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FRIDAY, MAY 28, 2010
Unplugged
BY IAN SHAPIRA
Step 1: Admit powerlessness over addiction
On the first morning, I woke up and immediately felt my brain neurons sending orders to my hands: Grab the BlackBerry. Check e-mail. Check Post instant-message system, Post e-mail, Gmail e-mail, Yahoo e-mail, Facebook news feed, Facebook messages, Twitter and e-mail at American University, where I’m a master’s student in interactive journalism. But I was not allowed. Just minutes into a week without the Internet, I was miserable. By week’s end, I learned
something: My name is Ian Shapira, and I’m addicted to the need to be constantly busy.
On Day One, I suppressed
my cravings. I figured that my story about the collapse of the Mary- land horse industry— would keep me busy enough. I drove out to a farm and strolled around horse paddocks, watching mares and newborns nuzzle and eat grass. I was lost in the beauty. But on my drive home, relaxation
crashed into a rising sense of depriva- tion. My instinct to pick up the Black- Berry resurfaced. Cheating would be quick . . .
But I didn’t want to go down
as the first to cave. I pressed on. I felt this scary empti- ness — a cerebral vat into which infor- mation is supposed to stream con- stantly. I missed belonging to the day’s running conversation, scanning pithy tweets and Facebook updates. I want- ed to read e-mails at traffic lights, or worse, while driving. I finished that first day
Internet-free. I thought I’d feel pride. I felt nothing. Before going to bed, I
picked up an essay by New York Times restaurant critic Sam Sifton, who wrote about our addiction to sugar and salt, citing a recent study showing how a diet of high-
fat, high-sugar food led “rats to pursue obesity with passion.” Suddenly, I felt weak. I vowed that
my resistance would last the week. But after three days, I told myself
that the only way I could obtain wa- gering figures for my horse story was to go online. It was a handy excuse to justify my unkickable habit. I caved.
shapirai@washpost.com
BY MICHAEL S. ROSENWALD
Print newspapers? I think I remember what those look like.
I had become a gadget. After 15 years of clicking around the
Internet, I found that my surfing had be- come more predictable, with fewer sur- prises. I had programmed serendipity out of my life.
A dozen RSS feeds automatically deliv- ered to me exactly the news I thought I was looking for — about the digital world, Apple products, behavioral economics, quirky political stories, the Red Sox, gadgets, media gossip and fountain pens. My Twitter feed piped in the same topics. Didn’t need a newspaper anymore. Stopped subscribing last year. I rarely vis- ited Web sites I had bookmarked. No need to: All the news I wanted was deliv- ered to me, at the time of my choosing. Then I logged off. Hello, surprises. I took two newspapers to lunch with
me every day. Whoa. Lovely obit of Lena Horne in The Post. Amazing story in the New York Times about AIDS in Uganda. Liberation. Instead of my iPad,
BY CHRISTIAN DAVENPORT
Turn on, tune in, drop out . . . unplug
Going a week without the Internet is stupid. I won’t glean any wisdom about being unplugged or more fully appreciating the present. You don’t have to go without to value what you have. I walk around with both a Black-
Berry and an iPhone. I got the iPad the day it was re- leased. I don’t use the home phone. Ever. I use the cell. And only when e-mail won’t suffice.
So the worst part of my hi-
atus from the Internet is that while I’m blissfully out of touch, others will be incon- venienced. What if my wife wants me to pick up groceries on the way home? What if a source sends me a scoop? Like I said, this is stupid.
That’s what I wrote at the begin- ning of our Internet fast. And yes, I did inconvenience people, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be, and I did learn something: I learned that human beings are adaptable. We’ve gone from rotary
BY ANNYS SHIN
It happened one night: A real conversation
If aliens dropped into my living room on a weekday evening, they would think marriage is a strange in- stitution. My husband, Dan, and I spend most nights with computers in our laps, making little eye contact and trading fewer words. By the time my colleagues and I de- cided to spend a week offline, I had accepted this scenario as, if not the stuff of Norman Rockwell paintings, at least within the realm of normal. I secretly wondered whether unplugging might be a way to regain some marriage mojo. I even pictured us having some awesome five-hour conversa- tion, like when you’re first dating. We had all agreed to keep our Inter-
net hiatus a secret from our spouses for as long as possible. We even placed bets on whose spouse would be last to notice.
Dan was the first. The first day, I left
my USB flash drive at home with all my work notes on it. When I asked Dan if he could bring it with him when he came downtown, he immedi- ately grew suspicious: Why can’t I e- mail everything to you? After I explained the situation, his
initial reaction was indifference, then an oddly intense sympathy. Dan, I should explain, blogs for a living. For him, being offline is akin to being in a coma. As we sat on the couch on the third
unplugged evening, he turned to me and joked, “Let’s have a conversation.” And we did. It lasted about 40 minutes, not five hours, but it was nice just the same. The next morning, I dropped out of the experi- ment. I couldn’t get work done.
When I e-mailed Dan news
of my liberation, I expected a sympathetic sigh of relief. In- stead, he was incredulous.
Later, at home, he ribbed me. “What’s the point if you can just quit?” he asked. I glared at him. Lovingly, of course. A few days later, when I asked what he thought of the whole mini-ordeal, he surprised me again, saying, “I liked it that your face wasn’t buried in a screen all night. “Not that I can talk,” he added
quickly.
shina@washpost.com
BY BRIGID SCHULTE
Really letting go is good food for the soul
I cheated. Just about every day. Some of it was legitimate — I was writing a story about Internet rumors, after all. When I had to ask a source to call up a Web site and get me phone numbers, I knew I’d reached the other side of ridiculous. Some cheating, however, was purely
discretionary. I just couldn’t stop my- self. I spent two hours on the first night of the experiment surfing the Web for “the per- fect” place to stay in New York when my sisters visit next month. Then I remembered a trip an aunt planned in 1976 for 13 relatives, ages 13 to 76, to go from Oregon and Wyoming through Denver and New York to Ireland to visit relatives. How on earth did she do it without the Internet? That’s when it hit me, at about 1:47
a.m.: The Internet feeds my worst in- stincts — distraction, obsessive com- pulsion, perfectionism, control-freak- ishness. Did I really have to find “the perfect” place? Whatever happened to making do? We stayed in some pretty wild places on that Ireland trip — like
the New York hotel nestled comfort- ably on a block of peep shows — but we just rolled with it. A couple of days later, after our Web
blackout had prompted me to do some unkind things — I left my daughter’s music teacher standing out on the front porch because I couldn’t check the e-mail she’d sent reminding me of the lesson — I found myself itching for bizarre, extra- neous information. Like, how does a snakehead fish “walk” on land? After the ban finally lifted,
my daughter and I called up a YouTube video of a snakehead writhing its muscular body to motor about. Then we got di- verted and wound up watch-
ing the trailer for the new “Twilight” movie.
I recalled a highlight of my un-
plugged week: chaperoning a field trip without a BlackBerry is good for the soul.
I turned away from the screen and said to my daughter, “Let’s go for a bike ride.”
schulteb@washpost.com
phones to answering machines to cellphones to e-mail — just in my life- time. They are embedded in my daily life. But in just a couple of days, going without felt almost normal. At first I worried about what I was missing. I felt out of it, alone, left be- hind. And then I didn’t. Per- haps it was only because I knew the experiment would end in a few days, but I let go. I adapted. And then a funny thing happened, something I never would have anticipat- ed: I cut myself off almost completely. My out-of-office e-mail reply told people that calling was the best way to
get me. But I didn’t answer most calls. Let them go to voice mail; I’ll deal with it later. It was rude, but hitting my phone’s
“ignore” button felt liberating. The in- cessant chatter, fueled by e-mail, cell- phones, texts, Facebook, Twitter, had become like a car alarm that won’t shut off. “Ignore” was a universal mute button that made everything calmer. It was my way of telling the world — and myself — to just shut up.
davenportc@washpost.com
Jaron Lanier, the in- ventor of virtual real- ity, accompanied me to my reclining chair each night. He has published a new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” a manifesto against the connect- ed Web 2.0 world of Facebook, Twitter and targeted ads. He argues that this pri- vacy-free Web world is stripping away what it means to be human. It’s all about the crowd now, he says. A crowd of people like us. A crowd of ideas we already know. “The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a net- work of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush,” Lanier writes. “You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful.” I’m back online now, but I’m reading print newspapers again, too. They’re making me realize there is a world out- side the one I create in my head. The ex- citement now comes from not knowing what you are going to get. I check in on Twitter just once a day now. I removed the Twitter app from my phone. I click around the Web more, putting myself in position to be surprised. I am not a gadget.
rosenwaldm@washpost.com
BY THERESA VARGAS
Technology holidays: Only on vacation
My low came that first day, riding home on the Metro. It is normally four short stops, enough time to write a few e-mails, check headlines on my BlackBerrys and maybe text the hus- band. That first day, it was four long, tor- turous stops. I found myself staring jeal-
ously at people reading books, wishing I had brought one. I played mental games, check- ing out riders’ shoes to guess what they did for a living. Bal- let flats: nonprofit intern. Rubber-soled boots: construc- tion worker. Peep toes with two-inch heel: political aide. My eyes gravitated to a man with a newspaper. Before I could stop myself, I was reading over his shoul- der. Until it occurred to me: “Oh, no — I’ve become one of those people.” My hands felt idle. My mind, mal- nourished. Now, to be clear, I have often won- dered whether the Internet enhances life or wastes it. If I could, I’ve long thought, I’d abandon it altogether. Whenever I leave the country, I con- sciously pick hotels where computers
aren’t readily available and my Black- Berrys won’t work. It is the only time I truly feel relaxed. Food tastes better. Sleep feels deeper. My thoughts feel smarter. I can finish a book. But midway through our experi- ment, I realized that that feeling of to- tal abandon is possible only on vaca- tion. Working while un- plugged produces the opposite effect. I was more stressed, thinking about the e-mails I was missing. I cre- ated an out-of-office message telling people to call me, but few did. I was more bored, wondering what family and friends were doing on Face- book.
As a reporter, I was paralyzed. On
Wednesday, I was handed an assign- ment that would be difficult with the Internet but nearly impossible with- out it: a cyber-stalking case. My editor released me from the experiment. Immediately, I reached for my BlackBerry and sent off a three-word text: “Free at last!” Only later did I think: “Or am I?”
vargast@washpost.com
BY PAUL SCHWARTZMAN
Reconnecting with the written word
What was I doing without the Inter- Reading “Huckleberry Finn” to my
net?
9-year-old son, snuggling with my 7- year-old daughter and bathing my 3- year-old girl. Oh, the agony of uninterrupted in-
teraction with loved ones! Somehow I managed. I watched more television than usual, read more of the newspaper, cracked open a magazine, went to bed earlier.
plugged week rereading let- ters from my
I spent part of the un- parents, old
friends and old girlfriends, some of the missives dating back to sleep-away camp in the 1970s. Just to look at the handwriting was a revelation — girly script or perfectly printed let- tering, crossed-out words, scrawls, ex- clamation points, homespun smiley faces — all conveying so many tex- tured memories. I never get letters anymore. By the
time my kids go to camp, it’s possible they won’t be writing any. Will they send and receive love letters they can stow in a musty old shoebox? Or will they print out texts and e-mails and keep them in tidy folders?
Does it matter? I’m not a big fan of technology. I like
eBay for buying baseball memorabilia and YouTube because where else can you plug in “Woody Allen and Billy Graham” and come up with some- thing to watch? But I don’t tweet. I don’t read tweets. I don’t read blogs. I feel no need to share that I just ate a hamburger.
Still, I found after a week
away from the Internet that I missed it more than I had ex- pected to. I missed being able to look up phone numbers, or write to friends and sources. I even missed reading those personal updates on Face- book that I would never my- self indulge in. After all, let us not forget
how important it is to waste time. On the last day, when I got around to telling my wife about Project Un- plugged, her response was something on the order of “Hmm . . . huh? . . . Whatever.” Then I was off to bathe the kids and put them to bed, happily still free of my electronic tether — even if I did sneak a peek at my BlackBerry.
schwartzman@washpost.com
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