Last Sunday, I walked into the editorial office a few minutes before 5 p.m., as I’ve done most Sundays for the past two years, eager to discuss whatever it was we had decided to editorialize on that week. But instead of being greeted by the rest of the editorial staff, I found an empty and dark office. Someone — not even another editor — was working in the back room. I asked if she had heard anything about a rescheduled meeting and she said she hadn’t. But she had come to the office to do work with another editor, which suggested maybe there had been a change. When my fellow editor showed up and saw me sitting confused in the office, she started laughing, realizing what had happened. The meeting had been pushed until later in the evening so that we all could go to President Liebowitz’s forum on social life. And of course, the Editor-in-Chief had made the decision over email, forgetting that for seven days I was cut off of the Internet entirely.
Constant connectivity is something we all take for granted. Professors make last minute changes to assignments by emailing the class. When an unknown concept comes up on a homework assignment, we assume the answer is only a few seconds of Googling away. Most of these conveniences are exactly that — convenient. But sometimes it seems we are too connected. We spend hours scrolling through Twitter instead of writing that next paper on Shakespeare and we stress over finding that perfect angle for the next selfie we’re going to send out to 1000 of our closest friends. This is why I decided to unplug for an entire week. No internet at all and no phone on me all day to answer the question: is it even possible to unplug in today’s hyper-connected age?
When my editors and I first came up with this idea, I have to say I was a bit worried. The Internet and technology are huge parts of my life. My first concern was social. So many plans are made spur of the moment through text message; surely if I don’t have my phone on me, I’ll never see my friends again. And beyond the initial comments of ‘wow, I don’t think I could ever leave the Internet’, some of my friends had pretty serious concerns about my project. One of my friends insisted that I carry my phone on me on mute. If something horrible were to happen, he warned, no one would be able to get a hold of me and ‘the whole world would fall apart.’
On the first day of my tech fast, I spoke with Professor of Psychology Barbara Hofer, who is currently teaching a class titled ‘Psychology and Emerging Technologies’ where she and her students examine the ways the proliferation of technology has affected our lives. She explained that this anxiety about being disconnected from the internet is common among college-age individuals.
“The first year I taught this class, in 2011, there was a group of students who said ‘we want to find out what happens when students have to stay off Facebook,’” she said. “They were going to randomly assign students conditions: there was a group that could stay on Facebook and there was a group that had to stay off Facebook from Friday through Monday … they had a prediction of such dire distress that I actually had to get Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval to do the study because you can’t predict this level of distress and not get approval.” However, the study found that, given the opportunity to disconnect from Facebook, students responded in the complete opposite way and in fact benefited from being offline.
“The people who stayed off Facebook for a few days showed less of every single one of the distress measures,” Hofer said. “In many ways they were grateful for the opportunity and excuse to avoid using it for a few days.”
Similarly, after only the first few days of being away from the Internet, I could tell my world wasn’t going to end.
Email was consistently the hardest part of the fast. I told my professors that I wouldn’t be receiving emails and had an automated message set up, informing anyone who tried to email me what I was doing and why I wouldn’t receive their message for a week. I had one professor, for whom I am a TA, print out an email exchange with the TAs’ planning help sessions and put it in my mailbox so I’d be in the loop. But still, I was tempted to check my email. Especially during the first day of my fast, I found that, whenever I opened my computer, I reflexively clicked on the Google Chrome item without a second thought.
After a week away from my email, I had 105 unread messages in my ‘primary’ inbox on Gmail (thanks, Google filters!). And of those emails, maybe 20 or 30 of them were consequential and not a single one was critically important. That was one of the more eye-opening parts of this fast for me: that most of the emails we feel so urged to read are not all that important. With email on our smartphones, it’s expected that communication is immediate and that everyone is reachable at any hour of the day. Before I disconnected, I know when I’d be lying in bed trying to go to sleep and hear my phone buzz with an email, I’d roll over and check it because it felt so urgent. But once I was forced to ignore all my emails, I realized I have control over things like that and that 10:48 p.m. email from Bernie Sanders’ email list can probably wait until the morning.
Productivity was another change. The internet has a tendency to be an enormous time sink for people. How many times have you heard someone complain about not having free time, but then in the same breath talk about the two hours they wasted on Facebook? Engagement with social media is no longer talked about as free time; it’s started to feel like an obligation for people. No longer do we sit down and focus our attention on one single assignment for a long period of time. Now it’s five minutes of reading, then respond to a text, then read another paragraph, then jump on Facebook for 45 minutes, but wait, just one more Buzzfeed list, and then…
With the Internet off, it quickly became easier to focus on my work. That isn’t to say I didn’t waste time. Procrastination isn’t new and unique to the Internet. But during my week offline, procrastination meant reading a book that wasn’t for class, or spending an extra hour over lunch with friends.
A common criticism you often hear about the so-called ‘Internet generation’ is that we don’t know how to socialize. We are so caught up in being online, that we can’t form meaningful relationships anymore without the mediation of a glowing screen. Of course, often what we are doing online is socializing, but it’s a different form of socializing. I didn’t do this fast with Luddite aspirations of ending the Internet, and I definitely reject the notion that our generation doesn’t know how to connect with other people. But I think there’s something to be said about the quality of attention we give people face to face.
