The Beginning of My Digital Detox Adventure
Saturday 00:58
“How do we interact with technology. Do we use it, or does it use us? What price do we pay for convenience, for seamless living?”
This is the first writing prompt from Punkt. in their Winter Digital Detox challenge. They’ve invited people to go without a smartphone for 48 hours. I’ve never had a smartphone so that would be too easy for me. In fact, I haven’t had a phone at all for about five years. So I decided to try a more radical version of the challenge. At first I figured I’d reduce my laptop use to four hours a day. Then I thought, you know what? It’s the weekend. What if I just put the laptop away for a while? That could be pretty liberating actually — and hey, if I can do that one weekend, I could do it every weekend.
Indeed, thinking this way… This does suggest one good reason to get a low-tech phone like Punkt.’s MP 01. Using a laptop for telecommunications means using it for everything. For example, I don’t have a stand-alone digital camera either, so I use the laptop to to take pictures. I suppose I’m a bit of a minimalist.
“What, you don’t have central heating in your flat??”
For a long time I’ve thought that because I’m a computer scientist, computer over-use is a professional hazard. But that’s only true until it becomes a highly unprofessional hazard. Edsger Dijkstra was famously fine with just handwriting and typewriters.
After taking the picture above, I thought: you know what else? The electricity, which I pay for using a prepaid key, well I’m pretty sure the prepaid amount is going to run out pretty soon. What if I just don’t add value there for 48 hours? So, no phone, no laptop, no WIFI, no electric lights, no electric cooker, no hot water heater. I guess that would be applying a sort of monastic logic to the digital detox. But, hey, why not?
For now the connection’s live, so I’ll post this. Let’s see where it goes from here.