How a Month without Computers Changed Me
Resoconto molto interessante ... <https://dev.to/iskin/how-a-month-without-computers-changed-me-1ho4> No emails left for me to read. Nor write. I’ve sent a message to my family and delegated my open source projects (Autoprefixer and PostCSS) to my friends. With my last tweet sent, I turn off my laptop, phone, and tablet. My Digital Sabbath begins in 10 minutes: no digital devices for the next month. The Month of Ramadan It began with a post <https://sajjadi.livejournal.com/158713.html> about the Islamic month of Ramadan <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramadan>, when one is not allowed to drink or eat until ‘the first star appears in the sky’ (imagine how difficult it must be fasting like that in Norway, during the polar day). The Ambassador explained that religious people deny themselves what everyday life has to offer to understand how great God’s grace is. This idea gave birth in my imagination to a technocratic state where people do without soy and genetically modified foods for a year just to see: natural agriculture is costly and might lead to global hunger. Then I asked myself if ‘technological fasting’ could do one good in modern society. Technology has changed the world in the blink of an eye, leaving us no time to reflect on it. What if a month without modern technology could ‘travel’ you to the past? What if there is a way you could compare your technology-relying self to what you once were? I had doubts. My love of IT and addiction to digital overload were not going to make it easy. But then I learned about this effort of a computer-weary <https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/1/4279674/im-still-here-back-online-after-a-...> The Verge journalist. My life, he wrote, had become so much better without the computers. To me, his report seemed not without bias, and I decided to take my own journey into the pre-digital world—this time to be seen through the eyes of a programmer. [...] Digital technologies are something more than routine tools we use without thought. The digital world has grown into our souls, created whole new worlds for our imagination and creativity, introduced us to so many people we would have never met otherwise—without us noticing it. The digital world needed no neuro-interfaces or cyberpunk-books to become part of us. The most painful thing about my Digital Sabbath was the feeling of something missing deep down inside. I came to the conclusion that IT hadn’t changed the world around, but created another, a parallel one. The reason we are always nervous and never have enough time is that we are living two lives now. It’s without a doubt difficult, yet how interesting it is to be living two times as much! [...]
participants (1)
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Alberto Cammozzo