_timmytim), 8:08 AM Jun 28th, 2010
Tim Else, Twitter User
Nicholas Carr, Author
In the summer of the [2008], I moved with my wife from a highly connected suburb of Boston to the mountains of Colorado. There was no cell phone service at our new home, and the Internet arrived through a relatively poky DSL connection. I canceled my Twitter account, put my Facebook membership on hiatus, and mothballed my blog. I shut down my RSS reader and curtailed my skyping and instant messaging. Most important, I throttled back my e-mail application. It had long been set to check for new messages every minute. I reset it to check only once an hour, and when that still created too much of a distraction, I began keeping the program close much of the day.
- Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
Nicholas Carr’s new book, The Shallows, has attracted much press. There’s little need to rehash its themes here. But relevant to this archive is Carr’s attempt to spend less time online while writing the book, particularly with the social aspects of the web. He describes the experience (excerpted above) in one of the book’s self-titled “digressions”—short essays related to the book’s larger themes but not substantial enough for an entire chapter. Carr notes the withdrawal he felt, followed by him “started to feel generally calmer and more in control of my thoughts”. The experiment was temporary, though it’s unclear how long he kept it up. Carr says he’s “backsliding”, returning to his old habits. About his new wifi-connected Blu-ray player, he writes, “I have to confess: it’s cool. I’m not sure I could live without it.”
Mitchell Lundin, Caitlin Magnusson, Andrew Tatge
Three college students take on the challenge of giving up their computers to see how their academic, social, and work lives are affected. No Facebook. No YouTube. No e-mail. How will they get their work done? Will they cheat? Who will survive the longest? This one-hour documentary follows Carleton College students Andrew, Caitlin, and Chel as they go through “digital detox” and learn to interact with themselves and with others in ways we have largely forgotten.
College life increasingly depends on computers and the Internet—and not only because of Facebook. Professors announce class changes via email, student-job payroll systems are migrating online, and library card catalogs are nearly extinct. Andrew, Caitlin, and Chel make their offlining experiment yet more audacious by scheduling their abstinence for the end of a term, with lengthy papers looming. (Remarkably, Carleton still had a bank of typewriters in their computer lab at the time of filming.)
Much of Disconnected’s early minutes focus on the trio’s attempts to explain their project to their teachers and friends. The film observes how the offliners define their constraints, how they grapple with the arbitrary rules they’ve chosen. For instance, Chel volunteers not to text message but he has fewer qualms than Andrew or Caitlin about using a “proxy” — having his girlfriend or someone else complete online tasks in his stead. Toward the end of the film, the students organize a day-without-computers; about 40 students take the pledge, though it’s unclear how many followed through.
Links:
Students at Riverdale Country School
The experiment, which asked students to voluntarily forsake instant messaging, chat, texts, and Facebook through Monday night, was Ms. Cohen’s idea. “Are they finding easy ways to avoid negotiating some of the normal social challenges of adolescence?” she wrote in an explanatory e-mail message that the head of school sent to parents.
The immediacy of parent-child texting does wonders for communication, Ms. Cohen said in an interview, but some aspects of the constant electronic dialogue make her uneasy. “Kids will do poorly on a test, and more often than not, right away they’ll go into the bathroom and text their mom and dad,” she said. “There’s no sense that the kid just has to feel his feelings. It’s an instant Band-Aid.”
- Encouraging the Text Generation to Rediscover Its Voice, The New York Times, 26 April 2010
According to this Times article, “Fewer than half of the 250 middle school students at Riverdale participated” in the “two-day experiment in text-free living”. The piece includes brief assessments of the experiment by three students.
The article also links to a website about a study from the University of Maryland, where researchers asked students to go 24 hours without “media” of any sort (including magazines, newspapers, and recorded music).
James Sturm, Graphic Novelist
I initially wanted to go offline for a year, but that didn’t seem feasible. Giving up the Web is sure to generate more work for my colleagues and for my wife, Rachel. From arranging play dates to paying bills, she will carry more of the load. The planning of a two-week family vacation to California this summer is a major hassle and most of it has to be done online. I hope to be able to make up for it in other ways. Rachel does enjoy having the final word on our Netflix queue. (I can expect to be watching more BBC miniseries for the near future.) Four months seemed like a good compromise—long enough to maybe get the Internet monkey off of my back but not so long that my wife will file for a divorce. I also hope my children won’t resent me when I can’t help them log on to Moshimonsters.com.
- My (Probably Crazy) Plan To Give Up the Internet, James Sturm, Slate
James Sturm, director of the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont, is writing an illustrated diary for Slate about his four-month abstinence from the Internet. He’s allowing himself to use his cell phone and the word processor on his computer, but no Internet access of any kind or illustration software.
His first three entries:
- My (Probably Crazy) Plan To Give Up the Internet (April 7)
- Is It Cheating if I Listen to a Podcast? (April 21)
- Drawing Ponce de León Is a Lot Harder Without Google. Plus: Reader Letters, Illustrated. (May 5)
(Full disclosure: I contribute to Slate.)
