A Week Without Google

I wonder about how much I can do without Google. I’m aware of its presence in my life to a certain extent, but I wonder how deeply it reaches. I know that it makes my life much quicker, much more efficient, and I know that I trade away my own privacy for that efficiency.

For my week without Google, I’d like to make the choice to live as though the internet were still in its infancy as I remember from when I was growing up. When I wanted to see a movie, I checked the showtimes in the newspaper. If I wanted to see a friend, I called them. To find directions, I used a map (and eventually Mapquest).

I’d like to do as much of this as possible again. And I expect it will have a fairly profound effect on my life. I rely on the internet for a lot in my life and without it I expect that I will come to see the world in a new way. I’m already fairly familiar with my neighborhood but I wonder how I might pay more attention to it without an easy way to recall locations. I expect that my feeling of what boundaries define my neighborhood and where I live will drastically shrink. And that my pace of life will suddenly stretch as simple tasks will take more preparation and coordination.

Even with all of this I don’t expect to be able to fully escape Google’s grasp but I do wonder how I will feel about it and how my actions will affect those I interact with.