Digital Cleanse Anyone?

This is a guest post by my very neat niece Leah, who mentioned on Facebook that she was undertaking a digital cleanse and agreed to write about it for SimplyForties. Could you do it? Would you want to?

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On December 31, 2009, I was checking Twitter and reading the latest updates from everyone I follow. One of my favorite celebrity Twitterers (Tweeters? Twits?) is John Mayer, also known as @johncmayer. He’s funny and kind of weird, and he likes his fans. He posted a link to his blog describing an idea he came up with called the Digital Cleanse. You can click the link to read the whole post, but this paragraph sums it up pretty well:

“Mention to anyone with computer savvy that your laptop has somehow gotten slower over recent months and they’ll ask you the same thing: “have you defragmented your hard drive?” Defragmenting works by taking small slivers of information stored in various locations and consolidating them so that they’re in the same place on the drive and thus easier to access in larger chunks. Hard drive fragmentation is a great metaphor for - if not a literal manifestation of - what’s happened to our brains over years and years of processing small bursts of information. 2009 took fragmentation to a whole new level given the rise of Twitter and the social acceptance of texting people as a substitute to making phone calls.”

The basic idea: take a week off of technology and give your brain a chance to defragment. It was supposed to start at 9:00a, January 1, 2010, and end at 9:00a, January 8, 2010. The guidelines: no social networks, no texting, and no checking email on your phone. I thought about it for a few minutes and decided I could manage that. I posted a note on Facebook letting people know that I’d be out of touch for a while and boy did that get a response! The responses were funny (“Sounds great, why don't you post a daily blog entry to tell us how you're doing?”), distressed (“nooooo!!! don't do it!! I'll MISS you!”), rude (“Sounds about as valid as colon cleansing does, which isn’t very valid at all”), and skeptical (“Seeing is believing, but good luck!"). Unfazed, I continued with my plan. I’m not sure what I really expected to happen. Mostly I thought it would be an interesting challenge, and it would be nice to not feel tied to my cell phone, constantly checking email/facebook/twitter/etc.

I woke up January 1 and my first thought was to grab my phone and check Twitter. That’s a sign of a problem, I think. I turned it on, but alas, it was 9:20 am and I was out of luck. The rest of the weekend was easy enough. I was on vacation and I tend to be slightly less plugged in when on vacation. The real challenge started Monday. Every time I hit a lull at work, my fingers instinctively began to type ctrl+t, f-a-enter, which is the keystroke combo that opens a new tab and auto-completes facebook.com in my address bar. I was surprised how ingrained that was in muscle memory. But I stood strong! I managed to stop myself every time.

The other thing that surprised me was how often I wanted to tweet. It seems I think in 140-character phrases now – not a good thing, in my opinion. A friend asked me how I was doing and I said I felt lost – “how do I know who I am if I’m not telling the internet who I am?” I was being facetious, but I think there is a grain of truth in that nonetheless. The urges to tweet were always about the most mundane things: the line I was standing in, my breakfast, the sweater I was wearing. Nothing very interesting, but I really wanted to tell the world and hear their responses! I don’t really think that’s a good thing, either. By the end of the week, I was fine without twitter, but I really missed facebook. I keep up with my family and friends through facebook more than any other medium, and I had started to feel very disconnected from them all. They missed me too.

Now that I’m back, everything is pretty much back to normal. I think I’ve been tweeting a little less, and I’ve spent less time on Farmville, which was turning into a huge time-suck for me before. I’m not quite as glued to my phone as I was before the cleanse, although just last night Chris got after me for checking twitter while he was talking to me. (I know that’s really bad. Definitely something I need to stop doing.)

My week of digital silence didn’t drastically change my life, but it did change a few small habits for the better. And really, that’s all I could expect from a week. I might even do it again in a few months.

Leah lives in Texas with her cat Oscar. She spends her time making pretty things with paper, planning her upcoming wedding, and obsessively checking Twitter (though not as obsessively as she used to). She also keeps a blog, which you can read here.