Some reflections on being online and offline

I do worry sometimes whether I spend far too much time online.

I have always been a bit of an information and news junkie.Before the internet came along I would readily devour the newspapers and listen to the news mostly via the radio.

The advent first of the internet and now the technology to keep up instantaneously with information has meant that it is extremely easy to keep oneself wired 24/7 so to speak.

Since I began my journalism degree three years ago,began blogging and more recently got addicted to twitter,it has been increasingly more difficult to draw myself away from being constantly plugged in.

Last week I was away in Cyprus for the week.I took a decision not to take my blackberry,to rarely switch my mobile phone on and to try not to pick up the news.

The first two I kept to,apart from three twitter updates,the latter was I am afraid broken with sojourns to Sky news and buying the Guardian on a couple of occasions.

But I kept to the online policy and after withdrawal pangs in the first 24 hours,I didn't miss it.

On my return it didn't last too long but then I came across this piece from Rob Horning who spent a week on a road trip in Idaho including Yellowstone National Park

I had expected it to be restorative to be out in nature for a while, unplugged, but instead it seemed to throw me into a kind of existential confusion. I had expected that the time away would allow to forget about online sharing and all that, but instead it brought out how much it had been lurking int he background, shaping my social self and the ways I’ve come to stabilize it and even recognize its existence

That all sounded a little bit familiar and he goes on

as I was out hiking, I would think of this dormant blog and wonder how I’ll ever manage to catch up, a nagging thought that filled me with vague, unshakable uneasiness. Being adrift in the natural world had come to feel very unnatural; the serenity seemed like a taunt. This seems to me the inverse of the interconnected feeling I take for granted in the time I spend online, and I understood for the first time why people would do something as inane as Twitter their hikes from their iPhones or something. I tried to feed this anxiety by taking lots of pictures with the idea of sharing them later, but this only aggravated the feeling. I couldn’t possibly take enough pictures. Eventually I had to try the opposite tack and take no pictures at all.

So maybe some time to reflect on this online,sharing,social media society that we inhabit.