Recently, we were on a cruise which meant for 10 whole days we were pretty much without communication to the outside world. Our cellphones didn’t work the entire time we were away, we had no internet connection (unless we wanted to pay extortionate fees to use the ship connection) and overall, we were in a bit of a technology black hole.
As someone who always has technology with them and who is always ‘on’, initially this proved to be a little strange. It was odd not being able to tweet, to foursquare in and to check messages. Work emails are never far away when you have an iPhone or a Blackberry, so not being able to ‘check in’ was a new experience for me.
I thought I would hate having no communication, but surprisingly, I found myself enjoying it. I think that every now and again it’s nice to switch off completely, as there really is no way of doing that now unless you are literally in a communication black hole. I wonder how many of us would be able to voluntarily go without Facebook, Twitter, Google or the like for more than a week. I probably wouldn’t be able to do it for more than a day. Want to try? No… me either.