2022-01-23

A pal of mine has a Tshirt with a comic style fish and a fish hook just in front of it. And below the text says "Offline". The fish exposes a hiddeous grin. Clearly this fish is offline.

My Mom was offline. She never used a computer, let alone the internet. However, she received and wrote letters, she used a land line phone, she did read the paper version of the local newspaper, and she did watch old fashioned, linear television. So, was she really offline?

I do not have a smart phone, and recently I did not even have a mobile phone at all. Does that make me offline? Clearly not, because I spent many hours a week on a computer. This always includes access to the internet. At least I assume it's still there, even when I do not use it :-)

Since two weeks I do have a very old fashioned flip phone again (third hand!). Does that make me online? I wouldn't think so, because the phone is switched off. I carry it in my backpack. I get it and switch it on if I need to. So basically I use this as a pocket phone booth.

I don't reddit, facebook, instagram, twitter, tiktok (and the like, I don't even know the other names). Does that make me offline? Some would say yes, because any reasonable person in their life cannot live without facebook. Or so they are conditioned to believe. I would say no, because I do blog on gemini, and I occasionally post on midnight.pub. So? Online or offline?

Ploum is doing an "offline year", they have decided to restrict internet access rigorously to short time spans only once per day. In order to follow some of the digital online world, a queue-download-cache strategy was implemented. And I can see how this is offline. Their computer (aka distraction machine) is not connected most of the time, so not bringing in new distractions all day long. For stack this caching is kind of cheating. ymmv.

I have started to read Cal Newports "Digital Minimalism" (old fashioned paperback). And to my surprise Thoreaus book Walden is cited. Now H. D. Thoreau went into the woods as an experiment. Was he offline? Sort off. However, internet wasn't invented in 1845, but apparently he did not forget the rest of the world either.

So could we please agree that "offline" may mean different things to different people? Good.

There is another thing I would like to cite. cmccabe has this essay about the Slow Movement. And in there:

There is no easy solution to this dystopian state of affairs, but one form of resistance is for individuals to reject the pace and content set by these platforms in favor of finding their own path. This is how the Slow Movement applies to the Internet. Again, it is not so much about slowing down the pace as it is about fiercely defending ones right to set their own pace and decide how they allocate their time online.

gemini://rawtext.club/~cmccabe/slow.gmi

local copy

... ones right to set their own pace ...

This, in my humble opinion, is what the above discussion is mainly about.

So please carefully choose your level of online-ness as you see fit.

Cheers,

~ew

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