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If the unavailability of the Internet this morning was due to Comcast finally figuring out the glitch in their system that kept me from ever getting billed these past three months, then my last use of the Internet at home--until service is restarted--will have been the streaming of Sufjan Stevens' upcoming album Carrie and Lowell through NPR's First Listen series. Prior to that I had streamed the upcoming album by Death Cab for Cutie, also through First Listen. Not a bad way to wind down the evening, in ignorance of the state of disconnection that would soon ensue.
Living "off the grid" to some degree or another has had many precedents in my life, starting in my undergraduate years when I first noticed the addictive properties of the world-wide web. During one semester I moved my desktop computer into the IT club office several buildings from my dorm room in order to have an empty desk on which to study without distractions. (It would be another five years before smartphones so thoroughly permeated our media landscape that such a distancing from technology would be harder to pull off.) A similar configuration proved effective in fostering productivity during my six-week summer REU at Temple University, although the structure of the program itself had no small part in encouraging a strong work ethic.
I find self-discipline easier to achieve when my contributions are seen to have an immediate, tangible impact on a handful of outcomes, rather than a ripple effect where the resulting wave is a superposition of my contributions and those of other team members "dropping their pebbles in the lake". In large groups the diffusion of responsibility lessens the influence that any one team member can have on the outcome. For the generations that grew up before constant Internet connectivity and ubiquitous smartphones, the intrusion of these technologies between an initial conception of a plan and its eventual execution in the physical world represents a similar "diffusion of responsibility," since for us the assistance rendered by Internet-connected devices more closely resembles the collaboration with a host of colleagues than it does the augmenting of our natural corporeal faculties by such analog tools as ruler, compass, mirrors, lenses, wedges, and levers.
The younger generations seem to make less of a distinction between the tools that extend our mechanical reach and tools that extend our social reach. This dissolution of category boundaries is not without justification, since each tool that extends our mechanical reach is itself the product of an iterated refinement process that spans multiple generations and thousands of artisans/inventors. Evolution along these lines has until now been constrained to take place over much larger timescales than those associated with today's relentless, Internet-assisted obsession with innovation. Nevertheless, by dissolving the boundary between the two types of prosthesis, today's youth neatly sidestep the problem of Internet-dependent tasks creating a sense of diffusing one's responsibility for the outcomes among millions of other contributors.
By eschewing the use of certain technologies, and taking on more of the organization and calculation tasks myself, I was able in earlier decades to reverse the encroaching trend toward diffusion of responsibility and take more ownership of the final product. This intimate connection with the end product--be it a meal, a carpentry structure, or a mathematical paper--is stretched almost to the breaking point when we rely on technological aids for much of the procedure. Choosing to downsize our technological dependence can help restore these immediate (i.e., not mediated) connections.
Benefits of having no Internet connection at home:
Drawbacks of having no Internet connection at home: