Bah Humbug I say to the nay-sayers amongst you who refused to believe I could disconnect from the digital world for a month. I am a stubborn geek with resolve and stamina. Admittedly having spent quite a lot of that time either at sea, or in the sea, both activities that aren't very connection friendly, it really wasn't that tricky.
What did I miss?
There were a few occasions I'd normally have turned to Facebook to talk about stuff, mostly because sharing our lives has become terribly habitual, (I'll save my rant about the TGV / Eurostar for another day), there were a few occasions when curiosity would have lead me to a search engine, and had I been inclined and prepared to pay for overseas data roaming, I could probably have added some new venues to FourSquare, and yes I probably should have read my race instructions before getting on the boat last weekend again but I knew I could rely on my crewmates to have done the honours, knowing that I was away, so none of these things were a big enough deal to make me feel I've missed much. Sure, I will no doubt get around to uploading some pictures to Facebook and Flickr over the next little while, because it is nice to share what you've been up to with friends and family, but overall it's been rather refreshing to be living life in real time rather than reading about real time for a few weeks!
Who knows what's changed in the digital world, I've yet to catch up on a pile of alerts, round-ups and reading, let alone the email boxes stuffed to overflowing, but I'm sure if it was important I'll find out over the next few days.
I think it's a genuinely useful exercise for the geek fraternity to disconnect for a while, it gives you a healthy injection of perspective on how and where digital activity fits into the lives of other people in other places. Big cities and working in the industry distort your view. Not that that stopped me smiling and making internal mental note when a 70 something friend of mine at the beach, someone whom I've known for over 20 years, whipped out his mobile to take some photos of me. He's not on Facebook (I asked) but he does download pics to his computer and share them via email.
Nothing changes. Digital's not just for the young or the techy.
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