How did I survive 48 hours without the Internet?
When this weekend started, I celebrated by logging out of all my accounts — Gmail, Twitter, Ping.fm, Facebook, FriendFeed. I turned off my personal cell and my work BlackBerry and noted the time: 8:01 p.m. I didn’t think I could make it 48 hours without tweets and text messages, but I liked the idea of being liberated from it all, no matter how brief.
The second after I had shut it all down, my first impulse was to send a tweet about how energized I was at starting this experiment.
Yeah. This was going to be a long 48 hours.
Getting through the first evening turned out to be surprisingly easy, and I started to feel that stillness I was looking for. But on Saturday, stillness turned to immobility — the list of things I couldn’t do got longer and longer.
Couldn’t go online to browse for ideas for my youngest sister’s birthday. Couldn’t tweet about the Mediterranean orzo omelet I had whipped up. Couldn’t post a LinkedIn recommendation for a former colleague. Couldn’t look up the lyrics to the Blur song I was listening to. Couldn’t even look up a word, since I don’t have a hard copy of a dictionary at home. Couldn’t make a phone call to set up a hair appointment, since I don’t have a landline.
Like a New Yorker who’s had it with the city, I told myself I had to get away for the weekend. But it didn’t take long to realize how much I missed my little space in this Web 2.0 world — even if it means that my BlackBerry constantly vibrates from incoming work-related e-mails. Logging on and powering up at 8:01 this evening felt like turning the key and flipping on the light — it’s good to be home.
[...] about the pitfalls of spending too much time with social media. In fact, back in November I logged off for a weekend to prove to myself that I still could. That said, I’m far from the point where I’m putting in [...]