72 hours of reality

I had a less-than-typical winter break.

Not that I didn’t put in my fair share of Netflix hours — I absolutely did — but I also read more books, both fiction and non-fiction, than I ever have during the Christmas season, and I put out a copious amount of new writing.

Inspired by Neil Postman’s book “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” I embarked on a three-day electronic media hiatus.

I spent 72 hours without using electricity for my entertainment. No Spotify; no Netflix; no Tumblr, Twitter or Facebook. I turned off my phone on a Sunday night and didn’t turn it on again until Thursday morning.

I thought I was going to die. On Monday I slept more in 24 hours than I’ve ever done in my life, and then, bored out of my mind, cleaned like mad.

By the end of my 72-hour experiment, I lived in a spotless and rearranged apartment. I had read four novels, baked seven dozen cookies and ran 24 miles.

But I learned the lesson Postman was trying to teach me. In his book, Postman argues the way we receive information and express our culture fundamentally alters how we know what we know.

According to Postman, in the print-centric culture that developed at the time of this country’s birth, thought was rational, literary and ordered. Some of the Lincoln-Douglass debates lasted more than seven hours, and that wasn’t unusual.

In this century, the advent of television and technology has altered our culture and our epistemology. The line between entertainment and information has been blurred, which blurs the importance of rational thought in society.

Postman’s book made me hyper-sensitive to the way I’m influenced by this technology. Today we know in a matter of hours the status of Lindsay Lohan’s incarceration, Kelly Clarkson’s engagement and whether or not Taylor Swift and Harry Styles kissed in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. They did, by the way.

Why do we care? The next time you see a piece of “news,” think about what impact it has on your life. Did you alter your plans for the day when you found out Kim Kardashian was having a baby? Of course not.

Spending 72 hours without that kind of contact with the world made me realize what is actually important to begin with.

It convinced me to be present in my daily life every moment rather than living in an imaginary world of electronic interconnectedness.

In the end, 24 miles, a handful of books and seven dozen cookies shouldn’t change anyone’s life, except perhaps for a case of type II diabetes.

But they changed mine.

I don’t need my email sent to my phone the moment I receive it, I’ve never had a Snapchat that required an urgent reply and I don’t need Facebook and Twitter at my fingertips 24/7.

And neither do you.

­— drlreed@indiana.edu