Sure, I could do it for a month no problem. Turn it off like the irritable waste of a convenience that it is. I am, after all, a zen master with godlike control over my will. But it started to irritate me when I really thought through the reality of cutting myself off from the internet, even for a month.
OK, the easiest thing to do here was first just limit my internet connection to work. Sure. For a month I could get by with just a work connection.
lil voice: That means no E2 at work
Me, in the voice of Stewie from Family Guy: Damn!
But seriously, no entertainment at work would be my employer's dream come true. Think of the productivity.
Ok then, that means no emailing to keep in touch with friends. Sure, you could get by with your friends through just a phone, or take things back even further, and use the gasp! mail - but would that really keep you in touch with all your friends? I'm not just including people you know through or on the internet. Think about all the people in your life. Your relatives, even your parents. Think how much of your communication with them is done through it. (If you live with them, I'll concede it might be entirely too conceivable). What about those friends you have moved away from or that have moved away from you? We're starting to talk about a large group of people that I would have to inform; ' Mail Call me, we'll be in touch.'
I started to think about how I'd have to kick my phone use into high gear. That quickly became a despicable feeling about how I'd never keep up the work that I'd have to go through to keep in touch with them. Of course, there's always, I'll see you in a month. Shit, it used to take a month to keep in touch with someone an ocean away. Geography means nothing to the general American population.1
Yeah, whatever - point taken. It'd be slightly rough if I didn't have the internet for a month. And I use rough lightly. At the drop of a hat. But it would be annoying, and you'd probably come back after a month and settle your eyes on that radiating glow, and it'd be kind of like slipping into warm water, bordering on hot. 'A bath or spa but only once a month, you say? No problem. I could even give it up for a year.'
As a side note, I also started thinking about how we are basically in the first stages of the internet. In Dan Simmons Hyperion series, our internet is referred to as a planetary datasphere, and the network of those within the known galaxy would then be the noosphere. Some people are connected to this noosphere via implants that have a direct fatline connection. Fatline means FTL, but we're talking about instantaneous here; stepping outside the boundaries of spacetime. Any information known to the galaxy, all you have to do is think to 'google'. Well, when the fatline transmission medium was destroyed (and thus also the economy and fabric of hundreds of worlds), what do you think happened to the people that had these implants? They dropped dead on the spot from shock.
1Two words:
Jay Leno. If you know what I'm talking about you cringe, if not, then reading this footnote was a waste of time I'm afraid.