Internet #Fasting – #Disconnect for a Day

A couple of days back the powerhouse of social media, Facebook(FB), underwent a long outage. All entities of FB that is photo sharing platform Instagram, chatting service Whatsapp, FB messenger and the website FB itself were beyond the reach of a lot of people for close to six hours.

Things went funny as CEO of another social media platform, smaller in size though, chided Mark Zuckerberg if the facebook.com domain name was up for sale.

Facebook covers more than 30% of the world in terms of its average active user counts. With a staggering 2.7 Billion users latching on it, the outage affected many people.

Not going into the nitty gritty of what went wrong and the root cause analysis of the technical problem that led to this, it was clear that a large percentage of people suddenly had some time away from the media.

An important side effect of the whole thing was that people found themselves with some time. There were posts on Twitter of people doing something with their families or with their pets, browsing through books, listening to music, just chit-chatting etc.

With the social media down, the social animal called human being became more social as the unsocial monotony via a medium was just not available.

While, not much affected but I took some time off to play with my young son and tried to teach him a few things with a cricket bat.

It also made me think what would happen if one were to spend a day without the internet at all.

A common distraction that I face, sometimes even while on lunch, is the temptation to respond to people over emails or slack. Knowing this is something of an extremely unhealthy habit, the outage gave me some time to introspect and think what does one lose if there is no internet for a day.

As an experiment, I am thinking of making one Sunday of the month as an ‘Internet fasting Day’. This would be the day when I will not latch onto any medium to spend time or ‘browse’- mobile, OTT, Television, laptops, iPads… nothing.

I would just bare essentials needed for day to day is what I would use. Being a Sunday, I would not be distracted by any work related needs, hopefully.

Lets see how this goes. I plan to do the first such on Sunday Oct 24, 2021. Wish me luck!