Could you live without daily electronic conveniences -- Twitter, Facebook, email, texting and more -- for 90 days? Jake P. Reilly, a 24-year-old copywriting student at the Chicago Portfolio School, did just that. [Related: See more of Reilly’s work at www.bodycopybyjake.com]
From October to December, he unplugged from social media, email, texts, and cell phones because he felt that we spend more quality time with gadgets and keyboards than we do with the people we really care about.
During his social experiment, he found that some people he counted among his close friends really weren't that close after all. ...
In the opening of your "Going Amish" presentation, you say that you had friends over and realized what was going on. Describe what you noticed and your feelings right at that moment.
Reilly: I live with three guys and we had two of our best friends in visiting from New York City. We only see these guys once a year, maybe every six months. We were at the University of Wisconsin watching a Badgers basketball game or something like that. Every single person had either a laptop or a cell phone. That's just kind of funny to begin with, then, I was like, "What are we all doing?" I asked everyone what they were doing and somebody's playing Words with Friends, somebody's playing Angry Birds, somebody's playing online trivia. Nobody's really doing anything, just sitting quiet. It's like this was what we were all looking forward to and we're just sitting here numbing our minds.
I've often posted on this disturbing trend in society, whereby people are becoming sucked into their handheld mobile devices, to the extent that their ability to interact with the people physically present to them is severely hampered. These days, is it possible to go anywhere, out to dinner, for a drink, etc., and not see someone, even your friend, pull out his phone or whatever, almost without thinking about it, and begin texting away?
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