So, You Like Donuts, eh?

at 10:00 am on January 28, 2009 under About the Project, Feb: Media Fast | Be the First to Comment

I love the web, and many of the people I know love it, too. So we heartily join together in indulging our passion, twittering, link sharing, posting, facebooking, blogging, last.fm’ing, rss’ing, tumbling, hulu’ing, delicious’ing, digg’ing, flickr’ing, chatting, wikipedia’ing, emailing, itunes’ing, youtubing, and commenting.

It’s a world that you must be enmeshed in to truly understand, so don’t be afraid if you didn’t understand half of the above words. There is no true real world analogy for this flurry of activity, but it might be best to imagine a cocktail party with everyone in the world, from your boss to your ex from high school, from a New York Times reporter to Demi Moore, from a random dude in Nebraska to your most distant cousin, from your banker to Barack Obama, and everything in between, each one of them in turn coming up and whispering something in your ear, handing you a postcard about their life, a photo, or a drawing, or showing you a video that they found or made on the wall right in front of you, all while a bumping and rapidly changing soundtrack of your choosing is playing in the background. Meanwhile a newsie runs around shouting only the latest headlines that might interest you, Dr. Phil gives your head a check, Sanjay Gupta checks you for symptoms of flu, and Karl Kassel records the message on your home answering machine. Meanwhile, you run around playing scrabble with at least a dozen of them, whisper in their ears, hand them a message, and have passionate, vibrant discussions about everything from Gaza, to Battlestar Galactica. And this only makes you want more.

You could easily get used to that kind of attention and quickfire interaction, couldn’t you? Addicted, even.

I was surprised to find that there are a large number of folks out there battling the addicting side of the web.

Earlier this month, CSMonitor reported the opening of a rehab for internet addicts in China, where non-material addictions – particularly to activities like online games, chatting, and trolling dating sites – have ballooned as a result of rapid modernization.

Similarly, a Minnesota-based Christian group called Sound Off for Poverty asks young people to take an electronic media fast for 3 days or more, collecting pledges to fight poverty. Feel free to peruse, and punch holes in their list of impressive stats about the danger of the web for young people. But it’s a noble effort in a time of cynicism.

danah boyd, a fellow from the Center at which I work whom I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting yet, engaged in a voluntary email sabbatical after completing her PhD at the end of last year. Essentially shutting off her email for over a month while she was globetrotting, she carefully and politely informed her contacts that she would delete any message she received between December 11 and January 19 (read more about why and how she did it here).

And there are others. Another colleague did a whole day without the internet at all last year. A number of other blogs have chronicled a media fast of some sort or another, and offer copious reasons (stymying information overload, detoxing on sex and violence, refocusing on a marriage, avoiding news about the recession) and tips (take up knitting) for the fast.

I take comfort in the fact that I am not the first person whose passion and livelihood depend heavily on the web to see what might happen if I take a breather. I may not have the adjoining distraction of a trip to refresh me, but I see the fact that I have to keep engaged in my “regular” routine through this rehab thing as an important dynamic.

Still looking for ideas of rules and consequences. If you take a look at my January resolution – vegan, corn syrup, and refined sugar free – it was quite easy to create the rules: avoid the bad stuff or pay 20 bucks to my Sin Debt. But I’m having a particular creative block with this one. Keep the ideas coming!

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