Technology has become omnipresent in the lives of modern Americans. I’ve never viewed it as problematic, inconvenient, or anything other than a reality of the time we live in. In fact, by all accounts, I would consider the all-encompassing presence of technology to be one of the major contributors to making my life much more manageable. Keeping track of important notes, remembering events, storage of contacts, instantaneous information, effortless communication, travel routes, tracking exercise, and more entertainment than I could hope for. It’s all right in front of me at any given point in my day because of the advancement of technology. I’ve become so accustomed to it that I can hardly imagine going through a normal day without my phone or laptop. Yet, that’s exactly what I was asked to do for my Digital Rhetorics course this autumn. The challenge was issued.
“We’re going to go for twenty-four hours without using any form of digital technology. Take stock of every digital device you currently use in your day-to-day life, turn them off for a day, and record any of your findings in your process notes. Make sure you prepare yourself for it and good luck.”
My initial reactions were laced with skepticism and annoyance. I had a lot of work to complete that week and midterms were inching closer and closer. I’m a computer science major, how am I supposed to avoid technology when it’s my whole reason for pursuing a degree at this school? Additionally, I didn’t see how we could even consider this a “challenge” given where the class was taking place. We go to the Virginia Military Institute. Twenty-four hours without access to a phone or laptop should be effortless for students here. During our first six months at the Institute, our technology is limited to a near-ascetic level. Until the spring semester, the only real technology we’re allowed to access is our laptop for the sole purposes of homework and seeing emails. Everything else is taken away. Being a military school, we also have regular field training exercises where we go for upwards of four days without using our phones because we’re doing branch-specific training exercises in the wilderness of Virginia. Going through the initial six months at this school coupled with my exposure to these multiple FTX experiences should have made this “challenge” a joke. But rather than dwell on how much it would inconvenience my work or inhibit my daily communication with friends, I decided to embrace the process for a day and see what I could derive from it.
Going into this project, I tried my best to pick a twenty-four hour period that would be least impactful toward my academic and social life. The weekend was automatically out of the question. I had too many social obligations pre-planned with a friend at the University of Virginia to make it work. Even though I probably could have made a more concerted effort with her to plan for an unplugged weekend, I determined that it was too much of an inconvenience for those days. I wanted my day of being unplugged to be as least impactful as possible to the lives of those around me and that simply wasn’t going to happen if I had to tell my friend that I couldn’t watch movies, listen to music, or use my phone at all when we were together. Instead, I opted for a weekday at VMI and began to think through how I would do it. Not much went into prepping for my day as it got closer. I didn’t designate anyone to watch my phone or emails for important messages, I didn’t have work that could necessarily be printed and completed, and I wasn’t privy to a million devices that I had to disconnect from. The night prior, I quickly jotted down a few assignments that I could complete by hand to keep me busy after classes, wrote out my daily powerlifting workout on a sheet of notebook paper, and turned off my phone. I got into my bed and did my best to fall asleep without my normal ritualistic routine of checking text messages, watching snaps, and flooding my mind with other miscellaneous, last-minute information. My rationale was that I could officially begin my unplugged day right before I went to sleep for the night. After getting a full night’s rest, I would already have eight of my twenty-four hours completed. So that’s what I did. I slept through eight hours of the night, woke up at 0645 the next morning, and prepared to face the final sixteen.
I was woken up the following morning. An alarm wasn’t necessary because our rats regularly come into the room around this time to clean and loudly move racks. Normally I would be woken up a few minutes prior by the alarm I set on my phone. This change was different but not excessively jarring or unpleasant. I quickly got into my uniform and walked to the morning formation. Up to this point, nothing about my day was incredibly out of the ordinary. I rarely check my digital devices before 0700. The first notable difference came when I got back to my room after the formation. I’d opted to wait until 0730 to walk down to breakfast rather than march down with my company. This left about twenty minutes of dead time between my return to my room and my breakfast. On an ordinary day, this time would be filled by checking news, social media apps, text messages, and other various activities related to my phone. Instead, it was filled more by an overwhelming sense of not knowing what to do with my time. I took the twenty minutes to organize my room, clean up, and begin to prepare myself for the day of school that lay ahead. I grabbed a notebook and walked down to Crozet Hall to have breakfast before classes began.
Repeating the standard VMI breakfast experience I have had for nearly four years now, I filled my plate with runny powdered eggs, a few strips of greasy bacon, and two slightly burnt pancakes which I topped with peanut butter. I grabbed three glasses of milk for extra protein and calories and then walked to a table to sit alone. Not having a phone to look at while I was eating made the experience drag on for much longer than I would normally be comfortable with. I’m a fast eater and would normally use any extra time before my classes to look at my phone. Instead I was forced to slow down and focus more on just getting through the questionably prepared breakfast items in front of me. By the time I had finished the plate, there were still roughly 15 minutes left before class and I had no desire to sit and stare at a wall for that time period. Nobody that I would normally sit with was left in the mess hall so I couldn’t even fill the time with a meaningful conversation. My immediate solution was to get up, grab some extra food, and continue to eat until I left to go to my first class of the day.
The day of my challenge, I had classes all morning. This occupied my time from 0800 to 1105. On one hand, this kept me busy enough to avoid reaching boredom or feeling as though I wasn’t being productive with my time. In fact, being forced to avoid digital technology likely enhanced my focus in certain morning classes. Admittedly, there are some classes I have throughout the day where I would much rather be looking at my phone or computer screen than focusing on the lecture being provided by the instructor. My ten o’clock course in Advanced Database Management is what immediately comes to mind when making this statement. Before taking the unplugged challenge, I would be hard pressed to think of a single day in this class where I had devoted my full attention to the PowerPoint slides and lecture notes being administered by my familiar teacher of nearly three years. Leaving my phone behind and exercising the self-control to not log into my school network account changed all of this. By 1105, I had given my full attention to the lecture and gotten much more out of it than I normally would. This change is what stuck with me most following the challenge. Above all else, it brought me to the realization that my attentiveness to my digital life can have negative effects on my academics if I let it control my actions in the classroom.
The rest of my day was mundane, boring, and bordered on frustrating. I had lunch and two afternoon classes left before I was free of my obligations to the Institute that day. Lunch was unremarkable, save for the fact that everyone I was sitting with was able to check their social media while I was left to simply talk about recent or trending events. My one o’clock class without my digital amenities had many of the same difficulties and benefits that I experienced from 0800 to 1105 – no social media, no communication outside of the room I was in, no habitual checking of emails, but a higher (albeit somewhat forced) state of attentiveness to the class material. The same can be said for my final class of the day at 1500. But between these classes, from 1400 to 1450, I hit my first block of time where I wasn’t entirely sure what to do without technology. With only an hour at my disposal before the three o’clock class, I sat in my room and just wondered what to do to fill the time. There wasn’t enough time to exercise, I wasn’t hungry enough to walk down and eat food at Crozet, and I felt like my assignments weren’t suited to be done in this relatively small block of time. After about ten minutes of sitting and thinking of what I could do, I decided to break down a larger assignment into more manageable chunks and begin working on one of them so that I could at least feel somewhat productive during the remaining forty minutes. I got a decent amount of work done in that time frame with an absence of distractions around me. This definitely saved me time doing work later that night and represented an overall improvement in my time management for the day. Feeling satisfied with what I had finished, I went to the final class and sat through it to complete my daily academics.
Prior to this point, the lack of digital technology was a minor annoyance. After I completed my classes and found myself faced with about six more hours without it, the challenge became much harder. Before going into this, I thought that my ratline and Army FTX experience had prepared me well for a day without my phone and laptop. Before 1600 that same day, I believed that I could easily manage for the remainder of the challenge. What I quickly realized was that I hadn’t accounted for the fact that I had other activities (training, ratline activities, classes, etc.) keeping me busy throughout every period where I had thought the challenge was easy. I’d never been completely faced with a normal, uneventful day without these resources. It forced me more than ever to make up tasks to occupy my time. These final six hours of the challenge were the most difficult.
I made up several tasks for myself to complete in order to avoid total boredom and frustration. I had written out my normal daily powerlifting workout on a sheet of paper the day prior since I wouldn’t have my phone available. I took advantage of that and walked down to the gym to exercise. I found it more difficult to focus since I couldn’t listen to music but I got through my workout nonetheless. Two hours down. After showering and changing clothes, my roommates and I walked down to dinner and enjoyed another gourmet dining experience in Crozet Hall. One more hour down. By the time we had finished, it was time to go to our evening formation. Twenty minutes later, I had less than three hours of this challenge left and I was ready for it to end. I filled the remainder of my time with handwriting some textbook assignments for my classes and struggling to give my focus to reviewing some study material for an upcoming test. Once my challenge came to an end, I found myself again fully involved in my digital technology. Not for the simple purpose of wanting new information every time I checked my phone, but I had missed communicating with friends outside of my school, being able to listen to music while I worked, being efficient with my homework, and having daily resources be easily accessible.
Later in my Digital Rhetorics course after completing the challenge, we discussed the experience of Baratunde Thurston who went through a twenty-five day stint where he limited his technology usage. In describing “The Great Disconnect”, Thurston outlines several moments of introspective thinking and clarity that were inspired by his determination to live a new unplugged life. After my twenty-four hours of the challenge, I couldn’t relate. There was no magical moment of self-realization or great epiphany. I saw some marginal improvements in my classroom focus and small bits of time management. However I was largely just annoyed by the lack of options for entertainment, workflow management, and communication. I don’t think these are aspects of my life that I would be willing to sacrifice for the insights that Thurston praised. This could be consequential of the differences between living in Lexingon, VA and New York City, NY. It could just be that Thurston was able to commit more time to a fuller, richer experience. However after twenty-four hours, I believe that I can safely say the #UNPLUG challenge was something that I would not regularly practice at my current place in life.