That’s the idea behind Offlining, Inc., which proposes that we all participate in a one-day digital fast. Initially, the call was for a collective fast on Sept. 18, Yom Kippur — the Jewish day of atonement, which calls for total rest (including prohibiting use of any electronic devices) and abstaining from food and drink. Now, the team appears to be targeting Thanksgiving instead.

It’s an unusual exercise — an advertising campaign for nothing in particular (besides signing up to “pledge” to participate in a no-device day) that can’t quite decide whether it’s holy or secular, just as it can’t decide whether life online does terrible things to you or that a one-day holiday from them would be kind of nice. The site includes a bullet-pointed “Ugly Facts About Life Online” that would make me retreat to the mountains if I took it seriously.

But the two marketers behind Offlining seem to have tapped into an element of the zeitgeist that is strangely attractive to an increasing number of people.

In a post at the Harvard Business Review, “The Dirty Truth Behind Digital Fasts,” Alexandra Samuel argues that we flirt with giving up our gadgets because we feel uncomfortable with how much we’ve invested of ourselves in them. “We plug in because we like it,” she writes, but “we’re in a period of self-doubt and self-interrogation about our budding emotional lives online.”

The whole process of a “digital fast,” whether real or imaginary, turns into a kind of legitimation ritual. We all get to participate in the rite, even if we don’t actually fast, because we argue about it. Call (“can I have meaningful relationships mediated through this technology”) meets response (“Yes, I can and do”).

The New York Times’s “Unplugged Challenge” is probably the best example of this process at work. Volunteers give up technology, then make videos sharing their stories with nytimes.com readers. We watch another ordinary human being give up the very technology that we are using in order to watch them (and that they used in order to share their story). The social fabric is literally disconnected and reconnected again.

Even more confusing is how you draw the line: How much technology is too much? NYT columnist David Carr, for example, looks back fondly at the time “when there were only three networks and I could let my mind go slack as I half-watched Diane and Sam circle each other on ‘Cheers,’ because that was pretty much the only thing on.” With Cable, TiVo, BitTorrent, Hulu, Netflix, et. al, television, “which was once the brain-dead part of the day, had become one more thing that required time, attention and taste.” For Carr, maybe, Hulu is too much but broadcast TV is OK.

But for other people, broadcast TV is too much because that, too, is clearly technology. So how far do you go back in deciding what counts as technology? Automobiles? Electricity? Fire?

As Kevin Kelly points out, human beings have always been technological, and our biology and social structures have flexed to accomodate new technology as it’s emerged:

Our ancestors first chipped stone scrapers 2.5 million years ago to give themselves claws. By about 250,000 years ago they devised crude techniques for cooking, or pre-digesting, with fire. Cooking acts as a supplemental external stomach. Once humans acquired this artificial organ it permitted them to evolve smaller teeth and smaller jaw muscles and provided more kinds of stuff to eat. Our invention altered us.

At every technological jump forward, we create mechanisms to establish and justify the new “normal,” integrating it into who we are.

That’s why Carr can feel nostalgic for the way we enjoyed technology twenty years ago. Even most “digital fasts” don’t propose that anyone do the full Yom Kippur abstention from lighting fires or using any electronic devices. Instead, like Offlining, they promote something smaller: disconnecting from the internet. Watching television (so long as it isn’t too complicated), talking on the telephone (so long as you don’t stop to check your Twitter account), or driving a car (so long as you leave your iPod at home) are grandfathered in.

But give Carr credit: unlike the guys at Offlining, at least he doesn’t ascribe virtue to his nostalgia. Unless slack-jawed laziness is a virtue — in which case, consider me sold.

Image credit: Offlining, Inc.

Authors: Tim Carmody

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