Can You Give Up Digital Life?

In October, three students from Carleton College, in preparation for a documentary, gave up digital life for a mere 24 hours. Could they do it?

In today’s day and age, we’re all wired. Silence and peace of our parents’ years are long gone. We need to be constantly in sync with our surroundings and always be connected. Instead of Facebook, students were meeting face-to-face. Phones replaced email and instant messages. The traditional pen and pencil replaced the word processor.

I never left the computer without an away message informing my college friends where I’d be and where they can find me.

So in this experiment, students spent an entire day without the “necessary” things that held the glue of their lives together (or so they thought). Here were some students’ reactions:

“It’s like I’m training for a marathon.”

“I turned my computer off at 11:59 [Tuesday] night. I read a book. I feel really good about it.”

One student, Jason Hitchcock, wrote on a scale from 1 to 10 that this was as hard as a solid 10. He couldn’t do it. “Agh,” he said.

Most, like Hitchcock, were antsy. Returning to email after one day was like a chore; hundreds of messages awaited students and they were all important.

The documentary is scheduled to be aired in mid-2008.

Could you go without computers for more than a day? Let us know by commenting!

Source: MSNBC