Internet Independence: An Experiment in Disconnectivity
One college student's attempt to transform her relationship with the internet.
Like A Kid in an Apple Store
Up until a few weeks ago, I went to bed every night with my iPhone plugged in and happily charging on the bed next to my pillow.
There are a few reasons why I convinced myself this close proximity was necessary. For one, my bed was an awkward height so I didn’t have a bedside table. I figured that having my phone within arm’s reach meant I could turn off my alarm faster, hopefully avoiding waking up my roommates who didn’t have an 8am. I even tried to reason that having my “Do Not Disturb” function turn on automatically every night at 10pm would negate any of the harmful effects of constant companionship.
What it really was, though, was a roundabout way of ensuring that I had constant access to the dopamine-shrouded haze I could conjure up in just a couple of taps. As much as I hated to admit it, I was hooked. My iPhone was a crutch, and I had convinced myself that I sprained my ankle.
I was born in 2002, two years shy of Facebook, three shy of YouTube, and right in the middle of the first generation for whom the internet was old news and social media was second nature. I have never known a time in which media technology has not been a constant presence in my life—and I had all the necessary gadgets to prove it.
I got an iPod at age 6, a Kindle Tablet at age 10, and a cell phone at age 13. I bought my first iPhone when I was 18, but my parents had one since 2013, when I was 11. I created my first Gmail account when I was 9, I have had 10 other email accounts since, I was regularly using the computer lab at school from age 5, and there was never a time when my family didn’t have some kind of computer in the house. I started using Snapchat and Instagram regularly when I was 13, and YouTube long before that. I don’t remember when most of these technologies were invented because they were a constant presence in my life from the time I became aware of the digital world.
I never had to ‘learn’ how to use the internet. That information was filtered into my bloodstream through osmosis, as it was for every other digital native with access to a router. I entered adulthood having never experienced an extended period of time without some kind of technology to fall back on. And why would I want to? The internet was always on, and always alluring.
This is not to say that I’m an all-knowing tech whiz on a straight shot to Silicon Valley. Quite the opposite in fact—I’m an English major. As much as technology was a part of my upbringing, my peers have time and again outpaced me with their technological skills and social media savvy. I always said when I was a teenager that I was bad at being a teenager, and I think this sentiment came in large part because I lacked the intuitive relationship with technology that I saw from much of my generation. A lot of things online come easy—typing, Googling, and navigating the internet and new devices feel like second nature. But other parts, like posting online and keeping up with the revolving door of online trends and new social media apps, are a lot trickier.
Even back in high school, I had a semi-formed idea that maybe social media wasn’t as perfect as it presented itself to be. I would like to state for the record that for years now, the folder on my phone in which I keep my social media apps has been aptly titled “Drugs.” It wasn’t until the pandemic, however, that I started to think that changing my media habits might benefit me. I was still using Instagram and Snapchat at that point, so I decided to start paying more attention to the ways I was using these apps. I noticed that I would always leave social media feeling more anxious and generally worse than I did when I logged on. Plus, it was eating up time that I knew could be better spent. I decided to stop posting, commenting, liking, and interacting with other accounts on my social media apps. It helped a little with the anxiety at least, but I was still spending the same amount of time online, scrolling instead of typing.
Before I started college, I decided to go a step further and delete Instagram and Snapchat off my phone. Deleting Snapchat was a success, but as soon as I realized I would need to use Instagram for student organizations and later my summer job, it made a hasty reappearance on my home screen. I figured what’s the harm in keeping tabs on my friends and classmates back home as they began their first semesters of college or started working full time. Also during my first year of college I had to create a Facebook account for one of my music classes, so I was down two, up two on my deletion record.
For the next few years, I would delete my apps when they got too distracting and reinstall them when I had some free time I wanted to fill, resulting in a toxic, on-again off-again relationship with social media. I would have been stuck in an ugly cycle of virtual love and loss if I hadn’t taken a class in my junior year of college called “Writing in the Networked World.” In that class we wrote and explored the role of the writer as modern technology like AI and social media is changing what it means not only to be a writer, but to be a human. We read a lot about the complicated relationship between us and our technology, but the thing that stuck with me the most was Johann Hari’s book “Stolen Focus.” Hari described, in horrifyingly relatable detail, all the ways that we as a society are losing our ability to focus. Modern technology that takes advantage of our biological instincts is shortening our attention spans and stealing our time.
Fortunately, Hari found a short-term solution that was able to help him regain his focus and rely less on his technology. A lot less. For three months one summer, he rented a cabin on the beach in Cape Cod and left his phone and laptop behind. He traded email for a local bookstore and Twitter for long walks on the beach.
After pushing through the initial internet withdrawal period, Hari started to see his focus coming back. He looked forward to writing every morning instead of checking his Twitter. He found that he was sleeping better, getting more exercise, and was generally happier when he didn’t have to cater to the whims of his social media followers 24/7.
As I read, I realized that if I didn’t start making some drastic changes in my own life, I would spend the rest of my college years becoming even further intertwined with my devices. In a fit of madness, I decided to do my own adapted version of Hari’s media blackout. For two weeks, from December 28th, 2023, to January 10th, 2024, I wouldn’t use my phone, computer, or the internet in any capacity. I would spend all the extra hours I discovered in the day reading, writing, and tracking the ways in which my focus and attention shifted without a screen to fall back on. My experiment would be much shorter than Hari’s, plus I would be operating out of Des Moines in January instead of a summer on Cape Cod, but I thought the time I was able to spend away from my devices would be enough to locate the roots of my media misfortunes and explore some possible solutions.
I was a little scared, obviously. We fear the unknown, so loss of technology is Gen Z’s biggest nightmare, and I was bringing it willingly upon myself. I focused on the advice given by Daniel Yoon in his novel Version Zero: “Take comfort in the fact that the internet will still be waiting for you when you return.”
I will return, and the internet will be as arresting as ever when I do.
Operation: Offline
It’s a bit romantic, isn’t it, to conjure up an opportunity to throw everything away and bury myself in blankets and Thoreau. To spend my days doing nothing but reading, writing, and thinking, watching out the window as snowflakes fall only to melt as soon as they touch the grass.
What’s less romantic is the buckets-worth of planning, bargaining, and asking for help that I had to do to get to this point in the first place. From the university bureaucracy to the family group chat, our everyday institutions are fueled by technology, and stepping away from that system required a substantial amount of forethought.
As soon as I had fully committed to doing this experiment, I was in complete preparation mode. The cell phone is such a broad and multi-purposed tool that I had to find replacements for things I didn’t even consider at the forefront. I had to get a watch, an alarm clock, a timer, and a journal to replace my Notes app. Before I left campus for winter break I went to the library and checked out a record player and some vinyls for when I lost access to Spotify, and a huge stack of books to read. I wrote down all the numbers and addresses of anyone I might possibly need to contact while I was offline. I wrote down bus schedules, printed out sheet music, scheduled meetings weeks ahead of time, and wrote out an extensive schedule of everywhere I had to be and everything I had to do for all fourteen days of my experiment. It was the first of many hand cramps I would get.
I also started reading as many accounts as I could of people who have done similar projects. As a card-holding member of Gen Z, I did most of this research online. I scoured blogs, Facebook posts, op eds, and literary journals for anything relating to the topic of technology independence. From a Reddit post by a college kid in 2006 who went a month without playing video games to a blog about a family who described why they didn’t let their children watch TV, I found a wide spectrum of commitment and results.
As I read, I noticed a pattern. The kinds of people who tend to give their version of the experiment a go are usually Boomers or Gen X, usually parents trying to live a better lifestyle for their kids, and usually grew up in a world before the widespread growth and integration of the internet into our everyday lives. I, a 21-year-old, college student, digital native, do not fall under this description, so I was operating in slightly uncharted territory.
One of my favorite accounts that I read was Susan Maushart’s book The Winter of Our Disconnect. When Maushart, a journalist and author living in Australia with her three teenagers, noticed that her brand-new iPhone and her kids’ quick adoption of social media was taking a toll on their relationships, she decided to pull the plug altogether. For six months, she designated their house as a technology-free zone. She and her kids could use their devices at school or work, but the second they walked through the front door, they were locked away.
I admired Maushart’s resolve—I can’t imagine ever having the courage to deny a trio of teenagers their devices. But at the same time, I am aware of all the technological changes that have taken place in between their experiment and mine. Maushart’s children were born between 1990 and 1994, which to someone from 2002, seems like a lifetime of social media trends and internet culture away. In 2009, the year of Maushart’s experiment, only 10% of Americans had iPhones and just under 20% had a smartphone of any kind. Today, those numbers have catapulted to 49% with iPhones and 92% with a smartphone. Also in 2009, Facebook had 360 million active monthly users, while today that number is over 3 billion. In other words, almost 40% of the world’s population uses Facebook at least once a month. That doesn’t even account for YouTube, What’s App, Instagram, or TikTok, all of which have more than a billion monthly users. These new technologies have grown at a rate unprecedented in the entire course of human history; the digital world of 2024 a far cry from the 4-inch screens of the early aughts.
Even in the past five years, media technology has progressed so rapidly that doing this experiment when I was in high school would have been a different experience altogether. These changes have a lot to do with one development in particular: artificial intelligence.
The first time I heard the term AI was in a STEM class I took in the 6th grade. We were using an app that let us create links to articles, images, or other informational tools when the camera was pointed at a specific object. (Think, pointing the app’s camera at a pencil would take you to an article about the reasons why Ticonderogas are six-sided instead of round). At the time, it was a fun excuse to use iPads in class, but now, AI and the algorithms it creates have not only been integrated into our everyday lives, they are intertwined with our futures as well..
Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, and even LinkedIn all use algorithms to produce highly curated feeds that will produce the most engagement from each individual user. Big tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft use algorithms to tailor their advertisements, as do most streaming services on the market. As a result of this rise in algorithmically created content, we are losing our ability to make choices about what we see online.
When a person sits down to watch a movie, they rarely click on the first thing that pops up on their Netflix page. It is not uncommon to spend 5, 10, or even 20 minutes looking for the perfect show to watch, even with the help of recommendation algorithms. On many social media platforms, we do not get the luxury of this choice. When scrolling through TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube shorts, we do not get to decide what to watch. Everything we see is carefully chosen to meet our interests and forcibly displayed on our screens. Our only methods of defense are to hit the dislike button and hope the algorithm adjusts, or to keep on scrolling.
We have reached a point in our media consumption when we no longer decide what to watch, we decide if we will watch. Our entertainment has become a yes or no question. Machines think in binaries, and now so do we.
I was aware of these trends going into my experiment. I and every other college student of my generation know the joy of sitting down to eat an inexpensive and probably poorly prepared meal while mindlessly watching YouTube. Out comes the frozen pizza, in go the earbuds. When I finally went offline, however, I would have nothing but choice. I couldn’t ask an algorithm which books I should read or which records I should listen to because I had purposefully cut myself off from that technology. Everything I consumed would be premeditated and require actual work (i.e., walking to the library), meaning that I would experience less ‘waste’ and more intent.
The days of fall semester ticked away, and I started telling people about my experiment to delightfully mixed reactions. The most common response I got from people my age was something along the lines of: “good for you, but I could never do something like that.” More than a few people looked at me like I was crazy. My favorite reaction came from my Millennial supervisor at work. On my last day before winter break, she told me to “enjoy your January. Your sad, sad January.”
I felt myself getting excited for my experiment to begin in the same way that I would look forward to a long weekend or some time off work. I expected my time offline to feel like a brain break more than anything, as I experienced for the first time in my life a lack of constant stimulation from the digital world. I was still a little unsure of how I would react, but I felt as prepared as I could get considering my upbringing in the internet age.
As my digital alarm clock approached midnight on the day before my experiment, I started to get a minor case of cold feet. Maybe it’s the fact that I decided to spend my last couple hours online watching Scarface before it left Netflix, but something about powering off my cell phone and laptop for the last time in two weeks felt very final. Like Tony Montana in his final moments, I was faced with an unanticipated urge to blast everything to shreds and never look back. Fortunately, I chose a tamer course of action and powered off my devices with a few minutes to spare.
I had officially gone dark. I sat in my desk chair for a few minutes and wondered what on earth I had gotten myself into. The next two weeks would either be torture or one of the best decisions I had made in my life. I would soon find out.
The Experiment
I woke up on the first morning of my experiment and stifled the reflex to reach for my cell phone. Not even 30 seconds in the waking world, and I was already fighting my old media habits.
Since there was nothing to scroll through, I got right out of bed and walked to the Walgreens to pick up my obligatory copy of the Des Moines Register. It was strange to be out and untethered in a world full of cell phones. My pockets felt empty and even the short walk made me miss Spotify. I bought a paper and walked back home, yawning as I made myself breakfast. True, it was only day one, but some things never change—I was still tired in the mornings.
Something I heard a lot from people going into this experiment was that it would do wonders for my sleep schedule. The National Institute of Health has published multiple studies that link cell phone usage before bed to poorer sleep quality as well as increased time needed to fall asleep. And I was no stranger to using my phone in bed. Heck, my charging situation meant that my cell phone spent the same amount of time in my bed as I did.
Most nights during the school year I work until midnight at the library, and when I get back to my apartment I spend at least a half hour on my phone before finally trying to go to sleep. As soon as I woke up, I would be back on the phone. This routine didn’t make for a very glamourous sleep schedule, but it did give me hope that the absence of blue light in my life would cause me to wake up feeling better rested.
It didn’t exactly pan out that way for me, and I should have expected as much. Ever since I had problems falling asleep as a kid, I discovered that reading before I went to bed actually made it harder to fall asleep. I would end up lying awake in bed, thinking about whatever story I was just reading. And because the main thing I would be doing during my two weeks offline was reading, it seemed unlikely that I would break this pattern by taking my cell phone out of the equation. As much as it has been proven that using a cell phone before bed is bad for sleep, for me at least, my ability to fall asleep seems to rely more on how tired I am rather than how much screen time I’m getting.
What I did see an improvement in, however, was my morning routine. I found that being forced to physically leave my apartment each morning to buy the newspaper was a much nicer alternative to my old habit: half waking up to the soothing sounds of my iPhone alarm, attempting to keep both of my eyes open as I completed the Washington Post crossword and read the morning news (or at least the morning headlines), and inevitably staying in bed on my phone too long and rushing to get to work/class on time. With no phone to tempt me, it was easier to get up. Plus, it turns out that doing the Register’s crossword over breakfast is a much more pleasant experience than puzzling out answers in a state of wakefulness where I can barely tell the difference between ‘across’ and ‘down.’
The hardest thing in those first days was the lack of routine. At that point, campus had not reopened for January classes and none of my roommates were back, so I had nothing to do but focus on my experiment. I tried out different patterns, going for runs at different times of the day and taking turns reading and writing. I practiced my guitar, listened to music, and one day I put together a puzzle on my bedroom floor. I did everything I could to distract myself from missing my devices, and for the most part, it was working.
After I got used to filling my down time with books instead of screens, I was finding myself missing my iPhone a whole lot less. I quickly fell in love with Thoreau’s Walden, seeing a lot of my own experiences outside the digital world reflected in Thoreau’s bean field and the ice on Walden Pond. Alas, my Walden Pond was Des Moines in January—and a particularly brown and dismal January at that—but I imagined summers in Massachusetts all the same.
My experiment in going offline went nowhere near as far as Thoreau’s experiment in simple living. He spent two years in the woods, growing his own food, getting his own firewood, and he built the cabin he lived in on his own, with only an axe that he borrowed. Thoreau relished simple living, on multiple occasions using Walden as a platform to bash unnecessary consumption and frivolous lifestyles (“simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”) If simple living in the context of a TikTok-obsessed world means living under less influence from technology, then I was all for it. It might take a little longer to convince me to grab an axe and take to the forest.
I both loved and resented my new-found simple lifestyle. The English major in me was living in a Waldenesque state of bliss, meanwhile my politics major side was going through New York Times withdrawals.
One of the first things that I noticed upon relinquishing my devices was a generational divide in the ways that other people treated their phones while they were with me. When I was with people my age, they would use their phones the same as they always did. They would text, scroll through Instagram, even show me photos or articles on their phones to let me know what I was ‘missing out’ on, making no effort to quell their usage in front of me. (Not that they should have felt obligated to, I’m the one who was doing the experiment). But when I was meeting with people from older generations, they always made a point to say something whenever they pulled out their phones, or else they told me they were making a conscious effort to avoid their devices while they were around me.
It seems that for my generation, our cell phones have become an extension of ourselves. It feels strange to not use them or refer to them in the course of normal conversation. It feels even weirder to not fill empty moments with some type of media.
Going in, I was unsure how my experiment would impact the ways I spent time with other people. Normally when I hang out with my friends, we turn to some form of media, whether it be a movie night or playing video games. Even when we study together the TV is always on in the background, so I was surprised by how seamlessly we swapped Mario Kart for Scrabble and Facetime for face-to-face conversations. Yes, I was asked a lot of questions about whether I was going crazy without my technology and if I needed anyone to rescue me, but except for a missing cell phone, it was hard to spot the difference.
As the days passed, I started to notice my phone’s absence in strange ways. It felt unnatural to show up to meetings or even walk to the store with nothing in my hands, so I started keeping a pen in my coat pocket where my phone normally went so it wouldn’t feel so empty. My journal morphed into a pseudo-cell phone, taking up the physical spaces that my phone once occupied. Although the journal was too big to fit in my pocket (hence the pen) I found myself carrying it around even when I had no intention of writing in it. For two weeks it was rarely further than an arm’s length away. And because I am a product of my generation, I started calling it my “Notes app.”
Strange tactile attachment to a phone-like object aside, for the most part, I missed having my phone a lot less than I thought I would. I thought about it, obviously, because that was the point of my experiment, but other than the occasional urge to Google some obscure and probably irrelevant question, I was fine without it. I was genuinely shocked by how fine I was.
Before I started my experiment, I worried that not having access to my phone and missing out on weeks’ worth of messages, calls, and emails would make me anxious and distract me from the reasons why I decided to give up my cell phone. Instead, I felt the opposite happening. When I no longer had the unwritten obligation to be on call responding to messages at all waking hours, I felt lighter, and my winter break felt more like a break. In the end, it wasn’t the fact that I couldn’t respond that made me anxious, it was the fact that I was expected to respond in the first place. In real, tangible ways, my phone had been weighing me down.
Without Netflix or YouTube, I started to turn to new and not necessarily exciting things for entertainment. Having spent my entire adult life without being subject to boredom, I was unsure how I would react when I experienced it. Contrary to every lifestyle habit I exhibited when I still had access to my devices, it turned out that I actually enjoyed not doing anything. When I was no longer trying to cram my head full of podcasts, Spotify, or news headlines, I found that giving myself space to think was not as scary as I made it out to be.
Sometimes when I wanted a break from reading I would literally sit in my chair doing nothing—something I only turned to as a last-ditch procrastination effort in the before times. I would sit and think, stopping on occasion to write something down. But mostly I would let my mind wander down whatever path it happened to take.
Even better than sitting and thinking, I found, was walking and thinking. Despite the cold, I found myself making literally any excuse to go outside. I took countless trips to the convenience store, the library, and the music building, and dragged friends along with me when I could. I chose my routes to ensure that I could walk past all the CNN vehicles and equipment as they worked to build the set for the presidential debate my university was hosting the next week. I would return home shaking from the cold and in dire need of a hot shower, but the exercise combined with my internal dialogue felt better than Instagram ever did.
One afternoon a few days in, I walked to the Drake Park and read Walden outside for half an hour (an English major’s rite of passage). Sitting on a bench next to some hibernating apple trees, I was as close to Thoreau’s woods as I could get in Des Moines proper. I would have stayed longer if I could—the chirping of the birds and the wind shaking the tree branches aided my immersion, especially as I read the chapter entitled “Sounds”—but it was cold and windy and I could no longer feel my fingers to turn the pages.
As I used my time to do less, I thought back to the ways I filled my hours before I started the experiment. News apps had to some extent stood in as a replacement for my rocky relationship with social media. I used them to fill up all the extra moments of free time I found throughout the day. Have a few minutes before class? New York Times. Need to kill some time while the oven preheats? BBC. Can’t possibly stand the thought of not being on my phone while I’m walking back to my apartment? Washington Post. It got to the point where it felt unnatural to not be consuming some form of media at all waking moments.
When all of a sudden I was thrown into the world of paper and ink, I had to readapt to reading the Des Moines Register once a day instead of checking my phone for updates whenever I had a second. I read stories that I never would have come across before. I learned about the growth of Iowa-based grocery chain Hy-Vee. I got the specific details of Nikki Haley’s campaign events in the Des Moines suburbs. I looked forward every day to a New Year’s series about Iowans who were the Register’s “People to Watch” in 2024. After a few days, instead of feeling like I was missing out, I felt like I was learning more about my community. The Register still publishes national news stories, after all, they are just outnumbered by local coverage.
It also made me have a mini-crisis about why I was so interested in keeping up with the news in the first place. Was my infatuation with reading the news a result of my craving information and learning? Or did it have more to do with the ways that modern journalism and news apps have begun to mimic the fear-response tactics that make modern technology so all-consuming? Do I love it, or had I become addicted to the dopamine hits I got while reading a headline or skimming an article, filled up by a perceived sense of civic duty?
Then, on the eighth day of my experiment, there was a school shooting in Perry, Iowa. Normally if a local tragedy like this happened, I would get dozens of notifications from news apps, emails, and texts from people back home. I would learn about the shooting as it was happening, as it went from an active shooter situation to a controlled crime scene, as casualties were being confirmed. I would get a fresh wave of reporting along with the rest of the world after each press conference. The information I would get at first would be piecemeal and not very substantive, a clear preference given to efficiency over depth.
Because I was in my media blackout when the shooting happened, I went about my morning not knowing anything because it happened too late to be published in that morning’s Register. I learned about it not from any of these sources, but because someone told me. As the day went on, I got conflicting information from different people about what had happened. It was a full 24 hours after the shooting before I was able to find out what really happened.
Before Perry, I had been thinking a lot about the way I consumed news media, and I had pretty much reached a conclusion. Getting to read a complete and more thought-out version of what is important in the local newspaper every morning was really working for me. It felt healthier, less prone to fear-inducing headlines or trivial stories framed as breaking news. I felt like I was actually learning things from reading the news rather than absorbing more information at regular intervals. But Iowa is small, and Perry is close to home. The shooting happened at a small public school about the same size as the school my younger siblings go to. And I started to feel my mind changing.
I know this is how people used to find out about things like this. They’d hear something from a friend or a neighbor and have to wait until the next day to get the truth. But there’s something about knowing the rumors and not the facts that feels worse than hearing about the news as it’s happening. At least then I could know that I would be informed. It would feel as close to control as I could get in that type of situation.
I know I still need to make changes to the way I get my news. There is no reason I should be getting upwards of 50 notifications every day from news sources. But if this had happened in my hometown, if my siblings were in that school, I know that I would want to know right away.
Eventually the time came for January classes to start. I went back to work, my roommates returned, and the teachings of Thoreau became intermingled with the faint sounds of Love Island coming in from the living room. I was excited for everyone to come back, but I was also especially excited for the music building to reopen. One of the things I had been the most worried about when I decided to do this experiment was music. I am an avid Spotify user, employing its services on walks, while studying, and to fill up as many free moments as I can. Spending two weeks without listening to music was not an option for me, so I had to find another solution. Luckily, my university library offered record players and a collection of vinyls available for checkout.
Despite a resurgence in popularity among members of my generation, I had never used a record player before. The most dated my music technology got was a Hello Kitty CD player my sister and I shared as kids to play the likes of High School Musical and Taylor Swift. After I got an iPod, I was more than happy to switch to a digital world of music, replacing it with Spotify as soon as I got a cell phone. With no YouTube to turn to for instructions, I was glad to see that there was an instruction manual included with the record player kit.
In the thrift store in my hometown they sell old vinyl records for a quarter each, so I stopped by to pick up a few when I was home for break. What the thrift store collection lacked in artists anyone my age has heard of, they made up for in price tag and a unique selection, so I was able to find a few to take with me. My favorite find wasn’t music at all, but was instead an oratory recording done by former Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen (of Dirksen Senate Office Building fame!) including his poem “Gallant Men.” I later found out that this record not only won the Senator a Grammy, but it made it to number 16 on the Billboard 200 list. Vinyl culture in the 60s is absolutely bonkers to me. I can’t even fathom current Illinois Senator Dick Durbin writing and recording a patriotic poem and actually getting listens on Spotify.
My favorite record that I listened to, however, was a Woody Guthrie recording done by the Library of Congress. On three two-sided records, Guthrie talked about his life growing up in the Oklahoma dust bowl and learning to play the guitar, sprinkling in old songs he had heard and written in different times of his life. As a fan of both country music and the Library of Congress, listening to this record was one of my favorite parts of my experiment, and I never would have gotten to hear it if I had stuck to Spotify.
Campus reopening also meant going back to work, which in turn meant that I would have to access a computer for the first time since I started the experiment. (Because I couldn’t take two weeks off of work, a clause in my syllabus allowed me to use my work computer only for specific, work-related purposes and only if using the computer was unavoidable). As I attempted to log on, I experienced the irony to end all ironies—the internet was down. It stopped working specifically on my computer, and not a single person in the building could figure out what was wrong. It remained out of commission for days, and I gladly conceded all computer tasks to my coworker and grabbed a cart to go shelve some books.
As much as I was learning to love my new tech-free lifestyle, I’ll also be honest about some of the drawbacks of my experiment. Not everything was sunshine and returning focus—you can’t get paper cuts from a MacBook.
The biggest frustration I had during my experiment came with having to write everything by hand. I know the point of the whole thing was to slow down and choose my words and actions with intent, without the aid of technology, but in so many ways I feel like my writing was inhibited by lack of keyboard. During Covid I got to be so good at typing that I can nearly type things as fast as they fly into my head. When I was forced to slow down, I lost entire sentences in waiting to write them down, and I spent more time re-reading, trying to remember which direction I was planning to take.
Normally when I write I start with a very broad outline, with ideas for paragraph topics and a plan to get me from start to finish. I often start writing in the middle and end at the beginning, filling in sentences or paragraphs wherever they call to me the most. My favorite part of Microsoft Word is how it keeps everything in order, allowing massive structural revisions with a simple keystroke. Unfortunately, my yellow legal pad did not have the same capabilities.
I will admit that by the end of my experiment it had gotten a little easier to write everything out. In my journal, my entries got a little bit longer every day until I worried that I would fill up the whole thing before I got my computer back. After some practice, I found that being offline made it easier to come up with thoughts, ideas, paragraphs, and snippets of a complete work. But it was so much harder to piece something whole together when I had all my ideas stored out of order in different places. Plus, my hand always hurt.
At times, I also felt a little guilty about the ways that my experiment was forcing other people to go out of their way to help me. Without my sister checking my email for updates on my impending flight and spring internship, my friend letting me use their phone to call the bank and my internship program, and my advisors assisting with the design and preparation for this project, there is no way that I would have been able to follow through with it. From asking for directions to asking people for more face-to-face time, I had to rely on others a lot more than I did when I still had my cell phone. And while I realize that these people were probably more than happy to help, as a very softspoken and independent person, I never got used to that part of being offline.
I made some mistakes before I went dark as well. I tried to think of everything I would need to know before I went offline, but of course, there were a few things that slipped through the cracks. I would like to formally apologize to my friend who was forced to go on a widescale digital investigation in search of my apartment number, which I had conveniently forgotten to give them before I powered off my phone.
I also managed to write down the wrong date that campus reopened after winter break, which led to what was perhaps the first real test of the ramifications of my no technology rule. Before leaving campus after fall semester, I had stored my trombone in my locker in the music building, thinking I would regain access to academic buildings just in time to retrieve it for a basketball game I was scheduled to play at. On the day of the game, I walked to the music building only to discover that it was locked and would remain that way until the next day, when campus actually reopened.
With the clock ticking down until call time, my solution was to wander aimlessly around campus, hoping I would run into a Drake Public Safety officer with a master key. After 20 minutes of such wandering, I spotted a DPS vehicle parked outside the science buildings. It was empty, so I did a loop around the buildings and managed to catch someone just as they were about to leave. I explained my situation, and he agreed to let me into the music building, where I was reunited with my trombone with plenty of time before the game.
And just to think, all this could have been solved with a simple phone call if I had access to my cell phone.
Another time, I was walking to a dinner where Drake politics students were meeting with some Duke students who had flown in to see the Iowa caucuses. Apparently, the location had been changed last minute via email, and I only found out after I heard one of my friends shouting my name from his car window, telling me to go to the restaurant across the street. Even though I had known about this dinner for a week, plans change, and I had to get used to rolling with the punches.
There were still a few times during my experiment when I knew that if I had access to my phone, I would be mindlessly scrolling in the same way I had been for years. When I got tired or bored or basically anything other than entertained, I would feel a small itch somewhere in my brain to reach for the empty space where my phone once was. At the end of my experiment I still heard the occasional phantom buzzing sound from my nonexistent iPhone.
The time passed more quickly than I thought it would. Even though my days felt longer, when I looked back on the time I had already spent offline, it seemed far too short. I wasn’t even done and I already wanted to do the experiment again.
I kept imagining a time, years down the road, when I have paid off my student loan debt and I could take a sabbatical for a summer. I would rent a cabin up North in Minnesota or at least go somewhere that’s a little more scenic than the grid layout of Des Moines’ streets. I would get rid of my cell phone, get a computer that only has access to a writing software, and spend every day reading, writing, going for walks, and letting my mind wander. It would be a long enough stretch of time that I could truly devote myself to this lifestyle, and I would have enough time to work on a project of a much larger scope than the essays that I wrote during my experiment this year.
I also worried that unless I was able to go offline again, I would regress into my old online habits. This is something that Hari and many of the other people who went tech-free warned about in their accounts. They would see extremely positive results at first, but as the weeks and months passed they would gradually find themselves picking up their phones more and more often until they were back to stage one. I knew I had to find ways to hold myself accountable if I wanted to keep up my good habits, and redoing my experiment in a different context is one way to do that.
As the finish line approached, I could feel myself looking forward to getting my technology back. The whole laptop ban was really taking a toll on my writing hand, for one, and I had also racked up a list of things I had to do when I got back online that was nagging me during my final days. Even though I was grateful for everything I was learning from my experiment, the internet beckoned, and the end drew inevitably nearer.
I had one final challenge to complete before a well-deserved reunion with my devices: flying to Washington DC. I was spending my spring semester in DC doing an internship program there, and because doing this program meant I could only do two weeks of my experiment instead of three, I was going out with a bang. On the final day of my experiment I had a 6am flight out of Minneapolis, a layover in Charlotte, and a second flight to my final destination in DC, all of which I would do while operating under the constraints of my experiment. The American Airlines app I had downloaded after a flight I took last year would be no use to me.
On January 10th, I woke up to my digital alarm clock for the last time and was quickly given some less-than-ideal news from my father. In a standard case of dad travel anxiety, he had found my flight number on the paper tickets I had and checked for delays on the website. His concern was unfortunately justified—my early flight was delayed following a series of Midwest snowstorms, meaning I would miss my layover in Charlotte. I decided to go to the airport anyway and hope that I could get something figured out in person. As much as I wanted to, I stopped myself from checking my cell phone to see about later flights out of Charlotte. Peoples’ flights got delayed in the 90s, after all, and they still managed to get where they needed to go.
In the end, everything worked out fine. I went up to talk to the gate agent as soon as I got to the airport, and he got me scheduled for a later flight from Charlotte to DC. He even printed out my boarding passes for me so I wouldn’t have to use a QR code on my phone. Tired as I was from an early and stressful morning, I still love flying and I savored the last few hours of my time offline, reading and watching out the plane window. I made it to DC in one piece, if a few hours later than I expected.
Back to Reality
As my plane touched down at the Reagan International Airport, I reached into my pocket and felt for the first time in two weeks the familiar metal surface of my iPhone’s touchscreen. I felt something akin to the first-day jitters I got on the night before my experiment began, only this time I was having second thoughts about having to deal with two weeks’ worth of everything I had been ignoring in the digital world. Part of me wanted to stay offline forever.
A combination of curiosity and a long taxi to the airport made me cave, and I powered it on, holding my breath. I was met with 57 text messages, 133 emails to my personal Gmail account, and 149 to my school Outlook, 122 of which were spam. Fortunately, news notifications don’t come through when my phone is powered off, otherwise it probably would have crashed under the weight of everything that had happened in the past fourteen days.
The world kept turning while I was offline, and it would keep on going now that I had my phone back. I texted my family for the first time in two weeks to let them know I had landed, and went on Google Maps to figure out how to get to my new apartment.
I will say that the four hours of emailing, online banking, texting, and apologizing for delayed responses I had to do as soon as I made it to my apartment in DC was not fun. But four hours in two weeks is a much better ratio than what I was living before.
That evening I also waded into the virtual waters with my first non-business media endeavor: watching the Iowa Presidential Debate that my university was hosting. As exhausted as I was from a long day of traveling, getting to see the set that I had watched CNN build all week on TV and recognizing people I knew from school in the audience was the perfect reintroduction to a whole new year of digital media.
There were some pop culture moments I was sad to miss while I was offline. Green Day played at the Times Square New Years Eve celebration. The Golden Globes happened. I couldn’t see how the Drake basketball teams were doing when they were away. But even though I missed these events while they were happening, I still got to watch them, albeit a couple weeks late. A Google search and some quick visits to YouTube and ESPN got me caught up in less time than I would have spent if I had watched them live. And as disappointed as I was to lose my Wordle streak, I completely forgot it existed until my third day of being back online, so it must not have been that important to me.
As much as I wish the world would be able to accommodate it, an indefinite version of the experiment would not be possible for me today. But there are still a lot of ways that I can alter my media habits to have an overall happier and healthier online presence. Over the course of these two weeks I learned that there are a lot of things I can live without, and a lot more that I can live with less of. Here is a working list of real changes I will be making that I think will help me return to normal in a more self-preserving manner:
1) Screen-free Saturdays. This is the biggest change I will make. I obviously can’t go full-time with the experiment, but there is no reason why I can’t do a condensed and limited version for one day every week. It will, however, look a little different than the version I have been living for the past two weeks. For one, I will only ban my cell phone usage on Saturdays, not my laptop. There is no way I’m going back to writing by hand, and homework waits for no man, so the laptop has to stay. I will also be a bit more flexible with my screen usage. I can’t ensure that nothing important will ever happen virtually on a Saturday for the rest of my life, but I will try to work around what I can. Overall: no texts, no emails, no calls, no social media, no Googling, and no algorithms. Don’t worry, I’ll get back to you bright and early on Sunday morning.
2) YouTube. I will log out and stay logged out of YouTube with my Gmail account. Having a personal account attached to YouTube means that the algorithm has been able to laser in on the exact videos that will keep me watching, which in turn makes me more likely to dump more time into the website. I am not about to quit YouTube altogether (I watch my two favorite TV shows, SNL and Taskmaster on YouTube) but logging in as a guest will allow me to watch what I need to without getting sucked in.
3) News Apps. I am slightly embarrassed to admit that I had thirteen news apps downloaded on my phone before I started my experiment. I can cut down significantly on that number without becoming less informed. During my time offline, getting my news from the local paper, I have grown to appreciate how much more relevant reporting is when it is tied to a geographic location that is important to me. So, here’s what I’m keeping: Washington Post, Minneapolis StarTribune, Des Moines Register, BBC, New York Times, Torino Today. That should cover all the bases.
4) Social Media. Before I started this experiment I didn’t use social media very much, but I still had accounts on some platforms. For Instagram, I have to use it for my summer job, but I will make sure it is deleted from my phone during the other parts of the year. I will also delete the personal account I had in high school that I haven’t used regularly in a few years. In the same vein, I have to use Facebook for college, but I am deleting the app from my phone and will only check the website on a need-to-know basis. I will delete my account with relish as soon as I graduate. I have a personal LinkedIn account, but I plan to keep it at least through grad school. I feel like LinkedIn is the lesser of the social media evils, and I use it so infrequently that it hardly makes an impact in my technology use. I will also refrain from downloading the app and use only the web version. At the end of my purge I will have only three apps downloaded full time: What’s App (which I need to talk to my exchange sister), Slack (which I need for student organizations), and GroupMe (which I need for student organizations and connecting with people on campus).
5) Notifications. After I was still hearing phantom buzzing noises a week into my experiment, I realized that it would probably be necessary to spend some time in my settings doing a notification deep clean. Cutting down on news apps will help a lot, and I will also turn off my Gmail notifications. Whenever I am doing something that is not technology related, I will turn on “Do Not Disturb” mode to ensure that my time in the real world is not interrupted by incessant chirping.
6) Laptop vs. Cell Phone. As a way to help me reorganize my priorities, I am going to start treating my laptop and cell phone as tools for different purposes. As they are both part of the Apple mediaverse, I have previously considered them to be different versions to access the same digital space. Now, I will start delegating tasks to each device. Laptop is for work, school, and writing, phone is for communication and entertainment.
7) Phone Relocation. I have by now come to my senses and realized that beside my pillow is perhaps the worst place to charge my phone every night. I’ll start plugging it in across the room, even if it means having to get out of bed to turn off my alarm every morning.
This list is not exhaustive, and it also probably wouldn’t work for everyone. I am still figuring out what works and what doesn’t as I reacclimate to the digital world with my new perspectives. There are also a few important solutions that are missing from this list, one of the most obvious being keeping all devices out of the bedroom. Although a no-screen zone in sleeping spaces had been proven to help with sleep and cut down on purposeless media consumption, a near future of budget studio apartments means that this fix is not very realistic for me. So do what works for you. If you feel like you might die if you don’t have access to your algorithmically-curated slate of tailored YouTube videos, then stay logged into your account. Although, judging from personal experience, you probably won’t die.
I don’t have the authority or the desire to tell everyone that they need to go out and try this experiment for themselves. I am well aware of the limitations of our tech-centric world. So many people need to use technology for their livelihoods or to connect with others that giving it up is simply not an option. Even I was pretty constrained in my ability to complete this experiment; there is no way I could have done it during a regular semester because so much of college today is done online.
But, I can genuinely say that after spending two weeks cut off from my devices, I feel like I have more control over my attention and focus. After reading about the ways that our technology is harming us at the same time it’s helping us, I have a better sense of what choices I am making myself, and what I am being prompted into by subtle changes in my media algorithms. I am living, breathing proof that even people who have never known a time before the internet or the cell phone can learn how to live without them.
I can’t claim to have had a perfect transition back to the digital world, and I can’t say how long the changes I make will last. What I can say, though, is that taking a break from my screens was one of the best things I have done for my education, my focus, and my well-being.
And just think—that was only my first time offline.