It’s not always easy to ignore an e-mail that has just come in, or to leave your smartphone in your bag for a few hours. But nevertheless, more and more people are discovering how nice it is to be off the radar every now and then. Journalist Jeannette Jonker wrote an article about it in issue 16, in this blog you can read a snippet.
Hans Schnitzler, Dutch philosopher and author of Het digitale proletariaat (The Digital Proletariat) has also noticed that more people are going offline and enjoying it. “The smartphone tends to make us act like wild animals who have to constantly be on high alert, and we’re just not able to keep it up anymore,” he says. “It’s exhausting. Mindfulness is popular for a good reason: We need to cut loose from the digital world now and then.” Schnitzler consciously has no smartphone. “It’s out of self-preservation, but also as a tiny act of rebellion,” he says. “When I am traveling and in public places, I don’t want to be on the Internet all the time.” At home he has also devised a clever trick to prevent himself from spending hours on Twitter when he should actually be writing: “I turn my modem off. If you want to spend less time online, you have to structure it for yourself,” he says.
You can find the article Screen time-out in issue 16, which is available in our shop.
Text Jeannette Jonker Illustration Bodil Jane
