Unplugged

Yesterday morning I caught a clip of the Today Show where they were interviewing Susan Mushart, a woman who turned off all technology for she and her teenagers for three months. I thought the idea was pretty fascinating and wondered how I would handle such an unplugging. When I got to work a little bit later I realized that I had left my phone home. Tim couldn't fully rescue because he had an appointment. So I left work, got in my car, drove 25 minutes to meet him and return to work, all to get my phone. Six months? I barely made it 60 minutes. Funny thing was, I wasn't sure which I would miss more, the phone, or the spider solitaire.

I thought I would include a little more about the book:
"Maushart wrote a book about the experience, "The Winter of our Disconnect," in which she explains:

There were lots of reasons why we pulled the plug on our electronic media . . . or, I should say, why I did, because heaven knows my children would have sooner volunteered to go without food, water, or hair products. At ages fourteen, fifteen, and eighteen, my daughters and my son don’t use media. They inhabit media. And they do so exactly as fish inhabit a pond. Gracefully. Unblinkingly. And utterly without consciousness or curiosity as to how they got there.

Her youngest daughter, age 14, was so unhappy about being thrown out of the tech fishbowl that she moved in with her father (Maushart's ex-husband) for six weeks rather than unplug. She eventually moved back in with her mom. That wasn't the only challenge, Maushart writes:

The Winter of Our Disconnect started out as a kind of purge. It ended up as so much more. Long story short: our digital detox messed with our heads, our hearts, and our homework. It changed the way we ate and the way we slept, the way we “friended,” fought, planned, and played. It altered the very taste and texture of our family life. Hell, it even altered the mouthfeel. In the end, our family’s self-imposed exile from the Information Age changed our lives indelibly—and infinitely for the better."