2 stirring instances came in close succession, and that is what prompted this post, if you care to know such things.
First: I made a lastgraph of my music listening history over the last year. While visually very nice, it also provides some really interesting data, and I am fascinated by data.
For instance, you can see spikes where finals weeks happened, or those few weeks in late July that were rainy and really slow at work, and so I was home from painting and, according to this, listened to music. What I found more interesting was there was not one week where I did not listen to music. I looked at the raw data, and even in the slowest weeks, I listened to an average of 2 songs a day. I found this rather shocking. That was the first event.
I had this sort of self revelation or self evaluation of, “holy cow I listen to a ton of music.”
After this insight into myself, I had my second instance: I discovered technoSabbatarianism, the decision to unplug from the plugged in world from sun up to sundown. To quote the founder:
“And yet … there is some things about technological progress that is troubling to me. Deeply troubling. For one , it’s linked in many ways to a rationalist, modernist, enlightenment vision of reality that I simply don’t buy into. For another thing, I’ve read too many books likeFahrenheit 451 and Brave New World not to see glimpses of these dystopias in the viral consumerism that threaten to alter for the worse our basic understanding of what it means to be human and to be in society with one another — perhaps even what it means to relate to God. Furthermore, technological progress is a thing that is rarely called into question and much more rarely resisted in any way. We rush headlong, in fact, to fill our lives with its textureless lights and manufactured noises.
I intend to practice techno-Sabbatarianism (according to the Christian calendar) by resting from technology from sundown on Saturday (around the time when we usually practice an opening of the Lord’s Day ceremony in People of Praise) to sundown Sunday evening (or thereabouts).”
The full post is here.
I don’t want to say I had some sort of religious experience about this, but more to show that I was already thinking about technoSabbatarianism, though not in name.
I too intend to become thus, a little more removed from technology. I will let you know how it goes.
November 13 at 11:50 am |
Join the revolution! It was an AMAZING feeling to experience the gravitational pull towards my e-mail, google reader, etc. And I’m not even THAT plugged in compared to some (no active Facebooking, no Twitter, 5 blog limit, etc.)
Some people might go into REAL withdrawl! Proceed with caution.
November 13 at 12:09 pm |
I tend to do this a bit without realizing it. During the week, especially while I am at work, I am always linked into technology. Being a teacher, this can look like a lot of different things. This school year we made the shift to using an online grading system for lesson plans, grade books, and even generating reports (progress, grades, etc…). It’s pretty slick and I like it a lot. However that, with the combination of checking my e-mail, chat, Flickr, blogs, & other stuff on breaks, adds up to a whole lot of technology.
I’ve realized that I kind of “un-link” myself from the digital world when I come home, occasionally in the evenings, definitely on the weekends. (This is especially applicable to the online digital world.) It’s a nice break. It would seem like this would be harder to accomplish as a student though. Is the plan to mostly study out of books on Sundays? Good luck to you.