The recent debates over whether the Internet makes you dumber (as Nicholas Carr argues in The Wall Street Journal) or smarter (as Clay Shirky counters) both simplify what is in fact an astoundingly complex question.
Regardless of your own answer to the question, though, the latest research (as reported in the New York Times) does indeed suggest that we don’t multitask as well as we think. Furthermore—and this should really be no surprise—all the attention we pay to our screens, both large and small, distracts us from other important things in our lives.
How wired are you? How do you manage to multitask? How distracted are you by email, Twitter, IM, Facebook, Foursquare, RSS, and YouTube?
Could you quit, cold turkey, for a day?
Are you willing to take the Great ProfHacker Offline Challenge?
This is your challenge, should you choose to accept it: Go offline for 36 hours. Then come back and tell us about it in the comments.
Why 36 hours and not 24? Because we’re cruel. You could technically go offline for 24 hours, say noon-to-noon, and still squeeze in online activity in the morning of the first day and in the afternoon of the second. Thirty-six hours makes your withdrawal complete, at least for one whole waking-sleeping cycle.
There are other rules: the 36 hours have to be completely voluntary. You can’t take a flight from LGA to PEK and count that enforced downtime toward the challenge. Power outages from a summer thunderstorm don’t count. Neither does time spent in the county lockup.
Can you do it? If it’d be impossible, let us know and why. If you do do it, how did you manage? What were the practical, professional, and psychological effects? Do you have strategies to share for the rest of us about unplugging, even if only for a day?
Let us know! We’ll be here, online, patiently awaiting the results of your experiment!
["Does the Internet" Google screenshot by Mark Sample]
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17 Responses to The Great ProfHacker Offline Challenge
digin4ed - June 14, 2010 at 11:49 am
I have an annual “online-free” week each year. I retreat to northern Ontario to spend a week with family, go fishing, and enjoy the beauty, peace and suppleness of a lifestyle of no electronic communications (except for limited radio reception.) It gives me time to read, think and appreciate other parts of life that often get lost in a busy 24×7 lifestyle and world.I find it of immense benefit and helps me to maintain perspective. It is so easy to get pulled into the torrent of data, news and communications the technology so easily affords. If you find this ProfHacker challenge difficult, it is all the more important you do it. And you will probably find it of immense value as well, to step back occasionally and reassess your world from a different vantage point.Pretending we are multi-tasking is really an illusion. Humans can only multi-task two items well and that is it. We multi-plex and call it multi-tasking. But in doing so, we sacrifice depth of thought, assimilation and learning for the breadth and frequency in torrents of activity. Now, more than ever, it is important for us to segment times for focused observation, thought and reflection (IMHO.)Sincerely,Terry Eberhart(AKA Digin4Ed)
drnels - June 14, 2010 at 12:13 pm
I do this all the time. It’s the second reason (the first being money) why I don’t own a smartphone. It seems like if you get one of those, then people expect you to be connected. I don’t like people to expect me to be connected. I was already planning on this later this week as I’m taking a road trip to get out of the house and change my scenery up a bit. Now, I will have my cellphone with me because I refuse to be anywhere on the planet where my partner can’t find me at a moment’s notice, but I won’t be taking the netbook or anything. Just some books, my camera, and my hiking boots.One thing that some people may have to consider, too, is whether going offline will freak people out. Last April, I took a brief internet break, and I came back to a few panicked emails asking if I was in the hospital or what.Personally, I don’t think the internet makes people dumber or smarter. I think it’s a tool that can be used effectively and ineffectively by anyone.
lexalexander - June 14, 2010 at 3:36 pm
[[Neither does time spent in the county lockup.]]Spoilsport.
velvis - June 14, 2010 at 3:37 pm
I’ve done a week off the computer…but honestly if I don’t have the phone on me 24 hours a day, people lose their minds.If I don’t call students back with in the hour I start getting testy emails, frantic texts, more calls.
crunchycon - June 14, 2010 at 3:41 pm
I don’t accept the challenge. I don’t have a smart phone and doubt I’ll get one, but I like having all the info available. Even while driving my son to school, I’ll connect from the motel in the evenings both directions. The last time I can remember going an entire day without being online was when the power went out a few years ago due to a storm, and I felt somewhat panicked.
11191947 - June 14, 2010 at 3:44 pm
Every time we have an institutional shutdown (e. g. Christmas holiday) the President’s exec asst sends out an e-mail telling us that we have the “responsibility” to check e-mail while we are out. I have been wondering if this could be legally enforced. I do think that if they wanted me to do this, they should give me a smart phone and account.
draws - June 14, 2010 at 4:42 pm
It makes me sad that this is considered a challenge. Why must we be so “connected” all the time, yet not with those in our immediate vicinity? I’m no luddite, but I rarely feel compelled to connect on my non-work time unless it is to look up a movie show time or something like that. Boundaries, right? And if you are going to disconnect and others will freak, can’t you just let them know that you are offline for a day, a week…I mean, unless lives depend upon your connection (and honestly, who is really that important?) then everything will be okay. The world won’t end, and all those emails and texts will still be there when you reconnect.
11299051 - June 14, 2010 at 4:45 pm
Saturdays and Sundays remain computer free in our house. It’s family time and because I’m a bit old-fashioned, too, we turn our cell phones on only when we absolutely need to reach out for help. Funny though, my family and colleagues still seem to be able to find me and missing a deadline because we don’t have the latest technology doesn’t happen in this world either. Oh, and our phone with internet and cell phone bills remain tightly within our budget of $100 for each month. Funny, we just spoke about this subject last night. We lived fine without these gadgets before their inception. Somehow, one doesn’t need to blindly buy everything that’s available technologically. These are still tools, whether used or abused.
texasmusic - June 14, 2010 at 6:37 pm
I do this quite often on the weekends as well. Some weekends I spend all weekend on the computer. It depends on my mood or on the project I have going on. Certainly can’t go that long without during the week – my job depends on it.
rweinel - June 15, 2010 at 5:49 am
Well, the internet is a necessary instrument to do both my work in university administration as well as do research for my PhD thesis. Therefore I cannot participate in the challenge. However, whenever I have the chance to go on a 3-4 day sightseeing trip to a larger city full of museums or other interesting sights, I have absolutely no problem to stay away from the internet, email, cell phone…name it
esselle_ - June 15, 2010 at 7:30 am
Teaching 5 online classes for 4 schools, I can’t catch up enough to take off for 24 hours, let alone 36. I will admit, though, when Hurricane Ivan came through and my family had no access to electricity for 10 days, I missed my refrigerator, my A/C, and my stove, but the time without the ‘net was quite the break…
peril - June 15, 2010 at 11:45 am
My Internet has been out for two solid days (moving right now) and it’s slowly killing me… Yes, I’ll admit it, I’d rather give up running water and shower at the gym than my be without my high-speed…That said, I’ve lived. I’ve got terabytes of stored media, an entire library of games for nearly a hundred consoles (Hey, I help run a game studies lab :P) and somewhere I have a few books that don’t take batteries…Being away from email has been a bit awkward, but that’s just because I’m so conditioned to hearing Mail ‘pop’ when a new message arrives. I’ve been using Concentrate (great mac app) to force closure of my email and IM’s while I work on specific things which has improved my productivity and reduced my email compulsions…That said… I want my frigg’n net back ;)
cotrlib - June 15, 2010 at 12:38 pm
I do this most weekends and often for extended periods when I am on vacation and the majority of the time don’t miss the connectivity. I find when I do get back online I am fresh and more productive – and I usually manage to do a tremendous amount of visiting, chores, and fun while I am offline. Having said this, I just started a series of online courses and shutting off the internet at this time would create considerable stress and lower my over-all productivity.
chrona - June 15, 2010 at 1:36 pm
During four days off line during an out of town visit with family old and new, I became increasingly frustrated by being disconnected from other family and friends, world news, my social activism groups, and professional reading. Coming home was all about email and following those links in newsletter subscriptions. The clincher is that I was anticipating easy internet access at various destination points and I discovered that I was unimpressed by folks whose lifestyles reflected greater emphasis on kitchen gadgetry than good old fashioned IT.
walkerst - June 15, 2010 at 2:20 pm
Well, I just had 3.5 days offline – the cable that I use for high speed Internet access at home was down, and required repairs, and my Blackberry died simultaneously. It was the weekend, and Monday was dedicated to a faculty retreat. So I got back to work on Tuesday – to hundreds of emails, including several angry ones. And yet I had missed only one ‘work’ day – the other were Saturday and Sunday. It seems to be expected that one will check and reply to email all weekend, late at night, and really any time at all. Am I thrilled about this? No. Am I stuck with it? Definitely. I liked the peace, but I didn’t like coming back to hundreds of emails and hours of catch-up work. It’s almost not worth taking vacation either – when you take one day off, that’s invariably when more people than ever try to reach you. Granted, I’m in IT as well as a faculty member, so most of my work is online. I do agree that to concentrate, i.e. to write a major report, I have to turn off email. Otherwise, I’m too distracted.
artificialinanity - June 15, 2010 at 2:55 pm
I can’t really do this during the work week–I’m a web librarian, after all–but I found it easy enough when I was on vacation, a few weeks ago. I enjoy time away from the computer.
aeonelpis - June 15, 2010 at 2:55 pm
I have one computer-free day set aside each week that I devote exclusively to marking up manuscripts for revision. When I go back to the computer, I’ve already done most of the thinking and tinkering, and can focus on fine-tuning the result. It’s too tempting, when I get stuck during a revision, to turn to other projects, so unplugging keeps me focused.I also skip reading everything in my reader at least one day a week. It’s not that hard to catch up (particularly since so much of the blogosphere calms down over the weekends), and I dedicate that time to reading current journal articles in my field.Two summers ago, I spent 7 weeks as a TA in Italy, and I had intermittent internet access. One of the other TAs had a difficult time adjusting to not being able to chat and stay in touch with people constantly; I struggled with not being able to instantly check information, ranging from restaurant reviews to checking facts in student work. I learned to keep a list and check when I *was* in the office; my colleague learned to schedule time with people. We both changed our habits when we returned to the States because of this break to our typical plugged-in lives. I suspect this challenge could function similarly for people.