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.
TV has always been a big part of my live. As a young kid I grew up with shows like The A-Team, Battlestar Gallactica, Knight Rider, Star Trek, Doctor Who and Robotech which we then re-enacted when we played outside. As a teen I started getting more into watching the news, seeing my favorite football club play their euro matches and NBA games. This continued while getting older and while I continue to watch certain programs the hours spend really watching TV went (also due to the rise of ads being shown during movies/series) down. Nowadays my TV provides more of a background noise while I do other stuff. So last week went without TV in an experiment to find out if I could do without it.
The answer to that is yes, but there’s a “but”. This has all to do with the web and what it has to offer. When it comes to news I can switch to Google News or any other news outlet that has an online presence. Even Twitter or blogs can be a great source for that matter. For local news I can go to nu.nl or the online teletext. For Dutch programs I would like to see when I want to (which for me is a big plus) I could go to Uitzending Gemist. Even the commercial networks have sites like these. If the BBC would make their iPlayer internationally available (first “but”) my TV subscription would be more absolute (note: the BBC in my view is the best network in the world).
The biggest “but” (no pun intended) is when it comes to sports. I love watching sports and there aren’t many ways to look at them live on the web with it being cheaper than just having a cable contract (only exception I know of was the NCAA basketball tournament which was broadcast online for free by CBS). Especially when it comes to the big events like the Olympics or World Cup football.
Watching programs on the web without having to have a TV subscription is becoming main stream with sites like Hulu or even YouTube. For me however the web doesn’t provide enough options yet (and it’s entirely possible that I have missed certain ones) for me to stop watching it. One thing is for sure: if I wasn’t a sports fan I would cancel my TV subscription in a minute.
