Well, I was hanging out on Hulu.com the other day, making the most of the first morning I don't have to rush at the library at 8am, and I watched this documentary called "Disconnected". The documentary was a class project by three students at Carleton College, MN, they decided to go without a computer for a period of 4 weeks.
When I say "no computer", I don't only mean "not my computer", they wrote their papers by hand or on a typewriter (please forgive the typos professor), had to register for classes on a paper format, left themselves notes in their mailbox instead of sending e-mail and so on.
The results of this experience were pretty interesting though. The results are that well it's a real pain to go without a computer. True you get the time to clean your room, actually DO your homework, play ping pong, have a real dinner or whatever, but it is a pain!! You cannot get contacted via e-mail, which is THE way people contact you know. One of the students, Chel, was saying how he had to go the offices of the professors he needed sometimes 3 times a day to get an answer since they were not calling him back. Forget the inconvenience of not checking the news on the Internet or watching Facebook. Here I am talking about real-life challenges, no source to do your research, and think about the number of institutions that now do everything via the computer? What about timesheets?
In the end they had to use proxies, people doing the research or sending the e-mails for them. Cheating? Maybe, but also survival. You can explain to your friend that you're going computer free but go explain that to a potential employer to tell him why you cannot respond to his e-mail... I don't really see that happening.
The positive result is that they are now able to log off from time to time. They are able to enjoy the sun shining or whatever (I don't want to be too cheesy here) and do things outside of the screen.
So my advice, log in and check the video. It is here http://tinyurl.com/yccau2j
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