My experience of going tech free for twenty-four hours was heavenly.

When given the assignment, my only concern was that my wife and kids a couple states away would be made aware and that I could arrange to tell my kids a bedtime story (which I recorded pre-tech free and texted to my wife.) Once everything was in order with my family, and knowing that other members of my cohort were sharing in the experience, I felt the immediate relief of being off the grid. No one could contact me if they wanted to, and I was under no obligation to respond. Heaven.

One of the most pleasurable parts of the experience was developing an awareness of other resources for accomplishing tech reliant tasks, like checking the weather for the day or telling time. I wasn’t exactly looking to see if the swallows were flying high to tell if it would rain, but I was paying attention to cloud formations when making clothing or backpack content choices. I also became aware of clock towers in the town and used the index of heavy traffic to tell me that I hadn’t awoken as early as I had thought on Friday morning. One more day and I would have purchased a farmer’s almanac.

The second aspect that I enjoyed was the need to arrange meeting places and locations with other members of the cohort. This provided a stress-free rhythm to the day where there was less social pressure to engage. You knew where people were studying, and you could join at any time. As an introvert and a private person, I felt that I could engage at my own leisure, and not have a time-stamped record of my engagement. I can’t say whether my engagement was any different in the low-tech environment, but I much prefer the idea of contributing to the lore of a shared experience than contributing to a record of communication.

There were a few times that I wished I had tech on me. One was to text a friend when I saw something that he would like. The others were to look up things: missing details from a conversation, a word from an article, etc. I did miss access to music, but I feel that longer disengagement from tech would have increased my own desire to make music and to seek out others who are making music.

This experience has caused me to think about the following questions:

• Do I only have tech because of social pressure/social connection?
• Does access to tech limit access to rest and rhythm?
• Does tech fill a void or widen the void?
• Does immediate documentation and access weaken the stories we are able to share?

  Here is an excerpt from a Werner Herzog New Yorker interview about virtual reality that has some significance for me in thinking about these questions:

“You once walked from Munich to Paris to visit your dying friend, and in your film “Wheel of Time” someone told you that by walking thousands of miles they learned the true size of Earth. Do you think that, with V.R., it will be possible to learn the size of Earth without ever taking a real step?”

“No. No further explanation. I can say it only in a dictum: the world reveals itself to those who travel on foot. It is hard to explain to anyone who has not travelled on foot. And I mean travelling on foot, not backpacking or hiking or ambling along. I mean as we were made as humans to travel on foot, and sometimes very large distances, or as nomadic people. Strangely enough, the only time I got the feeling I was not caught in a virtual reality is when I travelled on foot.”

I felt as though this tech free twenty for hours was a short distance travelling on foot.