{ unplug } Is it time for your Digital Diet?

{ by } Daniel Sieberg

{ source } The Telegraph, 2012.01.05

{ topics } unplugging, disconnecting, reconnecting,
four-step 'digital diet’, fast, digital life, digital intake

The diet is about seeing your technology in a whole new light. Loving it again, not wanting to put it in a blender. Going on a digital diet is also about reconnecting with people. It’s not a “digital fast”, it’s about indulging in a healthy manner. No one is forcing you to become so overloaded and overwhelmed.

Daniel Sieberg argues that many of us allow gadgets to dominate our lives - here's how to make them work for you.

A friend told me recently that her five-year-old son was suffering night terrors. One night, she went into his room to comfort him, patting his head and soothing with gentle words. In his sleep, her son said: “Mummy, mummy, put your BlackBerry down. Put your BlackBerry down.”

If that’s not a wake-up call for all of us then I don’t know what is. Let’s hit the virtual pause button for a minute and consider what our digital lives have become.

Many of us now spend our days with our head in the high-tech “clouds.” We text and drive like it’s a matter of life and death, which, I’m sorry to report, it is. And then there’s that nagging voice telling us that despite our unprecedented connectedness, we sometimes feel more overwhelmed and, ironically, disconnected, than ever before.

While it’s easy to blame technology for taking us away from the people and things we love, in truth we’re often our own worst enemy.

{ unplug } 'I took my kids offline'

{ by } Susan Maushart
{ source } The Guardian, 2011.01.01 

{ topics } unplugging, family, teenagers, boredom,
social outcasts, creativity, comfort zone, multitasking

Over a period of months, Maushart, a single mother, had a "dawning awareness" that something was not right. But when she watched Sussy receive video clips of her friends streamed live over the internet, her worries became "profound panic"."My concern," she says, "was that we had ceased to function as a family.

When Susan Maushart imposed a six-month ban on technology in her home, she expected the children to rebel. But they embraced the experiment – and even claim to have enjoyed it.

'It's weird when you have to text your kids to come to the dinner table," says Susan Maushart. At the end of 2008, she was anxious about the amount of time her three teenagers spent transfixed by technology.

All she usually saw of her 15-year-old son, Bill, was the back of his head as he played on his games console. Her elder daughter, Anni, 18, binged on social-networking sites and 14-year-old Sussy seemed physically attached to her laptop, often staying logged on to the internet through the night. Over a period of months, Maushart, a single mother, had a "dawning awareness" that something was not right. But when she watched Sussy receive video clips of her friends streamed live over the internet, her worries became "profound panic".

"My concern," she says, "was that we had ceased to function as a family. We were just a collection of individuals who were very connected outwards – to friends, business, school and sources of entertainment and information. But we simply weren't connecting with one another in real space and time in any sort of authentic way."

Susan Maushart with Bill, Sussy and Anni. Photograph: Richard Hatherly/Newspix

{ unplug } The Joy of Quiet

{ by } Pico Iyer
{ source } The New York Times, 2011.12.29
{ topics } unplugging, addiction, life balance

In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug.

About a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began — I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign — was stillness.

A few months later, I read an interview with the perennially cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? “I never read any magazines or watch TV,” he said, perhaps a little hyperbolically. “Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.”

Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts,” which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms.

Has it really come to this?

Zen Garden, Komyozenji Temple (Dazaifu near Fukuoka, Japan)