Ylliks

Last week I started a week of no-web experience (which happened to coincide with a week of fun visiting friends in Lebanon) because I wondered if I could last 7 days without the one thing I use most in my life. Did I last?

Yes, with a small exception of showing my friend how easy it was to get online on a phone in Starbucks and that was for maybe 3 minutes. But I didn’t tweet, read blogs or use the web for my usual stuff the rest of the week. As suggested by Graham, I also didn’t read my mail for a week.

I didn’t miss some of the things as much as I thought I would. Sure there were the occasional times I wanted to tweet some of the things I heard or saw (airports/planes are a gold mine for funny things to see and hear), check on the one social site I’m on or see what people I know shared or said. But overall that’s something I could do without.

What I did miss was the way the web makes communication so easy with email, chat or apps like Skype. I also missed the fact that it’s so easy to just whip out your phone and look something up. The information at your fingertips and it’s 24 hour access is really something I love about the web. Finding information about certain subjects (like say if my countrymen won something in the Olympics) could be done but not as fast or easy (especially when you’re in a place that doesn’t care about the subject).

Another thing is that after being away from it for a week a whole pile of mails, tweets and blogposts are waiting for you to digest and it takes time to catch up. This however gives me an opportunity to look at my feeds carefully and see which blogs I want to see every entry from and those I don’t feel as strong about. There will be some unsubscribing involved.

Being away from the web for a week and even longer is manageable and a lot of the things I do on it I could live without. The thing is though that they are so much fun to do and when I have the time and access I love doing them. I just have to be careful that they will not start to rule my life. And of course there are other ways than the web to communicate or find information. The fact is though that the web makes it so easy that it’s hard to find a good substitute. So I could live without the web if needed, but as long as I have it, i’ll use it. A lot.

The coming week I’ll do a little experimenting again: (almost) no web-related activities. This means no checking/interacting/downloading/posting on/from sites, forums, my rss-reader and even *gasp*…Twitter. I will check my email once in a while, but that’s it. So why do this? Is it to have a cleanse like John Mayer (although I will be using some of his cleansing rules)? Am I bored with the web? Not really.

I don’t suffer from web overload or boredom. I do believe it would be interesting to see how much (if any) I would miss the thing I spend most of my free time on. Especially what I would miss. It’s convenient that it coincides with a vacation I’m taking next week (more on that in a later post) in a place where I don’t know if I can get on the web easily (I know my friends place where I’ll be staying is connected, but know nothing about mobile web availability).

So what does this entail? As from sunday morning 21st of February 0.01 AM CET until 168 hours later I will just check email with my usual regularity (once a day) and that is all the internet activity I’ll allow myself. For all the other stuff I use the web for I’ll either have to find alternatives (for things like news gathering) or just be without (things like chatting or Twitter). Of course until midnight comes I’ll probably share, discuss and tweet so much it will look like spam-like activities.

See you in a week.