The National Day of Unplugging began at sundown yesterday. The NDU website is filled with photographs of people who have filled in the blank to explain why they are unplugging: to bike, to knit, to read, to talk. But here, courtesy of me, is the National Day of Unplugging for procrastinators:
I cast no aspersions on the NDU. But I think that Evgeny Morozov offers a useful general caution:
The embrace of the mindfulness agenda by the technology crowd is especially peculiar. . . . Never before has connectivity offered us so many ways to disconnect.That’s not the point of the NDU. But skipping candy one day a week is useful only if it leads to changes on the other six days.
In essence, we are being urged to unplug — for an hour, a day, a week — so that we can resume our usual activities with even more vigor upon returning to the land of distraction.
To my mind, the great irony of the NDU is that it asks participants to post photographs to the NDU website: Hey, friends and family, look at me! Which means that your friends and family have to go online. Which helps drive traffic to the website, right?
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Is unplugging a virtue? Or is living a balanced life? And knowing what that is?
I was reading a blog entry by an introvert about her childhood in which she referred to her online escapes and again realized I was a child a few generations ago. I forget.
That’s the question, isn’t it? The two aren not synonymous.
From a weight loss perspective, it may not be as useful to skip candy one day a week as it is to moderate consumption. And learn what moderation is. Walking away from the computer now.
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