Cold Turkey?

So I spent (almost) a two week holiday completely OFFline! I admit I suffered the usual withdrawal symptoms though and was tempted on perhaps three or four occasions to go online - the opportunities have been there. You see, I didn’t have internet access in the house I stayed in, but there were several places such as libraries, museums, etc around the region so I could have. I did the same thing last year when we went on holiday to Spain for two weeks – a holiday is a holiday, and I try to avoid anything that resembles work! I admit I do keep my mobile phone with me, but only to take pictures and keep in touch with family.

I heroically resisted the siren's call of the Internet and went cold turkey until the penultimate day of my holiday when I finally succumbed during a visit to Newcastle. I found a computer in a library at the University, logged on and my fears were justified. 268 e-mails were stacked up staring at me, and 197 of them were spam. Blimey. Shouldn’t have bothered. So I had to respond directly to 71 messages when I got home...

Appropriately, I’m reading Distraction by Mark Curtis at the moment. It’s an interesting book, dealing with the pressure we are under today to manage the growing tide of information that continually washes up on our personal shores. Perhaps his most important question in the book is ‘Do we run the risk of believing that data is everything and confusing information with knowledge?’ Curtis believes we have reached the ‘tipping point’ where humankind (at least in the industrialised nations) has no way back in an ‘always connected’ culture. There's an interview with him at this link if you want to know more. The book is not all doom and gloom though, and engages the reader with a number of scenarios in which information and communication technologies can enhance life and create new opportunities for creativity and lively community engagement. He warns though, that the boundaries between public and private spaces are being eroded by digital technologies and we are all being sucked into this vortex. Well, I guess it will be time for me to go cold turkey again in a short while … probably just around Christmas.