It is 06 pm – 02/10 Friday afternoon. Chose the perfect time to go on, this time, a lack of digital adventures. It wasn’t planned ahead, much like most of my digital use it was impromptu and subconscious, but I decided to stick with it, and finish this 24h Lent period :).
07 pm – After walking around campus, chatting with friends and other people, I cannot even feel that something is missing. As exaggerated as I made it sound, it didn’t feel like it before either. I left my smartphone in Macedonia on purpose (okay, not quite, I didn’t have the time to decode it and use it on US turf ), took my less impressing Sony Ericsson w890i and left it in my drawer since my second week. It was just a convenient alarm so I didn’t really feel any necessity to say goodbye to it for another 24 hours as I had been fine with it for a longer period. Also I don’t have a phone number (yet) so again, cellphone goodbye was the easiest part of all.
09 pm – More walking around campus, finding people, socializing, and let’s be clear, it was not a causal effect of my Digital Fasting. It might have been correlated, but then again, the only piece of technology I might be using at that time usually is my laptop, to catch up on some Modern Family or How I Met Your Mother. Irrelevant. I left my cellphone in my drawer, my laptop was conveniently low on battery, put it in my drawer and went on my merry way.
12 pm – 03/10 Saturday morning. I wake up (quite late, as per usual on weekends), grab some brunch, walk around, come back and grab my books. Nothing unusual for a Saturday, except that I was missing the constant beat in my ears coming from Spotify – for some reason I concentrate much better when I am listening to music while I am doing school work. Continued doing my homework, and did some readings, constantly getting more than annoyed by simple sounds such as people sniffing, lights ticking, doors opening and closing, people chatting, and I am more than aware everyone does that, even me, more than often (…but I have slight misophonia – hatred of certain sounds, which in itself does not help me concentrate, and that is one of the main reasons I do listen to music when I study) and that was probably the worst part of my media fast. I didn’t get to read the new articles on The Economist, or the Macedonian headlines, or see my facebook profile for a day, which again, as my mother would put it, it was not the end of the world (…”was it?”).
5 pm that same afternoon – Again, I go outside, find people, make plans for the night, get some food, and grab a cup of coffee. I was relaxing and chatting outside of Proctor for what seemed as a nice couple of hours. It was. Before I knew it, it was 7:30pm (excuse my possible inaccuracy it might have been 7:36pm), and I went to my room and checked my email, and my facebook. A couple of notifications from school events, a couple of messages from family and friends, and my media fast was broken 25h 30(36)mins after it began. I am alive, and so far, haven’t noticed a particular change in any activity I have been doing.
That was me, unplugged. Not a recovering addict of internet and media, but a social, occasional user, who if it weren’t for the drawbacks of being far away from home, would not even feel the need to be constantly online and in touch.