Live a year without internet - lalibre.be

Paul Miller spent a year offline … But he’s back on the canvas.

Offline 365 days. Suffice to say forever. A challenge that many of us hesitate to take, we are too dependent on technology in general and of the worl wide web in particular. But a challenge that Paul Miller has tried. And the task was for him difficult. For this man is practicing journalist of new technologies on the site The Verge. A profession where it is connected virtually 24 hours 24. Yet Miller is offline, canceled its subscription wifi and swapped his latest smartphone for a good 3310 families … “I give up one of the five most important technological innovations of all time for a bit of peace and quiet” , he wrote at the time. It was time for him to return to real life leaving this virtual world.

A year later, it reappears on the web and takes stock of the experience. Mixed the record. Through a detailed diary every day, Paul Miller explains that the experiment was not conclusive. “My plan was to leave the Internet and so find the” real “Paul, get in touch with the” real “world, but the real Paul and the real world are already inextricably linked to the Internet. Not that my life was no different without the Internet. Simply, it was not the “real” life. “

Suddenly the head of a nice time to provide capital, dedicated regular surfing on the waves of information, the reporter took the opportunity to return to the basics (“do not go near things simple “rightly said a famous brand of ham in a commercial). Read real books printed for more than ten minutes, identify with plans and paper maps, go visit his family if sending them mail and receive mail manuscript readers wishing him well courage in this business (Miller still writing for The Verge but put them more in line, and passed to colleagues by physical means).

According to his sis, Miller, more involved in the lives of others, was “less an asshole” before. Suffice to say that it seemed to like the new idea of ??his brother. But soon, the reporter began to feel alone. Not want to move out with my friends, too lazy to answer all the letters that he sent. One thing is then imposed upon him . “Internet is not an individual activity, it is something we do with some other Internet is where people are” .

So that Paul Miller disillusioned. Leave the net has probably brought peace and serenity a time, but the exodus has not solved any of their problems, far from it. He even admits to have slept the last 24 hours of anti-web cure, just to see the minutes shatter faster without doubt. Upon awakening, he writes:.. “It is 20:00 I just woke up I went to the cafe for dinner, watch the Knicks play, read two newspapers and the New Yorker now, I’m watch Toy Story, looking at the time the blinking cursor on the text, which I would like him to write his own, inventing epiphanies me that life has failed to produce “.

His final conclusion: if it seems not to have life, it is not Internet to blame but ourselves. Since then, Miller on the canvas again rampant.