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Merfam, via Flickr (CC license)
Hey you! Drop that cell phone! |
Could you go 24 hours without Internet access? What about video games? And while you're at it, give up TV, radio, your computer.
And now turn off that cellphone, too! Dammit -- right now!
How will you survive?
That's the premise of this Washington Post Magazine article by Danna L. Walker, a fellow in the School of Communication at American University. She made her students turn it off -- turn it ALL off -- for 24 hours.
Some spent more time with Mom. One felt homeless. "I couldn't go home because I knew that would be too tempting. I couldn't be with my friends because that would be too tempting," the student wrote. "I had just eaten, so I couldn't just sit in a restaurant all day. I was walking down the street literally with nowhere to go, and I just didn't know what I was going to do."
Walker, who started as a reporter waaaay back when (back when I was working with her at United Press International, and she still spelled her first name Dana), said she's "not from the we're-all-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket school of media thought. I use most of the electronic gadgets my students do. E-media keep us up to the minute on information, facilitate relationships without geographic constraint, make logistics easier and sometimes help us relax and fight boredom. But I do know of a world my students haven't inhabited -- a world in which we may have had less ready access to information but had more power to turn it off and reflect. I hold on to the hope that we're not too far gone in our media stupor to recapture the idealistic vision of the era of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, meaningful discourse and human-to-human interaction in the public sphere."
Worth reading. And pondering. (But unless you live in the D.C. area and can dig through the trash for the Post magazine, you'll have to go online to do it!)
