I know I am an internet junkie. I am addicted to email, to Facebook, to blogs, to news, to internet shopping, and to a host of other wonderful things available over the internet.
I knew I would be addicted many years ago, which was why I put off getting a smartphone for several years. Once I had it, I was on it… a lot! … as I knew I would be.
And now that I am retired, I’m on the internet constantly. I have my laptop open whenever we are “watching television”, which of course means I’m not really watching all that much. And I whip out my iPhone whenever I have the flimsiest of excuses.
Recently I began to wonder just how addicted I am to the internet and to my devices. And so I decided to try to go for 48 hours without using the internet.
I did it. I made it through 48 hours without using the internet from just before midnight on Saturday until just after midnight on Monday.
I turned off the wifi on my laptop so I wouldn’t be connected when I was working on photos or writing projects, and I tried not to use internet when I was reading a novel on my iPhone.
To be honest, the experiment wasn’t completely successful, at least probably not in the eyes of some people, but I think it was a success.
- Our printer uses wifi. I had to reconnect to the wifi on our local router to use the printer. I had already turned off gmail and Facebook, but then I also turned off my browsers. So while I used the wifi, it was just here at home, not via the internet.
- I didn’t figure out how to keep my iPhone connected for texts and calls but not for anything else. So whenever I turned it on, it downloaded my email. I didn’t look at the email, but I saw the badge on my Outlook App telling me how much email was coming in. [It was nearly 100 messages]
- Twice I had to gain access to my calendar, which is in Google. I tried to make sure I used the one that didn’t involve going to the internet, but to my chagrin, it automatically synched when I opened it. I didn’t use anything that was synched, but I should have printed it out ahead of time.
But that was it. So I made it, at least so far as I’m concerned. It was not easy, and I will not willingly to it again.
Email:
I wanted to write to some people about an upcoming show. After having studied the script more carefully, I have tonnes of questions, and I must wait to write the people who can help me.
And I have a granddaughter whose birthday started while I was off line. I’d have wanted to write to her sooner.
Also, I had no idea what I might have missed from my friends and relatives. I put a “vacation” notice on my email to let people know what was happening. I hoped that was sufficient.
Doing without email was especially difficult because we have some relatives who are traveling in Asia now, and I know they were constantly sending photos and updates that I wasn’t seeing (I tried not to look at things on Ms. Eclectic’s computer screen during these two days).
I get most of my news via email from various news organizations. I missed those. I detest television news, especially the local telecasts, and being without other news sources didn’t make me like television news any better (we gave up our hard-copy subscriptions years ago).
Finally, I worried that notices about work being done in our condo building might have been missed. Fortunately, there weren't any.
Facebook:
I really missed all the contact with my Facebook friends --- status updates, messages via messenger, photos, sayings, etc. I have only sporadic contact with most of my Facebook friends, and I know it can wait, but I missed it and I hope those who missed my announcements about this experiment will have understood what I was doing.
I wish there had been some way, in addition to my two status updates, to notify people who might have sent messages or posted comments – some sort of “vacation” type notice for FB. Maybe there is, but it didn’t occur to me to look for it.
Something else that bothered me and that I hadn’t thought about earlier --- what were people posting, if anything, to my Timeline on Facebook? I should have reset the privacy settings before going offline! But people rarely “share” things on Timeline, so I wasn’t worried. And I received no phone calls or texts from friends alerting me to anything untoward that may have happened in this regard.
Other Internet:
- No Google!! I’d guess there must have been 4-5 or more times a day that I was curious about something and wanted to find out more about it.
- Related: no Wikipaedia
- I couldn’t look up the weather, weather maps, etc. on the internet. Yes, I could check TWN (alternately known as either “The Weather Network” or “Trono Weather Network”) but I don’t much like that channel because I have to watch too long to find out what I would like to know. Also they seem disinclined to pay much attention to global warming skeptics.
- No maps. I use Google maps a lot, both on my iPhone and on my laptop. I look up places while I’m reading about them, I look up places I hear about in the news, etc. I have Navigon and Tom-Tom on my iPhone, with downloaded maps, but they aren’t nearly so easy to use as Google maps.
- No box scores for baseball games. I like watching baseball on television, but I like to confirm some of my qualitative impressions by looking at the data in box scores. E.g. Sanchez may have given up only 2 earned runs in 6 2/3 innings pitched, but he was also mighty lucky. His WHIP in Sunday’s game must have been up around the league average, but I wasn’t sure [Ms Eclectic also receives these updates via email and confirmed my impression].
- No dictionaries. A decade ago we had maybe 5 or so different dictionaries, including a huge multi-volume version of the Oxford English Dictionary (complete with magnifying glass!). But we got rid of them all when we down-sized and moved to our condo in London. I wanted to look up the pronunciation of querulous because I was taught one pronunciation but heard a different one in a Brit show we were watching. [Kerulous vs Kwerulous; update -- all the online dictionaries say Kwerulous.]
- I couldn’t shop online. This didn’t really bother me much, but twice I wanted to look things up on Amazon and Land’s End.
- I couldn’t shop for new eBooks. No problem in this regard, though, since I’ve bought far more than I’ll ever read anyway.
- I had to wait to download an iPhone app [sto-app or something like that] that our son told us about. Ok, I can do that, but I’d have downloaded it on the spot otherwise.
- Ms Eclectic and I have been discussing a short holiday together in August. I’ll have to wait until we’re both back online before I look into making the reservations.
- Ms Eclectic and I also share a wonderful shopping app called “Our Groceries”, which allows either person to add items to a mutual shopping list. Of course this list is maintained via the internet, and so Ms Eclectic did most of the adding here. I added my items while my phone was in “airplane mode”, knowing they will be synched once I’m back on line.
I was astonished by how dependent I am on the internet, not just because of my own personal addictions but in so many other ways as well. If the internet ever shuts down for any length of time, I’ll be done for.
The experiment confirmed what I knew but didn’t want to admit all along: I am easily distracted by email and Facebook. Anytime I get even slightly bored with my work, with what I’m reading, or with what is on television, I check my email and Facebook.
Suspecting this, confirming this, and now knowing this may affect my behavior. I doubt if it will affect much, though.